Logan Bartlett, Kian Sadeghi, Joshua Steinman, Sam Lessin and Seth Rosenberg Debate, Intel's New CEO

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (02:35) - Intel's New CEO (27:45) - Logan Bartlett (01:14:32) - Kian Sadeghi (01:27:30) - Joshua Steinman (01:57:26) - Sam Lessin and Seth Rosenberg Debate (02:35:41) - The Timeline

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. It is Friday, March 14th, 2025. We are live from the

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Temple of Technology.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys, folks. Today, we have Logan Bartlett calling in. We have Keon from Nucleus calling in. He's announcing a new product, DNA sequencing. It's gonna be very interesting. We got Josh Steinman, the legend.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  The legend.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  The man, the myth, the man who says every single morning, "Good morning, we are going to win." We're gonna find out if he's winning. And we have the great AI debate. We are putting two venture capitalists in a cage and

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Some people are calling this VC on VC violence, but we're gonna try to keep it civil.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  We'll try and keep it civil.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  So Seth Rosenberg and Sam Lessin are gonna be calling in. They've been going back and forth, not only on the timeline, but on the 101. They've been billboarded at each other.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Billboarding at each other, okay.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Sam Lessin and the Slow team threw up a new billboard that say, "Got an AI startup idea? Shoot at Seth Rosenberg a message. Not Slow." And this has just been on the 101 as of yesterday, so.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Lots of fun.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Lots of fun. We're excited to have them on and.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  But that starts in half an hour. For the next half hour, we're going through the news, bringing you the top stories in technology and business and finance. Top story today, Intel has a new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, absolute dog, one of the greatest to ever do it. Was at Intel for a long time, struggled, but absolute legend. And if you go back and listen to his Techery interviews, you'll understand that he is someone to be absolutely respected. And even though, obviously, there were lots of problems with Intel, the shift to mobile, the TSMC stuff, they're losing their grip on the Foundry model. Still a fantastic CEO and someone who I just think should be respected in the technology industry forever.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  But today, we're teaching you about the new CEO. A former board member has stepped in. His name's Lit Bhutan, and he's returning to overhaul the chipmaker.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, looking on public, the market likes this. They're up 18% in the past five days.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  After basically just kinda.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  I mean, that's good news. Given like the crazy sell-off, too.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, part of it's potentially just the rebound from a pretty intense sell-off.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  But. This is, you know.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  And now, a lot of people were saying like, it was a mistake to not stick with Pat Gelsinger. But we'll see. Hopefully, this works out. Let's break it down. The selection as the new, as the chipmaker's new chief executive officer was cheered by analysts, bankers, and shareholders. He brings two decades of semiconductor industry experience, relationships across the sector, a startup mindset. I want to know more about that because he is 65 years old at this point and has been on the board and in these really large companies. We'll see if he can go founder mode now. And he has an obsession with AI and basketball. He also comes with tricky Chinese business relationships, so that could get more complicated. Underscoring Silicon Valley's inability to sever itself from one of America's top adversaries.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  So even though people want to go all in on America, there's still lots of flow back, back and forth between the two most important economies in the world. How Tan, aged 65, will use his assets to resurrect Intel is on the minds of all industry watchers. Intel has gone from being one of Silicon Valley's biggest innovators to a relic struggling to compete with superstar Nvidia and others in the age of AI. Its stock lost two-thirds of its value in four short years as Intel sat out the AI boom. This is, of course, because Intel's known for making CPUs, not GPUs, very important for, you know, the normal apps that you use every single day, but not the next generation of video games, three rendering and AI.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  One interesting point, Gelsinger was pushed out three months ago.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  So there had been this.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Took a while.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Intermediary CEO.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's now.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  But they think they're, they think they got their guy now. So shares were up more than 14% at market close. Sounds like they're, they've been up more since then. The new CEO will soon have to answer the most burning question about Intel's future, whether he will break apart Intel's design and foundry businesses. I think Ben Thompson has been advocating for this. A lot of people have been talking about this. Basically, manufacturing chips is an enormous expense that Intel can't currently sustain. This is what industry leaders and analysts say, and former board members have called for a split up. And so Nvidia, of course, is a, is a fabulous. Semiconductor company in the sense that they work with TSMC. TSMC does not do design. They only do the manufacturing, the fab.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  And so when that, when that separation happened, it was very questionable because, you know, maybe you get some benefits to having everything being integrated all the way from, okay, you get an Intel Xceleron processor. It has a brand. You know, your average customer might not know, but certainly some gamer who's building their own PC wants the Intel brand. And that Intel brand leads into design choices that they make to make their computer run faster. And then they actually make it themselves. So that integration makes a lot of sense in many ways. But it, it allow, it, it kind of restrained them from having the flexibility to play in new areas as they came up.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Totally. And Nvidia has shown that they can just focus on this one aspect of the stack and still put up ridiculous.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Margins, yeah. And, and that's because they, they, even though they don't own the manufacturing, they have, they have the software and the,

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  and NVLink and CUDA and this ecosystem where if you're a very, you know, heavily funded, large language model, foundation model company, the best engineers in the world, they want to do foundational research, frontier research, and they don't want to learn a new language. They want to just write CUDA. And CUDA is not perfect, but it's certainly the best in the ecosystem by most accounts. So, but a deal to sell all or part of Intel to competitors seems to be off the table for the immediate future, according to bankers. A variety of early-stage discussions with Broadcom, Qualcomm, Global Foundries and TSMC in recent months have failed to go everywhere, anywhere, and so far seem unlikely.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  And this was the story that we covered earlier about the, the private jets of, I believe Broadcom, Intel and Elon were all at Mar-a-Lago at the same time. So there might have been some deal talked about.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Which, I honestly think that was somebody trying to make a story out of everybody just being around Mar-a-Lago.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  At that point in time, because many of the most important people

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  all of the world in business were there.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  I mean, they might have just been golfing.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  They might have just said, hey, like this, this get-together, we're not talking business.

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  We're talking par threes, par fours.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's be the first group to keep business off the course.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Exactly. The company already hinted at a more likely outcome, bringing in outside financial backers, including customers who want a stake in the manufacturing business. Intel fortunes also rest in part with President Trump, who has signaled that he wants to unwind the CHIPS Act, signature legislation from former President Joe Biden, to invest more than $50 billion in semiconductors. Intel would receive up to about $8 billion through the legislation contingent on development of new factories, which have faced delays. And of course, TSMC is now building fabs in the US, and there were early reports that it was going better than people expected. There was a big question about, okay, it's not just you get some ASML machines, you get some lithography machines, and then you turn them on and boom, you're just printing chips. You need really, really talented individuals,

• 7:44John Coogan?

  and most of those individuals live in Taiwan, and they might not want to relocate very quickly or move over. But things have been looking good, but I'm sure we'll need to dig into it more.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to wonder how bad it would have to get geopolitically for Ben Thompson to leave Taiwan, because you can imagine him just yelling into his newsletter, "I'm not leaving."

• 8:07John Coogan?

  "I'm not leaving. You're gonna have to drag me out of here."

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  And then we'll have to do a strike mission, pull him out, pull out one of the greatest writers.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  He is one of the most valuable assets on that island, right below TSMC geopolitically. It's like, we need TSMC and Ben Thompson, and then who knows what happens to the rest? I'm sure there's a lot of other important stuff over there. Tan has likely no more than a year to turn the company around, said people close to the company. His decades of investing in startups and running companies, he founded a multinational venture firm and was CEO of a chip design company called Cadence Design Systems. He served there for 13 years. Good run. Provide indications of how Tan will tackle this task in the early days by cutting expenses, moving quickly, and trying to turn Intel back into an engineering-first company. In areas where we are behind the competition, we need to take calculated risks to disrupt and leapfrog.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Tan said in a note to Intel employees on Wednesday, in an areas where our progress has been slower than expected, we need to find new ways to pick up the pace. So this could be really interesting. I don't know if they're going to go on an acquisition spree, but you know, there is an like a question about what does the next chip look like after the GPU? You know, Google's built the TPU, but then you also have startups like

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Facebook is rumored to not even rumored confirmed.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, Amazon has one. But there's also the question of, you know, these new transformer based AI inference focused chips like from etched. And there's a few others. Cerberus, there's Grok, there's a few others. I forget, I forget the other startups, but a lot of people, they raised money very quickly. They got line time with TSMC. They became like great designers. But there was a question about could these companies really go the distance? Or would they land with a company like Intel ultimately and just provide a new product line that then Intel could push? Either could be fantastic outcomes for everyone involved. So many take this culture reset to also mean significant cuts at Intel,

• 10:06John Coogan?

  which has already shed about 15,000 jobs last year.

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  That's like, what, like a quarter DocuSign they lost?

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  Almost to a T.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  To a T. He is brave enough to adjust the workforce to the size needed for the business today. A former Intel board member who is known Tan since the 90s. Tan's first tour at Intel as a board member from 2022 to 2024 ended in frustration, people say, people close to him say, although he cited time demands as reason for departing. Company insiders believe Tan was fed up with the bloated workforce and direction under then CEO Pat Gelsinger. Tan's return then signals an inevitable change in strategy. His capabilities aside, Intel remains far behind modern chip production, said Mark Rosenblatt. And Intel's balance sheet is not sufficient for the cost required to sustainably achieve it and scale the manufacturing

• 10:59John Coogan?

  needed to support it. Our team management cadence was going through turmoil similar to Intel's when Tan took over in 2009. He was able to refocus the business, push its services to the cloud and land new customers, including Apple. A company on the brink of delisting went on to return more than 3,000% in share price during Tan's tenure. Let's go. Size gone for that.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Good stuff. Tan in public talks has described how he approached reshaping Cadence's culture to eliminate what he described as silos. I tried to change it into a one-team culture. That approach hearkens back to what he calls his first love, basketball. Born in Malaysia and raised in Singapore, Tan aspired to be a professional basketball player until his mother told him to get a real job. I love it. He said during a video interview during January. Well, I'm sure his mother's very happy now. Hopefully she's still alive, but.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'd like to.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Because there's no more real job than CEO of Intel.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd like to see him go on a generational run at Intel and then buy the NBA.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  You know, don't just buy.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Don't just buy a team. Don't go Ballmer mode.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, buy the league.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy the league.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  And say, I'm a professional deal, you know, player now.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes sense.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Tan has declared the arrival of generative AI is bigger than the invention of the web. He's spent the past several years investing in AI startups across the globe. And let's go into the China connection and then we'll move on to the next story. Before he rose in the semiconductor industry, Tan was known as one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists to invest in Asia. I'm sure he did very well. Tan is founder and chairman of Walden International, a prolific investor in Chinese tech companies. He was a big champion of China semiconductor sector in an era when US-China relations were considerably rosier, including co-investing with a China state-owned asset manager.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  Party around.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  He was an early investor in SMIC, which is the Semiconductor Manufacturer International. I believe that's SMIC. And which the Commerce Department blacklisted for its alleged ties to the Chinese military in 2020. Walden sold his last stake in 2021, and in 2023, the House Select Committee on Chinese Communist Party sent an letter to him.

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get Steinman's view on.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Oh, this would be good. Yeah.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  On this whole era.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  I'm sure he's gonna have a nuanced stake, folks.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can expect nuance.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can definitely, definitely expect some nuance from Mr. Steinman. It's great. Intel, as word of Tan's new role spread, one Chinese media outlet headlined the news, "Intel hires the CEO with the best knowledge of China's chip industry." Interesting.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you missed the line here, too. A subsequent report from the committee highlighted hundreds of millions of dollars of walled-in investments that went to Chinese companies involved in military activities or human rights abuses.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Hmm, not good.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  Kind of a weird, the market likes it, weird pick in the context of this being one of our great American technology companies.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Keep your friends close, keep your enemies close.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the steel man here is that, you know, he's not a Chinese national.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I would, let's give him the benefit of the doubt that he is deeply loyal to the United States and was just, you know.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, there is a world where you invest in a Chinese semiconductor company, you see how fast they're moving, you take the threat realistically, you don't want to be Jack Ma, you would much rather be Jensen Wong.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  And not get thrown in jail when you throw on a leather jacket and become a superstar, right? And so you come to, you know, you, you take over Intel and you make it amazing and you become a legendary American turnaround CEO. And that's just, that's just a fantastic outcome for everyone involved. Well, except for the CCP, but I'm happy with that. So, I don't know.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  We'll, we'll be tracking it here. We'll get him to call in to the show.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  We will be.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Chop it up with us.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Talking to a correspondent over at Truth Social, seeing what Trump has to say about, about this, you know, appointment.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  I'd be interested. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I've always been very, very optimistic about Intel, very pro Intel. And I, I used to have a riff about how, you know, I wish Elon had bought Intel instead of Twitter because maybe semiconductors are more important. Now you talk to, you know, all sorts of folks and they'll tell you, well, like the free speech thing is really important and there are good, good, good reasons why it was important to, to, to, for the X deal to go through. But why not both?

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it does say a lot that Elon seemingly looked at the opportunity.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  Didn't go for it.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a lot of work. He's got a lot of stuff going on.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  But it's very possible he just didn't see. It's very possible that intel is valuable, but Elon didn't see the sort of value for, for the sort of Elon ecosystem.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Totally. Well, if you're looking to go long intel, go short intel, whatever you're thinking, do it on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Stocks.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Go to public.com.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Options. Crypto. You can do it all.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Do your own research and then make a bet. Anyway, let's move on to the economy. Everyone is worried about a recession and the Wall Street Journal is breaking down where you should be looking.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  Not reacting at all to me, just.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  I love the hats. I love the hats.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm just gonna start not even making eye contact with you, just fully focused on the mic, the public hat.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  That's great. So the, the Wall Street Journal has an article here. Here's what to look for in terms of early signs of a recession. Tariffs, government layoffs, funding cuts, immigration restrictions, recession talks in the air. Any one of these things would at least temporarily exert some drag on the economy. Put them together and they have an everything, everywhere, all at once dynamic that could hurt it badly. White House officials have cautioned that the economy might need, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bassant put it, a detox period. At the same time, some of President Trump's promised challenges, such as less regulation and a big tax cut, are pleasing to many businesses and could stir them to invest and hire more. Very true.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Major economic data hasn't fully yet begun to capture Trump's time in office. The Wall Street Journal is looking at a host of other factors to figure out whether the US might skirt a recession or fall into one. Here are some areas to watch. There's the Small Business Uncertainty Index, which is at a high point and ticking upwards, but a lot of that happened kind of before the. The the election mentions of soft landing in company conference calls or seems like it's very, very low. Which means that people in business are maybe a little bit worried.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this this terminology started being used very clearly. You can see it in this this chart that we're looking at in 2022. Where everybody was like, okay, things seem to be correcting. Can we is a soft landing possible?

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  And objectively, at least from a market standpoint.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  It happened.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  It happened.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  But maybe we were.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  So maybe you don't.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  You stop talking about it because it happened.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  We just sort of leveled out.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  So I I don't think that's necessarily the the right data point, but.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  The US policy uncertainty index is at an all time high and that makes sense. Everything feels very uncertain. But hopefully, you know, certainty around policy can happen very quickly. Like we can get certainty around these things. We saw that with the with the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve. Like it was very uncertain on Tuesday and then by Friday it was pretty certain. And so, you know, that's not that much turmoil in the market. Anyway. The policy uncertainty index is based on US news articles has soared. It recently hit its second highest level in data going back to 1985. The only time it was higher was in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Even for businesses that are enthusiastic about the White House's deregulatory agenda, the whiplash of uncertainty could be causing problems. Not knowing, for example, what products might be subject to tariffs and at what rate. We talked to Avi Schiffman yesterday. He said, I didn't want to make my product in China. I made it in Canada and now I have a tariff on my product. And so that that's a perfect example of uncertainty. You know, if you want to set up a new manufacturing plant. You might be in the wait and see mode right now and that hurts investment, that hurts the economy, that slows things down, right? And so consumer sentiment is dropping and the probability of delinquency is also on the rise, but this is a trend that's been going on for a few years now.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Tiny bottles of liquor are flying off the US store shelves. Whiskey and tequila makers said sales are up for miniature 50 milliliter bottles, often called NIPs, as well as for 375 milliliter bottles, which are half the size of a standard bottle. So, do they make-

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Is that historically a recession indicator?

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Of course, because people stop going from, hey, we're throwing a party and we're getting a large bottle of alcohol to, I need my alcohol and I just need the cheapest thing possible because I'm living paycheck to paycheck. Very sad. I would say stick to the 50 milliliter bottles of Dom Perignon if you can, if you're struggling. But, yeah, it's a tough, it's genuinely a tough recession indicator. And there's been a few others about what, what products have been slowing down in convenience stores. We looked at that in the Wall Street Journal earlier. And it seems like people are buying less because of course, even though inflation, we talked to Dalian about this, Trueflation.com is showing that inflation is coming down, but again, inflation is a rate of change and so we're not seeing deflation, so the prices

• 21:06John Coogan?

  are still high because once you go through a period of inflation, the prices are higher. And they're not going back down. So, the rate of inflation is declining, which is great, but that just means high prices forever, basically, unless they come down. That's the nature of these things. So, people are starting to feel that and they're seeing that, hey, the economy and my salaries maybe not catching up with the higher prices, I'm going to buy less and then that slows down the economy. That's certainly the-

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, JD Vance did an interview yesterday and he said, you know, a part of-

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  It's possible for the underlying sort of economy to be fine, yet like the sort of fear and sentiment, you know, sort of takes over and people just start sort of anticipating a recession and then there ends up being like somewhat of a slowdown or like change in consumer behavior. Vance has taken a fairly hard line on this. He says yesterday, you can never predict the future, but I think the economy and the fundamental, the fundamentals of the economy are actually quite strong right now. Sort of his view, sort of his job, he's got to defend like the policy coming out of the White House, but yeah.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  I mean, it's not that unreasonable to think about the fundamentals. Like if you think about previous recessions and depressions, they're built on, you know, massive bubbles popping, the dot com boom where so much money had poured into companies making no money and then there had to be a retreat or you've built up this crazy house of cards on top of the real estate bubble and all of a sudden people have six homes in the desert that are just sitting empty. And, and right now you could point to a lot of things that feel frothy, but it's hard to say like the US economy is built on a house of cards right now. At least no one's concocted a strong thesis around that. So although there are nervousness

• 22:55John Coogan?

  and weakness, spots of weakness here and there, no one's really sounding alarm bells in the same way that Michael Burry did during the, during the housing crash.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, except random and on accounts.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, as you've said before, like the most alpha you can possibly have is just tweeting top every single day. And then eventually they get it right.

• 23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  And somebody, so I think the key to tweet a top and like very much near the top, right? Because like we're now, we're now off the highs and he looks like a genius, I guess.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm very excited to have Logan Bartlett on in just three minutes. He's going to be walking us through a red point market update that they gave to their LPs.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  This will be interesting.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  For March 2025.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Has he invested in any interesting like power law fintech companies?

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  John, you know what? There's one that comes to mind.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Oh, which one is that?

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  I think the website, it's R A M P dot com.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Oh, cool. That's a good domain.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good, great domain, and I think the company is pretty great, too.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and what do they do at that, at that domain?

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  They're an all-in-one finance platform that saves companies time and money.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  That's, oh, I mean, that's great, because time is money, and you want to save both, right?

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  That's exactly right, John.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe you could pull up some, some more info.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  I mean, I'll just, I'll just pepper you with questions. They have corporate cards, right?

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Are they easy to use?

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Okay, what about bill payments?

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  They have that as well.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Accounting?

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yes.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Do they have a whole lot more?

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  They have a whole lot more.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Wow, and, and you're telling me it's all in one place?

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  It's all in one place, John.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  That's almost too good to be true.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  But it's not.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Because you can sign up and you can use it now.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  And where, where would I go to do that?

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Just go to ramp.com.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Ramp.com.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  And tell them that the show formerly known as Technology Brothers.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Sent you.

• 24:46Jordi Hays?

  Sent you.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Okay. I think, I think I'm getting it now. This is really cool. Yeah, we should check this out.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, Logan actually invested in, in Ramp, uh, I believe it was, we'll have to ask him, 2021, and he took a little victory rap when, uh, lap when the new round got announced, because they're back at a healthy multiple of where he invested at.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, in terms of like, high-status things in the valley, it's really just, are you a Ramp investor? And then above that, it's like, are you advertising Ramp?

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  That's the real, like, maybe, maybe we can convince him to run some Ramp ads soon, because that would really, like, broaden his appeal.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, his podcast right now is presented by his fund, Redpoint.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, maybe we could help.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  It would be much better if it was presented by Ramp, I think, so.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Let's try and get him to do some ad reads. Maybe we'll get him to do an ad read on, on this guest spot.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  That's great. We should, we should have like, a bucket poll for the, for the, for the guests.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  I mean, we're having the billboard guys come on to argue about AI. We gotta do an AdQuick ad in between that.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Pause, hey, pause.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Right in the most heated moment.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  If you're looking to get in a fight with another venture capitalist, go to adquick.com, throw up a billboard on the 101, uh, and you might just find yourself debating another VC on the TBPN show, live. Anyway, how are we doing with Logan? Is he ready to come in? He is not ready to come in. Should we move on to some to some bucket pulls, some bangers, some random, some random posts?

• 26:21John Coogan?

  Did you see? This, uh, this AI written email?

• 26:28John Coogan?

  I hear you're in New York. You have to check out Central Park and catch a Broadway show. It's a blast. Ashley Meyer says, gee, I wonder if this vendor email was written by AI. Pretty ridiculous. It is. It is remarkable how how low the bar is for some of these. It's maybe just like these.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Funny, New York is one of the, I mean. Yeah, I mean, to me.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  AI should just focus on what actually matters and not focus on that sort of human connection piece.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Because if you're sending, like, the whole point of this is to try to send. A super high volume of outbound that's sort of like a super human level of outbound.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  And so for every, you know, if if one out of five messages, that's like using this sort of personalization feature is just like making somebody like not respect you.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not, it's not great.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of an unlimited downside situation, which I think is why a lot of, you know, Apple has been slow to adopt it and a lot of large organizations have been slow to adopt it. Figuring out the right level of like human and.

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  They've been that slow.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  They.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  I mean, those, those.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  They're happy to summarize your eye message for you.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  I, we, I want to talk to Bryce about that more. He, did you see he responded to my Apple intelligence thing?

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  We got Logan Bartlett here.

• 27:48Logan Bartlett?

  What's up, guys?

• 27:49John Coogan?

  What's up? How you doing?

• 27:50Logan Bartlett?

  Good.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 27:51Logan Bartlett?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you. It's great to have you. Uh, how's the, uh, how's the reception been to the market update? You getting any pushback? Or are, you know, VCs already sort of making threads or based around your content and sort of making it their own?

• 28:08Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, it's a, you know, we were done like. A week or two ago with all the content and then obviously the market went, uh, went crazy and we had to like redo, I don't know, 50% of the slides or something. So I, uh, thankfully it didn't end up being too stale. We, we froze all the data on Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday ended up actually being pretty tame, uh, in terms of the market trading. So I think people can rip off all the slides for their annual meetings that are coming up here in the next couple of weeks. We're happy to open source and take credit for it.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Give me the, give me the one liner. Is it so over? Are we so back? Are we poor? Are we rich? How are you feeling?

• 28:48Logan Bartlett?

  Private or public?

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Let's start with public.

• 28:52Logan Bartlett?

  I don't, uh, I don't know. It's not a great answer, but, uh, I would say it feels like we're in for a lot of bullshit, uh, that is flowing through the system and uncertainty just isn't a great thing for, for any business. And while it's not going to impact software companies or technology companies quite as much directly, like the end customers for a lot of these different businesses are going to be impacted in a meaningful way. And so until we get a little bit more clarity on to what end all of these things are being done and what sort of the end state is, I don't know how you price in anything, uh,

• 29:33Logan Bartlett?

  going forward. And so now that obviously changes by the, by the minute here. So I, it could be we're at some steady state here in the next couple of days or hours or weeks or whatever it is. And, and this ends up all sort of feeling kind of stale. But right now I'm not, uh, I'm not particularly optimistic about what's going on in the public markets. I heard some Morgan Stanley, uh, equity research person said that coming out of their conference, which was a week ago, they said it was the most negative sentiment. That he had heard, I think with the exception of the onset of COVID in the last 10 years from people sort of like looking at the markets. And I assume that's just a factor of uncertainty.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  But yeah, yeah. Is there, do you think there's some sort of like Doge efficiency meme? That's working its way through the market right now? Like, I remember when Elon came into Twitter, X, you know, laid off a ton of people. There was this big question about like, well, what other software companies could do something similar? But is that now that you're seeing it done at the federal level, are companies thinking like, hey, maybe we should pull back a little bit on the investing and scaling?

• 30:39Logan Bartlett?

  I think we've sort of seen it over the last couple years, or at least the last 18 months or so. If you go look, one of the slides that we put up in our deck was sort of the trade off that's occurred between growth and free cash flow. And to some extent, that's the, you know, the macro environment. But also, I think it's just the knobs being pulled a little bit between layoffs and hiring freezes and all that. And so I think people have made the conscious decision that they can do more with less. And I think AI is only gonna continue to pull that trend forward. Is it, is it cutting to the bone like Doge maybe is doing or Twitter did? Probably, probably not. People aren't taking it to that extreme. But I do think people have really

• 31:22Logan Bartlett?

  recognized that there's knobs that are a little bit more pullable than they would have appreciated otherwise. And I think, I mean, if you look at the big software private equity folks, the Vistas and the Tomo Brahmas of the world, like, they've been doing this for the last 10, 15 years. I just think it wasn't something that people really tried to do in the public markets. And now we're seeing that actually occur in a more meaningful way.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  For you as a multi-stage investor, what advice are you giving to the sort of average series A founder? In many ways, like, we could have massive sort of GDP could go negative. But if you're a high growth software company that's just sort of hitting your stride, you can still thrive. How are you kind of advising, you know, your portfolio companies around sort Downstream Capital, because as Redpoint, you guys are also, you know, a fund that can participate in some of these later-stage rounds as well.

• 32:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I would say that at least the last, I mean, the last five years has sort of felt like, so I've been doing this now for 11 or 12 years, and the last four, five have felt like, you know, twice as long as the first half of my career, just in terms of all the changes that have occurred. That said, it does seem pretty uncorrelated what's going on at like a high-level macro with the early-stage funding environment. I think to some extent, what happened after 2000 was the like sophisticated LPs really pulled out of the funds that they felt had gotten too bloated or too big. And that's happened this cycle as well.

• 33:06Logan Bartlett?

  I think if you talk of smart endowments or pension plans or stuff, they've definitely, as fund sizes have gotten to 3, 4, 5, 6 billion dollars, like those people have raised eyebrows and maybe voted with their feet to either scale down or walk away from those funds. But there's a lot of other money that has willingly and excitedly run into those big fundraises. And so I think you're seeing sovereign wealth and Middle East people come into those funds and give them, you know, what 2, 3, 4, 500 million dollars. And so it ends up kind of being a rounding error if a smart pension walks away or endowment walks away.

• 33:48Logan Bartlett?

  So the way that impacts the startups, I think it's just at a very micro level, like continue to execute and the funding will be there. At least that's the way it seemed over the last couple of years, and I guess it's true until it isn't. But all this stuff sort of feels outside of the control of the individual founders. And so I would encourage people not to worry too, too much about it.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, related to that, I remember when the the market crashed kind of around, I don't even know what we have the term for interest rate like post Zerp era.

• 34:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  SBB crisis, post Zerp. You were talking to, maybe it was Emile Michael or someone, but about this idea of like, there's a lot of dry powder. And there was a lot of optimism from entrepreneurs being like, well, the VCs have the money, they're gonna have to give it to us anyway. And you were kind of explaining to folks, well, like, the dry powder isn't necessarily sitting in their bank account. Like, they have to make capital calls, the LPs might put pressure on them, like, funds might get downsized. But it feels like maybe now the dry powder narrative was real. And now, like, all the VCs figured out how to start deploying again and deployment rates are up. But how do you tell the story of the post Zerp era to where we are now in terms of just the pace of capital deployment?

• 35:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a great question. It's, I would say, I've been surprised at how insistent people have been able to fundraise. And I think there was really a triaging or kind of a hollowing out of the middle that occurred. Or maybe the the tier B, if you will, a tier two funds, where you saw a handful of those folks blow up or really struggle with their fundraises in some way. But the the names that everyone thinks about or knows, I think there was a concentration and consolidation of capital that came in. And then you couple that with some of our friends with with seemingly endless amounts of oil money coming into the the sector as well.

• 35:43Logan Bartlett?

  And it just, it just sort of feels like we're in this new normal state where there's a lot of capital going around. And I don't know exactly what's going to cause that to change. It feels like there wasn't a ton of reckoning for sins that were made in 2020 and 2021. It feels like people were able to get a mulligan and say, hey, you know what? Like, yeah, we got a little crazy, but now we've, we've really doubled down and focused on what it is that we do well. And people seem, at least on the LP side, seem to be largely forgiven. Or if they're not forgiving, there's someone waiting to take their place in one of these name brand funds.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  I mean, it feels like, yeah, there's gyrations and oscillations in the American early stage technology market. But where are you going to go if you don't invest in American technology?

• 36:36Logan Bartlett?

  It's sort of like, we all read the same books. You look at the founders today and like, everyone's read Innovator's Dilemma. Or everyone's read, like, read the case study of Blockbuster Netflix. And so we're dealing with a far more sophisticated, like, entrepreneur that's executing or CEO that's executing on AI right now. And I think similarly, like, all the LPs studied what happened after 2000, 2000, sorry, 2000, 2001. Like, that was actually a great time to lean into the asset class. And so now we're at this prisoner's dilemma where it would be theoretically a great time for everyone to lean in if other people backed out because then prices would depress. But everyone's staying in. And so it's actually leading to prices staying elevated, which has been interesting.

• 37:20Logan Bartlett?

  I mean, I think in the last couple of weeks, it feels like I've heard the meme or the refrain that it's like so 2021 or it's got 2021 vibes all over again. This was pre the last seven days. And so I'm not exactly sure how that's going to play out. But that's definitely been the sentiment in the private markets from the VCs that I'm talking to is just sort of like, gosh, this feels like we're running this back and doing it all over again.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've had that. I've had this feeling multiple times this year where a portfolio company is just raising like a, you know, big up round. And depending on the lead, I'm just thinking like, wow, I really wish I could sell into this round. Like, even though I'm a believer in the company, it's just like, you know, getting so far over. And the narrative is always there, right? Like, I'm thinking of like one company in particular that will go unnamed. Like, really, really strong narrative, really strong traction. It's just like, setting prices at a point that, you know, basically pricing in the next, you know, potentially decade of growth. And if that's the case, as an investor, you ideally would want to get out and then just invest, you know, rotate into another illiquid asset. You got your growth.

• 38:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's such a feature and a bug of the private markets that you're not like beholden to the mania. And you sort of get to play a long game in anything you're doing that when I talk to my private or my public market friends, like they're envious that, you know, you can take a morning off and not have your entire world implode versus the public markets. Like stuff can hit the fan and you, your entire day could totally change at a moment's notice. The flip side of that is you're, you're really in for a long period of time and you don't get to say, well, I'll take a few chips off now because I think probabilistically there's a better opportunity that could come down.

• 39:15Logan Bartlett?

  And it feels like this is a good risk adjusted return. That doesn't really, that's not as accepted in the private markets. I think increasingly though, we're finding some of the financial products for that. And I've seen more people, or at least more opportunities to take a little liquidity. I'm not sure it's totally socially acceptable, at least for the institutional funds to do it. I think it's far easier if you're an angel. People are a little bit more understanding of that, but it does feel like we're trending in that direction.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  It comes down to volume, right? If I, if I put 25K into a company and it, and it does well, that, you know, and I, and I want to sell the position. It's very different than, you know, you with like, you know, we have a $400 million position here and we're rotating out. It's like, there's probably not the, the demand. What, just, just one, I, I don't know if you, you feel even free to speculate on this, but something I've been confused by was, you know, the figure round getting priced around $40 billion. Like what do you, what in your mind do you think is the play there? The, you know, Brett's last company, Spacked, you could imagine figure, you know, I, I think a pure play humanoid stock would do well, you know, at least a little bit, a little while in the public markets.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  But what do you think is some of these later stage companies that are still a ways out from like true commercial adoption? But, you know, it, you know, especially now with companies like CoreWeave, you know, the, the CoreWeave IPO, it seems unclear now if they're going to get out, but like, what's your read? Are, are, are any of these companies going to get out in the next year other than some of the bigger names like, like Chime?

• 40:54Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard, um, so a few different things there. I guess I've heard, uh, I don't know if you, if you guys have heard different things with CoreWeave in the last little bit, but it seems like there's, there's a few people that are still kind of all systems go on IPO and are going to plow ahead. And, uh, CoreWeave certainly doesn't ask my opinion, but if I were counseling them, it feels like just, just get out there. And I think having some AI story with, with probably, uh, a bunch of institutional managers that want exposure to some derivative, direct trend of AI, I would say it's probably as good a time as any, especially when some of these bigger contracts are coming up in 2017, 2018.

• 41:34Logan Bartlett?

  Like get out when you have a little bit of, you know, certainty of those cash flows coming from the Navidas and the Microsofts and the Open AIs of the world. Like I would encourage, uh, them to go. Um, on the figure thing specifically, um, so, so I looked at Brett's, uh, business vettery, which predates the last one. Uh, and I actually really enjoy, I haven't talked to him in, I don't know, eight years or something, but I really enjoyed, uh, that interaction. Now that was like a job marketplace or something. So very, uh, different than now he's sort of become this like hard tech founder, which is interesting, uh, from a job marketplace thing. Um, the, the thing that I don't totally understand about figure in that round itself.

• 42:18Logan Bartlett?

  And this is a common phenomenon at the, not the end, but at, at the peak of a lot of cycles is you end up with a lot of these SPVs getting formed in a meaningful way. And you end up with managers trying to get, uh, write bigger checks for rounds than their funds can actually hold. And so it's hard to know exactly what the incentives at play for some of those names. So I, I don't even, uh, I, I wasn't familiar with the names that they're talking about and leading those rounds. But, um, it certainly seems from a fun size standpoint that those people probably can't step up and write those checks themselves. And so then you wonder, what are the incentives at play for the, for the, whoever is writing those checks?

• 43:02Logan Bartlett?

  Like, what are they thinking about? Uh, and like, what is the, the executive team? Like, what is their incentive, uh, to raise at this price? Yeah. And all these things.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  I looked at it as if you're going to price it at 10 and say, this is a pre-IPO round. We are going to basically, we're planning to SPAC the company in the next year. We think it's going to pop. That type of round makes sense, but if you're pricing it at four times that roughly, it just feels like, how do you actually get out of this? Who's going to get out of this position? Do the employees actually benefit? But that's just, you know, one example.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Skill issue, SPAC at 80.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  SPAC.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 43:40Logan Bartlett?

  I do think there's this retail demand for, I mean, if I were OpenAI, I would try to get out sooner rather than later, right? Because I think there's this demand, both from institutional and retail, to have exposure to some of these things. And if you look, I mean, Palantir's where they're trading, and obviously, there's a bunch of different considerations around that business. But like, I think that if you went out and floated just a small percentage of your, you know, your overall business, I think that there could be a lot of nice liquidity to fund a lot of the CapEx, and you would trade at a really healthy premium. So it'll be interesting to see who of like, the big model companies actually tries to get out first.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of going public, do you want your private market investor competitors to go public? The general catalyst? You're like, yeah, really, I want you to go from, you know.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  I want to be able to see your fund returns.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  The disclosures are going to be crazy.

• 44:36Logan Bartlett?

  It's an interesting thing. So our structure is not one that we can or ever will try to have the ambitions of doing that. I saw when people, there's certainly funds that act or either call themselves, have leaders that are more akin to a CEO than they are, you know, an investment partner or something like that. And so I think from a financial engineering standpoint, and like institutionalization of the asset class, I'm excited to see people try these things.

• 45:13Logan Bartlett?

  The cynical side of it, when I compare a venture firm to a private equity firm and think about the incentives at play. So if you're a private equity firm, if you're Apollo or Blackstone or BlackRock or whoever it is, right? And you're this big entity, the people within your firm can't can't really leave and compete with you because there's so much institutional infrastructure around, one, the quantum of dollars that you actually need, but then two, the relationships with the debt providers, the ability to process the deals, the ability to get access through the bankers. You can't just go hang a shingle or go join another competitor to compete with Blackstone or Apollo or whatever it is, right? In venture, it's so beholden, I think, at least to individuals,

• 45:56Logan Bartlett?

  and individuals can walk out the door and they can go raise 100, 200, 300, 400 million dollars and like effectively compete with you in some way, shape or form. And so there was an information report, I don't know if it's true or not, talking about G C moving from more carry to bonuses. And I don't know if it's true. Information tends to do a pretty good job reporting, I think. And like, that was reported alongside some people leaving the organization. And you just wonder, like, as the incentive structures start to change and you start to be more institutional, how do you retain the quality of people? So like, at an intellectual level, I'm very interesting,

• 46:41Logan Bartlett?

  interested to see how this plays out. And I respect anyone that's like innovating in some way on, on a structure that has been stuck in some version for a long, long time. I'm very curious about the practical implications of how it's going to work with like retaining individual talent and all that stuff.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's been, that's been my big question. If, if you're somebody that, you know, wants to get into venture and you believe in your picking ability and you think you can be one of the greats, wouldn't you want to get the sort of maximum benefit of that by getting carry and being a part of a partnership versus, you know, oh, I got, you know, I invested in, you know, the next Slack and I got, you know, one time little, you know, bonus. Yeah, who knows? Who knows how it'll work? But, you know, I can imagine.

• 47:20Logan Bartlett?

  And especially since the next option, if you can't compete, then it's, it's fine. You're kind of locked in. Like Goldman bankers or Morgan Stanley bankers or Apollo M Ds or whatever. It's it's hard for them to get the scale to go out and really compete. And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. But like that RSU structure, bonus structure kind of works when you can't really walk out the door and hang a shingle and compete. Venture, you kind of can. And so I think it's, if you're good, you know, you can go raise. We see a lot of these solo capitalists or whatever, like small three, four, $500 million funds out there. And so I think, I don't know, retaining talent is going to be an interesting thing to see.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Have you, like, last question on this point. Have you seen solo, the sort of solo GPs overpaying to win deals? Because like, that's something like, you know, sometimes you see these sort of obvious power law companies, like the Andurals of the world, with Illad Gill, sort of like, you know, leading rounds. And that that makes, that makes sense. I think there's sort of consensus now that Anduril is going to be a really massive company. But when you see a solo GP come in and write a $100 million plus check, does that ever, you know, you know, what's your, what's your read on that? Because from my perspective, sometimes those marks don't even feel real when, when you're, you know, there's something to be said of like, okay, Red Point like underwrote this

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  and like, you know, they're like an organization and a firm and it's not just like, you know, one or two, you know, major, you know. So, so how do you, how do you look at those rounds? And I'm sure oftentimes you're, you're competing to win those rounds.

• 49:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's, so I guess we, I've seen less of that phenomenon than probably 2021. And I would have to rack my brain a little bit to think about like the big institution or institutional, institutional solo capitalists, or I think those terms are directly at odds with one another. But the big solo capitalists that can write those checks, I mean, Illad, Illad can obviously do that. And he's the, the one that certainly comes to mind. I would say, honestly, there's, there's been some firms that have continued to scale where I've probably seen that more than any individual kind of solo capitalists out there. And

• 49:42Logan Bartlett?

  I think there was this thing where in 2020, 21, it felt like we rotated to the brand where we lived in this world where everyone was was just a zoom screen away. And so, you know, Marc Andreessen and Doug Leone and Keith Raboy and whoever was was could be in the room as quickly as I could be in the room because time and space weren't really constraints at all. And so in that world, I think there was a big gravitation to the big institutional funds because it was like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get Marc Andreessen involved. And that's amazing, right? It feels like we've rotated a little bit more back to like, who

• 50:24Logan Bartlett?

  is my individual board member? Who is going to be on the ground with me day to day? Like, I'm going to solve for that person rather than the sole like just the break past a certain point, right? Like, obviously, you must be this tall to ride the ride with some some things. And so you got to have enough credible brand as an institution. But then it comes down to the individual a little bit more. And so I would say I've probably seen more than the solo capitalist thing. I've probably seen more of, hey, this fund has a bunch of money, and you might not be getting their number one person. It could be their, you know, whatever their reliever out of the bullpen that's coming in to do the round. And those are the ones that they're like, really juicing the price a little bit

• 51:06Logan Bartlett?

  on these things because they, you know, they want the asset in that way. So I think that's, that's something that I've seen more and more of of late.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  I want to go back to the innovator's dilemma. And I heard you on a podcast, maybe two years ago, right when the Chachi PT moment was happening, debating is AI a sustaining innovation or disruptive innovation? How do you sit with it now? How are you seeing it get adopted in the public markets? And what narratives are taking hold there?

• 51:33Logan Bartlett?

  I still, I still feel like

• 51:37Logan Bartlett?

  There's an analogy that was made to me about Google and it was it was talking about the Americans in World War II that like we got every opportunity to ultimately do the right thing and come into the war and like help determine the outcome. And I think that was the analogy I had heard about Google with AI that like they have all the things to their advantage, be it the distribution of Google SEO, be it YouTube content, be it whatever it is, like the talent, the team, the dollars, all of that stuff to like figure this out ultimately. We'll see if that actually proves to be the case. But I do think that that is largely true of a lot of a lot of the incumbents in different sectors. And and so the analogy

• 52:21Logan Bartlett?

  that I think I used back then, I think is still true, is like, if you go back and look at the Salesforce of mobile, that was still Salesforce. It was just like a mobile app of Salesforce. And if you go look and kind of go down the line, like how did Netflix or Facebook, there wasn't like a a mobile Netflix. I mean, I guess you could say TikTok is mobile Netflix in some ways, but like there wasn't a pure play mobile Netflix, like a Quibi that came out and was actually disruptive in some ways. And there wasn't Facebook, there maybe Instagram was the one that like kind of tapped on being that. But still, it was like, it wasn't totally net new surface areas that ended up manifesting themselves around that stuff, or at least it wasn't immediately in the fullness of time. Maybe it could have

• 53:02Logan Bartlett?

  been if Instagram had stayed independent, or if or if or what TikTok's been able to do. I think that seems to be the case here today, where we're going to see these things that are that are new and novel within AI. And I draw akin to the Ubers or the WhatsApps or whatever it is, where these businesses that couldn't have been possible without AI are going to form a lot of independent equity value. But a lot of it's going to be captured by incumbents in some ways. And I think in mobile, Apple and Google probably captured the lion's share of like equity value that was created by the mobile. iPhone or whatever, like those were the ones that really through the App Store and the actual phones, they captured a lot of it. And I think in large part, maybe with the

• 53:45Logan Bartlett?

  exception of OpenAI, like the vast majority of the equity value will probably end up accumulating to the Facebooks and the Microsofts and the, you know, the Googles and I guess OpenAI as well. But I still think we'll end up with hundreds of billions of dollars of equity value created for, you know, the derivative companies akin to the, to the Ubers and the WhatsApps and whoever else.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had this take I was noodling on yesterday about it feels like Apple's missing the AI moment, but does it matter? Because Microsoft missed mobile and they still made it work. How do you feel things are going with Apple Intelligence? Obviously, that John Gruber article kind of shook everyone to their core. Do you think they're in trouble? Or is it overhyped? Or where's the narrative sitting with you these days?

• 54:31Logan Bartlett?

  So the Gruber thing, I mean, obviously, Gruber is like the goat of Apple coverage. And so I, you gotta take everything he says, almost like biblically in some ways. That's like the canonical gospel of Apple, you know, takes. But I, I have always hated Siri. Like, I have always hated it. And then the Apple Intelligence thing and the summarizations on the text, I mean, I love that, if only as a meme, like I enjoy screenshotting it and sending it back to my friends. And like, that's the best use case of Apple Intelligence I've seen. And so like, when making fun of your product is like the best instantiation

• 55:13Logan Bartlett?

  of your product, it's probably not, you know, you're not on a good trajectory there. Culturally, it just seals, and this is, this is probably more, you know, John Gruber or Ben Thompson than what I profess to know about. But it just feels antithetical to Apple's culture to execute on AI in the way that I think you need to.

• 55:39Logan Bartlett?

  They are very like measure, uh, measure 35 times and cut once and let's do this all secretively and let's like try to control the ecosystem and keep everything uh like insular in some ways and that is just so antithetical to AI and AI is about like proliferation and getting it out there and getting the data and taking the feedback loops and moving fast and trying new things and iterating and like I just think that's directly at odds with who they are. And so I don't know how you change that. And does I guess to your question, does it actually matter? Um, I don't know. They have such lock in, right? Is Apple, what is Apple's market cap today? I mean, is it like a trillion dollar business?

• 56:23Logan Bartlett?

  Sorry, $3 trillion business? Yeah, 3.2 trillion. It's like, I, I think they're probably gonna mess this up and I'm not sure it's gonna matter for them as a business. And I think the sooner they realize that they, they, they won't be able to execute on it, the sooner we get these things in our product as a, uh, you know, as a partnership rather than

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, just open up the APIs and let the, let the ecosystem flourish and you know, let me change out the button for a different Siri.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other

• 56:52John Coogan?

  They lose that, but it's fine. It is, I still buy the, I still buy the phones.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that nobody really talks about anymore because it just hasn't been possible is M and A.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  Apple has so much cash. If there are breakout, you know, consumer like products that make sense as part of the Apple ecosystem, there's a, there's a world in which they could actually just buy those companies and

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone quotes the 60 billion on their balance sheet or something, but Apple has returned over a trillion dollars of cash over the last like 14 years. Like it is a cash generating machine at a scale. I don't think we've ever seen

• 57:23Logan Bartlett?

  Given their acquisitions, I think that's probably a better use of capital than what they bought to date. They've not been the best suppliers. You know, it's crazy though. I mean, they, they were, uh, Siri was acquired for them like, uh, I don't know, 13 years ago or something, 14. Like they were early on all of this stuff. And so clearly there's some like broken, um, execution elements, at least within, you know, how they've gone about it to date, which might not matter in the grand scheme of things.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a deterministic culture, not a probabilistic culture. And so it's misaligned with AI.

• 57:54Logan Bartlett?

  I like that. That is, that is very, uh, Ben Thompson or Benedict Evans of you.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  I'm trying to be more pithy.

• 58:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I like it. I like it.

• 58:02Jordi Hays?

  We got really no time left, but I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about Ramp. You, when they announced the new fundraise, you, you kind of like were poking a little bit of fun at yourself because you, you did, you basically.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  You got found the local top, but not the global top.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think you invested a couple of times during.

• 58:22Logan Bartlett?

  I did, yeah. We invested a billion and then like three and a half and then eight or whatever, eight, two or something. Yeah, it was a, it was a, it was a long, a long run from there. Funny enough, that, that round that we ended up investing in at whatever eight billion or eight and a half or whatever it was, what's a couple hundred million among friends, but I, that was like December 21 when we were talking about it. And then the round ultimately closed in January or February or something. And so it was really last vote off the island in terms of like internally, the, the zero interest rate kind of mindset. And the thing that I've learned, and this was, this has been the last five years for me, basically since I, so I joined Redpoint

• 59:06Logan Bartlett?

  in, in December of 19, officially started in March of 20. And what, what, what I've realized is like price very rarely within some zone has, has mattered. And when I find myself iterating a little too much on, on like, oh, I'll do it at this price versus that price. It probably says something about what I think the ultimate outcome for the business can be. And when, when it's been the investments that have worked the best are the ones in which I'm like, I don't know exactly how this is going to play out or where the ceiling is on how this company can execute. But I just need to be in business with these people and let's, let's just see where it goes from there.

• 59:50Logan Bartlett?

  And obviously that's easier when you're talking hundreds of millions than it is low single digits, which is easier than high single digits, which is easier than double digit billion dollars. But like that mindset is one that I've, I've internalized where it ultimately says something about the quality of the company. If you really think too, too hard about the difference between this price or that price. And so the funny thing about the Ramp investment was the entire time, uh, for the last three years, I was like telling our team internally, I said, I don't know when this is going to stop growing or what the ceiling for this can be. And at some point we're going to get to the other side of what. That round was a couple of years ago. And so that was the first like public validation that it really felt like we had crossed that chasm a little bit. I think probably nine months ago, a year ago, it sort of felt like an inevitability that we weren't going to get

• 1:00:35Logan Bartlett?

  stuck at, you know, some, some maximum that was beyond that. Uh, but yeah, I mean, the, the team just continues to execute at a level that I've, I've never really seen before. And I know you guys know them well. And so it's been a fun one for me to be a part of and kind of work alongside.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, this conversation has been presented by Ramp, like every conversation.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  Go to ramp.com to sign up. Easy to use corporate cards.

• 1:00:57Logan Bartlett?

  All my conversations quite literally are presented by Ramp. My ability to do this job at this point is presented by Ramp in some capacity. So you guys have quite literally the ad play for it, but I, uh, they keep me in business as well.

• 1:01:09Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. Uh, when's your next, are you gonna do, uh, is this report, I feel like I see him twice a year or is it?

• 1:01:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think once a year ish is usually, I mean, this, uh, this one I think took a lot out of our team internally. There was a lot of late nights and weekends on this one. So I think we're going to give our folks a little bit of time, uh, a little bit of respite, uh, before we run it back. Uh, but who knows? I mean, the market keeps up. We get more tariffs. We, we get things a little crazy. Maybe we'll need to come out of the woodwork and you know, when the theme music plays, you gotta emerge.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  For sure. Uh, last, last question for you. We have Sam Lessin and Seth, uh, Seth Rosenberg from, uh, Greylock coming on, uh, and Slow coming on to debate AI in about an hour. Who's, who do you think's coming out of?

• 1:01:58Logan Bartlett?

  Let me give you guys a little bit of advice. As someone that has moderated a debate with Sam Lessin before, let me give you guys a little bit of, uh, I would, I would encourage, um, if you, if you have mute buttons on microphones, uh, I would encourage you to jump in and try to steer the conversation. Don't be a passive participant in it. People tend to be really mean to you when you do that and you let, let, let the filibustering go on between him and let's say, I don't know, Zach Weinberg theoretically. So I would encourage you guys to be active participants in that conversation.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  We're excited. We got our, we got our boxing gloves. We're going to throw them on. We're going to get in the mix.

• 1:02:34Logan Bartlett?

  Hey guys, keep up the great work. I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. I appreciate, uh, anytime you want me, I'm here.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome.

• 1:02:41Logan Bartlett?

  All right, guys. See ya. Bye.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Good fun.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Did you?

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get the mute button ready.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Have you seen that, what he's referring to?

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  I'd.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  With Zach Weinberg? They were debating crypto. It was Sam Lessin versus Zach Weinberg. And Sam was making the case that like every real asset should be on-chain. And your mortgage should be on-chain. And like, this is the future, everything will be crypto. And Zach is just like, okay, like, walk me through that at an extreme level of detail. Like, how does this work legally? How do the taxes on the land work? Like, all these things. And they just went at it. And Sam was just going super, super hard, talking, talking, talking. And then he kept being like, I gotta go, because it's kid bedtime. Like, I really, I really gotta go. But then, but then he wouldn't let Zach get the last word. So he'd be like, he'd wanna like, drop another filibuster on him. It's like, really frustrating for everyone.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  And I guess people gave Logan some, some negative feedback, because he wasn't, he wasn't aggressive on the moderation enough. But I thought it was a great, I, I, I found it very, very entertaining to watch. So I had a good time. Uh, anyway, should we do some?

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Good time.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Some posts, some ads, all of the above, over the next few minutes before Kian joins us from Nucleus?

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Uh, the shot the chaser from XOR swap. The shot Claude thinking and O1 Pro have replaced all university instructors for me. I can no longer watch any pre-recorded videos. And then the chaser is, I bombed my second linear algebra midterm.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Ouch.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Two days later. That's so funny.

• 1:04:15Jordi Hays?

  And word grammar, friend of the show, says math is best learned from textbooks and practice problems, not from Claude, but also not from lectures. So just hit the books, Ishan.

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I remember I took a train up to Silicon Valley from Pasadena. Took me like 12 hours. But I had a textbook on natural language processing, like the precursor to LLMs, this was back in like 2012, 2013. And I just sat there and just read this whole textbook and taught me a lot. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Textbooks are underrated when it comes to getting potentially goaded when, when.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  When learning is the vibe.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  The vibe, yeah.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Textbooks are goaded.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I think the good thing for Sean is that the models are going to get better. And the good thing about the real world is nobody really cares if you're using an LLM for, for specific answers, as long as you can do a little bit of thinking yourself.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you should be able to generate something. I mean, all the textbooks at this point have been scraped into these LLMs. Like, you should be able to get the LLM to essentially just reproduce exactly the text that's in the, that's in the textbook. Now, maybe that's IP infringement, but you can certainly get the facts. The question is, were you just sitting there chatting and making it feel like you were learning? It seems like you didn't, you didn't actually get all the information into your brain.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  But good luck on your next midterm. Let's go to Packy McCormick. He says, "Today, much of the global GDP is not computer. Soon, everything is computer. This is the opportunity." Funny, because there's, it's true.

• 1:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  But I was thinking about the "everything's computer, everything is computer" thing. And I think it, I like the phrase more as a possessive than a contraction. So, the, the actual quote is a contraction. He was saying, "Everything is, is a computer," basically. And then he dropped the A, and it was "everything, everything's computer, everything's a computer." But I, I prefer the "everything's computer" as like, what is the computer of everything? It's like this, like, you know, hive mind, AI, like, yes, what we're building is everything's computer. It belongs to everything. And, and that just tells you like this, this very weird futuristic networked mega computer that controls everything. It sounds even more sci-fi at that point. Let's stay with Packy.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, like, one more thing on this. I think this is the opportunity and why so many people that were traditionally software investors are excited about investing in hard tech or the real world as a category. When you look at some of these, some of the biggest... Recent outcomes, the sort of flock safeties, and rolls are these companies that have our software is critical to the business, yet there's a major sort of real world component.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I think that's just going to continue to be where some of the bigger outcomes are.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Teal had a good riff on this where he he was like, I keep investing in companies that aren't the internet and then they make money from the internet, like SpaceX. It's like a launch business, but Starlink is an internet company.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  And it's just like, I keep, I keep going. It's like, you know, he's co-founder of OpenAI, eventually invested in the business. It's like, it's a, it's a consumer internet company now. And like, maybe that's where the value is. And so there's all these weird things where you just keep coming back to the internet is this ultra powerful force. And the more you align yourself with it. So your capitalism and the economy just kind of naturally pulls every company towards that. And, you know, flock safety is like, yeah, we're a camera manufacturer, but without the internet, our company would be worth way less.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  We originally wanted to be a newspaper and

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Everybody said, hey, technology

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Hey, why don't you put this on the internet? Yeah, that's really the way to get ahead. Should we stay on Paki?

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's stay on Paki.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  His breakdown.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  This was a

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  What a week for the optimists.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Devastating week for the pessimists.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Devastating. He breaks it down in his fantastic newsletter. He says, solar and wind pass coal in the United States. That's a big milestone. The United States continues to mog all in liquid natural gas exports. NASA launches a mission to study the sun. I like that. That's interesting. I don't know what they're trying to get out of that. I want to know more about what the goal of studying the sun is. They're like, they come back and they're just like, it's bright.

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  So basically, you know how people started staring at the sun?

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, Huberman.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  The whole Austin crowd.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Huberman has

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  It was like the meme was like, wake up, get some sunlight. It's like, get outside, get some sunlight.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  People like

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Circadian rhythm stuff.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  The sort of startup community in Austin started staring at the sun directly.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Sort of maybe getting some benefit from that. NASA is basically saying, you know, we see some opportunity here.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  They haven't gone blind quite yet. We should maybe check it out ourselves.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  We should check it out ourselves, yep. Gavin Newsom launched a podcast and Packy says, hear us out.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this was cool. Lulu's analysis of this was fantastic.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Which is that?

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Gavin Newsom, the Gavin, my read on Gavin Newsom is he'd maybe start a podcast and he would just have people that agreed with him on.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  He's taking the opposite approach.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  To the exact opposite.

• 1:09:23Jordi Hays?

  He's inviting basically his political enemies on the show and it's very humanizing, you know, he's, he's got, he's always been an incredible, a much better public speaker than he has been, you know, operator, I would say.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, he's good with his words.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  And I think the strategy is really smart and I think, you know, you're, you were, you know, when we started this show, you, you probably said multiple times on the show, like, the person that does the most hours podcasting will win the election.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  It's all about attention. Attention is all you need.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Gavin heard you say that.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  He got the memo.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  The podcast election.

• 1:09:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, no, but I think it's always smart, you know, the, the joke is like, the world doesn't need more podcasts, but there still is white space.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  And there's ways to come in and get an edge.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  And no one was doing this, which is an actual elected official.

• 1:10:11Jordi Hays?

  Bridging the divide.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Talking across the aisle to.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Some of the characters who have been labeled extreme. I mean, Steve Bannon is a very controversial issue, a very controversial figure, not normally platformed by even centrist media, mainstream media. But he, I think Bannon did a, did an interview with the New York Times. The New York Times also had Marc Andreessen, who they've written very negatively about in the past. And they, they also had on Curtis Yarvin, who in the past has been extremely controversial and, and someone that was not platformed by the mainstream media, but something is certainly changing.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, do you know what happened around five years ago?

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, California Governor Gavin Newsom was photographed wearing a Rolex Kermit.

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which you can get on.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  On Bezzel. Shop over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezzel's team of experts. Go to getbezzles.com, shop around and find your next hitter.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Newsom is, is a Panerai guy.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, every now and then he'll step out. I think he's, he's got a lot of attention, right? People kind of judge a lot of his, uh, fashion decisions. He, he had these, it's very sad time, but he had this sort of like custom, all this custom gear for the fire where he'd like pop up and be on.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  On camera. And it was like, really? Like you, you got that like, like specifically stitched to kind of like LARP as like a firefighter.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Is sometimes it works. Sometimes he's taking risks, you know? Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, we got Kian from Nucleus coming on the show soon. Let's check in with producer Ben and see if he's on. I think we got a couple more minutes. Um, let's move on to another post. "Project Europe is a joke," says Arnie Ramesh. "It's not the Teal Fellowship for Europe. If they take 6.6% equity for 200K, surprised. So many European founders are on board, maybe for visibility. $10 million fund size, lol. An average US seed round. Make it non-dilutive, then I'm all for it." And Kari Sarnan.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  It's very European mindset to just be like, just give away money.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Just give away money.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  They get non-dilutive. I mean, the Teal Fellowship is non-dilutive because it's a nonprofit, but at the same time.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but it's, but they're trying to.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Asking for a handout.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're trying to stimulate for-profit, you know, the founding of for-profit companies in Europe.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  It's fine to just do it as a seed fund. It's fine. I don't know. I, I haven't dug into it too much, but let's read this critique, uh, from Kari Sarnan.

• 1:12:41Jordi Hays?

  This is a founder of Linear.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I set up a Linear account for us to do some project management stuff yet, but, uh. We'll see if we get you on there.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:53Jordi Hays?

  But I'll read through it. So Kari or Kari says, I think your critique is overly harsh and frankly reflects the kind of attitude that holds Europe back. Initiatives tend to get criticized unless they meet some impossible standard or align with absolute ideals set by someone. Is this the best deal globally? No, but by European standards, it's probably average. I see seed rounds at 20% for one to one and a half million led by reputable VCs. Personally, I'd rather raise less with simpler terms and go through these seed rounds, but everyone is their own economic actor and can decide which deals to take or pass on. Someone has to provide the capital and there isn't the deals to provide the capital in Europe. You're also overlooking history in a lot of contexts. You're comparing something just starting now

• 1:13:36Jordi Hays?

  to YC, which began 20 years ago. YC's original deal was 6% for 20K and it stayed that way for a long time. None of the perks you mentioned even existed back then. What you got was PG's chili once a week and some advice. Priceless chili. When I went through YC in 2012, the deal was 7% for 125K. The whole premise of YC and whether the economics made sense was simply about whether it could make your company at least 7% more successful. If Project Europe can do the same, then it's worth considering. So

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm in favor of Project Europe. We've also been working on our own Project Europe

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  internally at the show, which is going to Europe.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Going to Europe, three months.

• 1:14:15Jordi Hays?

  South of France.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Wine tour.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Doing, doing the podcast.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Spending lots of time on boats.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Doing the podcast from the continent.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, making Europe greater than one show at a time.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  Seven, spend 6.6% of your time in Europe. That's the real Project Europe. Anyway, we got Kian in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. How you doing?

• 1:14:34Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Welcome to the Temple of Technology.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  What up?

• 1:14:38John Coogan?

  What's up, man?

• 1:14:39Kian Sadeghi?

  The Kugan Pugans, the mods of pods. I'm ready, John. I'm ready for you right now.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Let's go, let's go. It's great to talk to you. Great to see you. I don't think I've seen you in person since Miami, but give me the breakdown. Tell the, tell the fans who you are and what, what Nucleus is and then what you announced today.

• 1:14:56Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah, so my name is Keon, founder and CEO of a company called Nucleus Genomics, where the world's most advanced DNA health test, single swab, single test, we can screen for over a thousand conditions. And today, oh my god, it's payouts in the headquarters in the best way. Okay, we have launched genetic matchmaking, okay, so now you can family plan far more effectively, you can make sure every single couple in this country has healthy children. It is absolutely amazing. It's already blowing up on Twitter. John, have you seen the video?

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  I have not seen the video.

• 1:15:22Kian Sadeghi?

  Apple-esque video. Can you pull the video up right now? Can you pull the video up right now on Twitter?

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  I will, I will share it then, and hopefully we can, we can pull it up and watch it.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Have you been, are you in a relationship? Have you been testing this yourself? Have you been getting on the app?

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Are you dog fooding this?

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  Are you dog fooding this?

• 1:15:37Kian Sadeghi?

  I am dog fooding this, real time. It's funny, because we, we were thinking about, like, should we block same-sex couples or not, you know, because we figured that in the future, you should be able to, independent of sex, you know, be able to have, you know, children. For now, it is sex blocked, so it has to be male to female. Sorry about a lot of tech bros out there, I know, that might be hard for some of you guys. But when you find the one, when you find the special someone, you can do Nucleus, and it is going to be amazing.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  What is the actual flow for Nucleus? Is it a cheek swab, I mail it in?

• 1:16:04Kian Sadeghi?

  Cheek swab. Yep, you get, get a DNA kit that looks like this, you open it up, inside there's a cheek swab, you take the cheek swab, you go, stick it in a tube, non-invasive, you can do it at home, no doctor's office involved, goes to a laboratory, laboratory process of DNA, outcomes arrive, DNA file, which then we run through all our analysis, which is honestly, like, a, like, this is, people do not appreciate how much of a feat of science and engineering this is. There's a couple people I have to thank here. First and foremost, Gregor Mendel, late 19th century.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:16:33Kian Sadeghi?

  Thank you for, thank you for playing with those peas. He did not know, when he played this piece, you know, you know, you know, he, he had like an extraordinary statistical intuition, you know, he had no idea what DNA was, he was completely abstracted, there was no molecular basis, just playing with the peas, went all the way to the, you know, Hershey-Chase experiment, shout out to that experiment, Watson, Crick, and then find the structure of DNA, of course, the Human Genome Project, right, massive government project, billions of dollars in investment, thousands of scientists, this product is now live in anyone's hands.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  It's a short line from Gregor Mendel in 1866 to Nucleus being promoted at the Jake Paul fight, so, you know, if only he can see it now, we'd be great.

• 1:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Ben, you're, you're live streaming right now, let's see if this video works.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we got the video here.

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  This is a day I've been looking forward to for four and a half years. But really, today's product announcement is the culmination of decades of scientific, medical, and genomic progress, spanning thousands of scientists and billions of dollars in investment. Hence, today, I'm so excited to show you the next chapter of preventive health: family planning through genetic matching. Imagine knowing every possible outcome for you and your partner's future children, starting with their hereditary risk. Through Nucleus, you have the power to end preventable disease in your future family, long before you even decide to have children.

• 1:17:59Speaker 04

  To show you how easy this is, I'm going to sync my results with my good friend Molly O'Shea. Let's go.

• 1:18:04Speaker 05

  Hi, Molly.

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Hey Molly, what's up?

• 1:18:06Speaker 05

  Perfect timing, I just opened up my Nucleus to see my results. I've got to say, the UI looks really good.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  Oh, that's so nice. You know, we really spend as much time as possible to build beautiful products. And by the way, aren't you one of the first people who did Nucleus? I mean, do you think maybe we're going to be a genetic match?

• 1:18:24Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Let's find out. Seeing if you're a genetic match is almost as easy as seeing if you're a match on a dating app. I'm going to show you exactly how. Here are my Nucleus family results, which just came out. I haven't synced with Molly yet, so you can actually see my kids may be at risk for cystic fibrosis. But the only way to find if Molly and I are actually going to pass down this risk to our kids is by syncing our results. Let me show you how this works. Just click Add Partner and confirm that your partner's done Nucleus. Molly has, of course, so I click Yes. We're about to find out if we're a match. Molly, are you ready?

• 1:18:59Speaker 05

  Yep, let's see.

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  Oh my god, we're a match! This is amazing. Molly, are you still there? Shocking!

• 1:19:09Speaker 05

  I'm going to have to break up.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Okay, well, we'll come back to Molly later, but let's talk about what just happened. On the backend, Nucleus scanned our combined genomes for nearly a thousand conditions that we could have unknowingly passed down to our children. From here, Molly and I can dive deeper into the specifics of our results. In reality, nine out of 10 parents have a genetic risk that they could pass down to their children. And one in 25 people have a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis. So what would happen if Molly had a genetic marker for cystic fibrosis? We have good news. We've been hard at work for something that we think will fundamentally change family planning forever.

• 1:19:52Speaker 04

  We can't share too much yet, but imagine if you could learn not just about the diseases you could pass down to your children, but also where they're gonna look and act more like mom or dad. More on that soon. At Nucleus, we believe that anyone, anywhere should have the choice to access genetic insights to make more informed decisions about their health.

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so the big question, do we have him back?

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You there?

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Oh, I think we gotta unmute him.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  We're juggling things. Can we hear you, Keon?

• 1:20:29Kian Sadeghi?

  Hey, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Yep, fantastic.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  All right, we're back. The big question.

• 1:20:33Kian Sadeghi?

  All right, come on. First thing, how was that video? Huh? It goes hard, right?

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, very clear, very clear. I really liked how efficiently everything's communicated. The transitions are cool, but it's not all style. There's substance there. Very well executed. Good job.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  When, the big question, John and I are both married, but if somebody, if one of our listeners is dating, you know, somebody, when's the right time to say, all right, pull out, like, let me see your cheek. We gotta do a quick swab.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  We gotta do a swab.

• 1:21:01Kian Sadeghi?

  Look, look, look, look. There's many ways in doing this, right? If you're dating someone already, it's okay. You know, you do Nucleus, you see if you have a genetic risk or not. If you're, if you both have a genetic risk for the same thing, you can do IVF. There's other B productive options. You're gonna be good. You know the risk exists, so you can prevent the risk. The whole point of genetics, right? But also, there's a world where, listen, maybe you're a tech pro out there listening to this podcast, you don't have the special someone yet. No worries. You sit down, you say, you know, you know, what college you go to, you know, they tell you whatever. You say, okay, nice, you know, what do you do, you know? And then you say, have you done a Nucleus test?

• 1:21:32Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:21:34Kian Sadeghi?

  I mean, you gotta break it to them. You gotta say, listen, you gotta make sure the genes are aligned. Because why would you get into this business in the first place, right? You're gonna get deeper into it if the genetics are not matched, right? I mean, you don't wanna be carried for the same thing.

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Do you see people throwing up their Nucleus results, like, on dating apps? Like, just look, just look at these, like, look at these genes.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  I think that's the future, maybe. What do you think?

• 1:21:52Kian Sadeghi?

  I mean, I think, I think we believe in kind of individual liberty. I think genetics should be integrated with dating apps. And if someone, you know, opts in and should say, hey, I don't wanna be matched with someone that's also a carrier for a rare genetic marker. It's actually done in different communities. The Oskarnology Jewish community, they do this all the time. I actually don't match people who are the same rare genetic marker. So 100%, I think you should integrate dating apps, do mass preconception testing. DNase is becoming, as you guys know, cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. One of the greatest decreasing costs ever. Combining that with AI, there's gonna be magic. Mass integration with different dating apps. I think you're able to save a lot of babies' lives.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  What about flipping it around? Obviously, the genetic markers for diseases are very, you know, you want to avoid those. But, you know, I already have kids, but I could imagine that my son, when he goes to have his own child, my future grandchildren, uh, might want to optimize for a grandchild who's, you know, gonna be a future bodybuilder, let's say. And, and we want to make sure that, you know, they're just matched up so they can go to the Arnold.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  The most proud grandpa ever.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  And just, and just absolutely look diced, you know, massive. Put on 300 pounds of pure muscle. And, and he wants to make sure that his, his wife is, uh, is setting their kids up for success. Uh, will Nucleus help with that?

• 1:23:01Kian Sadeghi?

  Great question. So first thing, first I'll say is, John, he has a good father, cause you're like seven foot tall. The genes are good. The genes are good. He already has, already inherently, he's good there.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:23:11Kian Sadeghi?

  Uh, but you know, it's funny you actually ask this because at the end of the video there, I, you know, left a little teaser in there about something that's coming out.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:17Kian Sadeghi?

  Let's just say, you know, there, there's something about, you know, maybe, you know, you don't want to just simulate people's disease risk, but also maybe you want to simulate what your baby's gonna look and to act like.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:23:25Kian Sadeghi?

  And, you know, when you start thinking about whole genome sequencing, you can start maybe thinking about, can you actually simulate procreation? Oh, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And let's just say, you know, John, we're shipping. We're shipping like crazy. It's like, it's like hysteria in the, in the Nucleus headquarters.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:23:38Kian Sadeghi?

  We're building at the frontier genetics. You know, I hear like sirens going off, gongs being hit. It's complete chaos in here.

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so, so, so it, it feels like, you know, the, the, I think that the consensus now is at 23 and me walk, so you guys could, uh, take us to the moon. Like, what, like, how far can you, how far can you take this, right? Cause like the first step is like giving people the data. And then you're, then you're trying to like influence, influence outcomes. Like, how, how much does this sort of Nucleus platform expand? What is the like $10 trillion vision for the business? Cause I know you're that ambitious.

• 1:24:14Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah, so you know, it's like Blockbuster versus Netflix. It's like, you know, BlackBerry iPhone. That's the moment that's happening in genomics right now. And the beauty of the genome, what everyone's starting to appreciate is that the basically marvel of engineering and science that it is. Because if you think about it, when you actually read someone's entire genome, it's not just disease risk assessments that you can actually think about. It starts to become about family planning, about procreation simulation, about what drugs actually work best for you, what supplements work best for you, and even about the long tail of different traits you can analyze from, from IQ all the way to muscle strength. You start realizing that the integration of the genome simply has not happened yet in society. Right? If you take a poll of, you know, 300 million Americans and look at how many have been sequenced, right? Basically, none of them have. And you talk about one of the greatest innovations ever, which is the decreasing cost of sequencing genome,

• 1:24:58Kian Sadeghi?

  by far the single highest density, uh, highest consequential piece of health information that exists. Because it's literally your DNA, it's the entire thing. And it's not integrated in medicine, in lifestyle, or in dating. I mean, the opportunity is massive. And this test today costs $400. I'll make a prediction right here on Technology Brothers. Within five years, this test, couple of dollars. Couple of dollars, I said.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Couple of dollars.

• 1:25:20Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, so, so, so, last question. Uh, is, are we gonna have a way to test if somebody's nice with it or got that dog in them? Or is cracked? Because you seem like you're, you're definitely nice with it. You definitely have that dog in you and you seem cracked.

• 1:25:37Kian Sadeghi?

  So we, we have found consistently, okay? That founders who do nucleus tend to be very high in their schizophrenic disposition. Okay, so personally, I'm in the 99 percentile. I'm rocking it, maybe I'm seeing shit, I'm telling you right now.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Schizophrenic chat.

• 1:25:51Kian Sadeghi?

  I'm in the 99 percentile. That's how it is. I swear, you look at Alexis, shouts to my man Alexis, one of our lead investors, super high schizophrenic. A lot of other founders I know, super high schizophrenic. And that's public, by the way. That's public, by the way. I'm not just exposing Alexis. Alexis's results are public, I would never just expose Alexis's very public. Don't look at all his results. Shout out to Alexis there. And so, if you want, you gotta look to see your schizophrenic. In fact, one interesting study showed that they ran these different models across every single phenotype, and they compared it across different careers. By far, the highest predictive one was actually schizophrenia. But it was for artists, which is very similar to entrepreneurs, though. So, you know, that's something to do. If you're low ADHD, super low ADHD associated with doctors and lawyers. So, you know, there's something there, you know? You got that dog in you, maybe it's in your DNA.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  I love it, I love it.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  That's an amazing line.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Well, where can people go get it? Where can people order a test?

• 1:26:35Kian Sadeghi?

  Mindnucleus.com, mindnucleus.com/family. If you're a couple, you want to have healthy children, that's where you should go. Uh, @tian95, follow me on Twitter.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  You're amazing. You're amazing. This was fun. I've actually never, we've never talked and I'd love to have you back on whenever there's, whenever there's genome news, just join this, join this exact link. Like, don't even, you don't even tell us, just join the link.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Hey, there's news. You tell us. Amazing, man. Well, congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Have a great day. Peace, guys. Bye. Have a good weekend, too.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I think genetics might explain why a single inorganic blueberry would kill you on the spot, and yet I could eat a credit card with a fork and knife and just be unaffected. So, I think we got Josh Steinman coming in.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of, uh, microplastic haters.

• 1:27:24Joshua Steinman?

  Yo.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  Yo. How you doing?

• 1:27:28Joshua Steinman?

  Good. Good.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. We got Josh Steinman in the building, in the temple of technology. Uh, give us an update. Is it a good morning and are we going to win?

• 1:27:40Joshua Steinman?

  Uh, all signs point to yes.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Uh, how's, how's it going?

• 1:27:46Joshua Steinman?

  It's good. It's good. How are you guys?

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  We're, we're doing good.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  You want to know, you want a little, uh, show lore? I, I definitely like put one of your initial good morning, we're going to win posts into the, into the stack in the early days. And then I put another one in about a week later and John was like, wait, you put this back in? I'm like, yeah, we're still, we're still going to win.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're still winning. It's still a good morning.

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  It's still important to remember.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  And so we've done those tweets like three times already.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  And I've, and I've talked about it on the show before. I think there's this, you know, founders will say something once and, and feel like they've said it and you're not realizing that, you know, a lot of the long, the, the return is in the sort of long tail of just drilling this idea. And I, I really feel like it's become, uh, movement.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  It's the David Senna thing. You're not advertising to a, a standing army. You're advertising to a marching parade.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, part of it is self-talk, right? And this goes into like the deep, like how do we program ourselves?

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:40Joshua Steinman?

  Like, human as computer. Scott Adams talks about this, the moist robot hypothesis, but other people as well. His, his school of persuasion is the same school that Bill Clinton and Tony Robbins come from. Like Norman Vincent Peale, like there's a lineage here. So it's like, how do we talk to ourselves as people? How do we talk to ourselves as, as agents, free agents, like in the world? So part of it is just like, I'm telling myself every day, like you have to wake up and you have to like want it every day. And then the other part is just like, obviously, you know, with the, with, with the public persona that I have, you know, having come from, you know, both the military, but then also politics.

• 1:29:24Joshua Steinman?

  Like, man, it was dark for a while, you know, like super dark. And I just wanted something where I just could say to myself every day, like, look, things can turn around. And I actually think they're going to, and certainly they have. But like every day, just wake up and be willing to just like offer yourself up to the universe. Like, yeah, it's gonna happen. Like, we're gonna win. Like, you're never more than one, one day away from like catastrophic success.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, going back to

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Catastrophic success, I like that term.

• 1:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Going back to, uh, going back to your, your dark days. Do you feel like you got a lot of, like, were, were people turning down meetings with your company early on just because of your sort of political leanings?

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  Can you do some backstory on the company? Can you break down what you're building, who you are, a little career highlights? I mean, yeah, I'm sure a lot of people know, but give us the basics.

• 1:30:16Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, so, um, I started off my career in like this weird corner of operational counterterrorism in the US military. That sort of branched into high technology and high technology strategy. Um, again, when I was still in uniform and got a lot of exposure to just how much, um, You know, the world is a very interconnected place and there are things that we can do in the digital world that absolutely affect the physical world. People talk about Stuxnet, they talk about, you know, these, these attacks that have happened against oil facilities. So I get out of the military, I go to Silicon Valley, and then two years later, just like a strange series of coincidences, I get asked to come back to Washington and essentially

• 1:31:01Joshua Steinman?

  be like the most senior cybersecurity person in the US government. Not like, I'm gonna reset your password, but like, I'm gonna remake our entire practice of running cyber operations for like, the DoD and the intelligence community and homeland security and all that stuff. So I did that job for four years, and then afterwards, pulled together two buddies of mine, including Brandon Park, who helped stand up Amazon's global, what we call Operational Technology OT cybersecurity program at Amazon, and then Felix Plushinsky, who I'd recruited to come join me in the admin, who was a hedge fund trader. And we started looking at this problem. It's a huge problem. You know, we've digitized the industrial world, and yet there's,

• 1:31:44Joshua Steinman?

  it has created these huge vulnerabilities that have been exploited, and some of that stuff makes its way out into the public. So yeah, we just wanted to start a company to, to solve that.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  What percentage actually gets public versus is sort of known among the industry, but not necessarily in headlines?

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, are there foreign agents operating on American soil?

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Because I, I hear some people say the number is zero, but I think you had a different point on that?

• 1:32:14Joshua Steinman?

  Right. It's a different meme of mine. Yeah, no, there's absolutely foreign, foreign sabotage teams operating on US soil, 100%. My actual number is somewhere around 100 teams. My guess is that, and the question is like, you could break that down into, you know, what types. Anyway, yeah, most of it doesn't get public. And, you know, sitting in that chair for four years, I had to get the classified reports every day of like, oh, this thing happened, that thing happened. And it just... It didn't drive me nuts, but it was like, man, it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Are there any cybersecurity stories in history that are public now that you like to point to as like, that could have been prevented, that's the one we're learning from, and here's how my company would prevent that essentially, or here's how I would have stopped that?

• 1:33:00Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, too easy. So I think two, three years ago, someone, I don't know who, I don't know who, literally destroyed the Iranian steel industry in like one day.

• 1:33:13John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:33:13Joshua Steinman?

  There's video out, yeah, there's video out there. Like, they literally took over, you know, the refineries and just started pouring liquid metal all over the floor on a bunch of these, bunch of these facilities.

• 1:33:27Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of incidents like that that have happened.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  So walk me through how you would prevent that. I mean, I imagine what you're describing is like remote takeover of a machine that is connected to the internet or maybe air gapped, and they didn't have the right security there. How do you actually step in and prevent that for our steel industry?

• 1:33:44Joshua Steinman?

  Air gapping, I mean, a lot of people will say that stuff because they've heard it on like TV or whatever.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  That's me, that's me.

• 1:33:51Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, exactly. But these operations take days, weeks, months, sometimes years, to sort of like get into a network and then find your way to the systems that you want to take over. And the whole point is like every step of the way of those types of operations leaves breadcrumbs. And so currently, the way in which people try and protect these networks is by looking at only one area of technology inside the four walls of the facility, and that's like the networking equipment. So what we do is we look at everything. And so by looking at everything, you just have a bigger picture, and you can assemble a narrative, you can try and understand when malicious things are happening at that super high level, because you're seeing what's going on with the engineering workstations,

• 1:34:34Joshua Steinman?

  you're seeing, we are seeing what happens with the network, we're seeing what's being done on the applications.

• 1:34:41Joshua Steinman?

  We're seeing what's happening, you know, the firewalls.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Joshua Steinman?

  So we just take it all in and, you know, it's not, it's not, um, it's not new to like, oh, do something with a much bigger data set. That's really what we're doing.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  Can you break down, uh, some of the difference between espionage projects and sabotage projects? Are there any differences? Are there any risks, uh, you know, state actors that are prioritizing one over the other right now?

• 1:35:08Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, this is like the thing that most people don't understand. They'll say like, oh, you know, things that are happening right now, it's just espionage. The thing is like, in the course of an operation, like you do the espionage first. It allows you to map the network, map the systems. And then sometimes people will like, just leave a little, leave a little something there.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  In case they want to do sabotage later.

• 1:35:29Joshua Steinman?

  They want.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:31Joshua Steinman?

  Pop it.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:32Joshua Steinman?

  So like, yeah, there's like lots of espionage happening.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:36Joshua Steinman?

  On critical networks, like gee, what's that preparation for?

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  Sure, that makes sense.

• 1:35:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what's been your read on our response to deep seek broadly? Do you think that US companies have been taking it seriously enough? There's this, you know, general lens from some, some, some of the tech community that says it's, you know, it's open source. You know, it's not sort of the, the same type of risk as Tik Tok. Uh, what's your read on it?

• 1:36:06Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, look, a major frustration that I have is that we get a bunch of these cutting edge companies. And then, you know, almost certainly you have foreign, foreign actors, not just the Chinese, like many other foreign actors that come in. I mean, you can read the papers that came out of like the Twitter.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Joshua Steinman?

  Buy, you know, transition to X. And they basically are like, yeah, we had foreign, we had foreign intel services, foreign governments, like operating inside, you know, X formerly known as Twitter. Uh, I think that's happening at a bunch of our companies. I think it's a huge problem, huge counterintelligence problem. Cause the question is like, what are they manipulating? Like, are they putting back doors in there? Are they changing content? Are they changing, uh, you don't know. And a lot of the companies, many of which my friends have worked at, um, they don't even have a way to think about this. And also obviously like, it's not politically correct to talk about.

• 1:37:03Joshua Steinman?

  Hey, maybe we shouldn't hire that foreign national that went to the like, you know, military college of their respective nation and whose uncle is like the deputy chief of their intel service. I don't think you can do that.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so speaking, the, the new CEO of Intel that got announced today, you know, we covered this earlier on the show, you may not have seen it, has invested over the last, you know, 20 years, hundreds of millions of dollars into, you know, Chinese tech companies. Do you foresee any sort of like pushback into bringing somebody like that on to run? Um, you know, he's not a Chinese national, but-

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Born in Malaysia, grew up in Singapore, but invested in the Chinese semiconductor company, exited the position in 2022, I believe, and now running Intel.

• 1:37:51Joshua Steinman?

  Look, you know, I don't know the situation specifically. Obviously, Chinese companies are legally required to be dual-use. Like, they've architected their entire economy to serve the Chinese Communist Party. It just means that I'm super wary whenever you see folks that have been allowed to make profit out of that system. I don't know his scenario specifically, running Intel. I certainly hope that, um, you know, I certainly hope that everything's on the up and up. I have no reason to think that it's not, but whenever I look at, you know, those types of interactions between, you know, what I think the, the United States and, and Western

• 1:38:35Joshua Steinman?

  allies would call like the free market and the Chinese Communist Party, I'm just super wary as a whole.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Staying on the topic of China, do you think we've learned at all from the sort of, uh, DGI just sort of blitzing and taking the entire US drone market? Do you think there's a real risk that they're able to run that same playbook back with Unitree and the sort of humanoid space? Or are we going to be smart enough to not let them put a robot in every American's home?

• 1:39:00Joshua Steinman?

  They are absolutely taking that. They're absolutely taking that playbook and trying to replicate it as broadly as possible. For years, I've been telling, screaming to anyone that'll listen on X or wherever else, like, we, we should ban DGI from doing business in the United States. Full stop, full stop. Everyone's like, oh, all the alternatives are like more expensive or this, that and the other. Well, yeah, supply and demand will allow the market to correct over time.

• 1:39:26Joshua Steinman?

  But it's a huge problem. Like, they exactly know. By the way, like, if you don't think that senior CCP intel officials have the ability to just walk into DJI headquarters and be like, give me everything you know about the topography of the United States, like, you're smoking crack. They probably have access to it right now. So every time these things fly, anything that gets transmitted into the cloud, whose cloud is it? Where's that cloud located? You know, what access do, uh, you know, the Chinese intel services have to it, military have to it? Like, yeah, all that stuff's like in the wild.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  What about, uh, personal cybersecurity? Uh, what, what do you recommend to the average listener just to kind of beef up your own, uh, opsec?

• 1:40:15Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, it's tough. Um, so for normal folks, I'd just say, use the big cloud, use the big providers. That's like the, the Googles, the Microsofts, et cetera. Enable two-factor authentication. I think probably the biggest thing that I don't hear a lot is whenever you get a message, like an email saying like, hey, like, your bank says this or that. Delete the email and then go straight to login to the service.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:40:44Joshua Steinman?

  And, and that's like the mind space that you want to be in because, like, these guys are social engineers. They know the language to get you to click the link. And that's what they're trying to do. Cause they're gonna put malicious software onto your laptop, onto your phone, whatever.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Tons of phishing attacks at X right now. Uh, and then those are getting more and more convincing. You've seen some people, uh, leak it out, usually just for meme coins launches, basically, but, uh, you can imagine being much worse.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, famed investor Kleiner Perkins launched a meme coin. Um, I wanna, I wanna, there's a couple of topics I want to get through. One, uh, you know, uh, I'm sure you, uh, can only make sort of general predictions here, but do you think this whole TikTok thing gets resolved in the next month? You know, there's sort of, uh, there, there was an initial date for early April that it was supposed to, you know, sort of change hands, but. You just, we haven't been seeing that much new news about it.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  At this point, there's plenty of people that want to buy it, you know, Oracle, Microsoft, Alexis Sahanian, like, there's so many different capital groups, like, chomping at the bit to, you know, be the, be the buy side on this deal. It's just a question of can you twist their arm enough to get the sale done, I think. But what do you think, Josh?

• 1:41:57Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, they absolutely want to retain control of the algorithm because that's like the prize, is the ability to like inject ideas into the youth of the United States or elsewhere in the world. And so I think that's going to be, I hope that's a major sticking point with the way in which it resolves out. At the same time, you have to remember that this deal has the attention of the President of the United States, who is at the same time negotiating with his counterparty, Xi Jinping, over a trade relationship that, you know, there are 12 trillions of dollars in the offing around it. And so I learned this over four years of working for him, like, you just have to trust the boss. He's playing a game that like very few humans have ever been

• 1:42:40Joshua Steinman?

  able to play, which is like the most high risk, the most, you know, impactful game of like one nation in the world. And so, look, I hope he's able to negotiate it in a way in which, you know, preserves cognitive sovereignty. There's a lot going on and I've sort of taken my foot off the gas on it.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, it's not a focus. Let's, let's kind of pivot to a topic that's, you know, definitely, I'm sure, top of mind for you guys. Re-industrialization, the vibes are good, the work is, you know, maybe starting, feels like it's starting, it's certainly ongoing, job's not finished. Are we doing enough? It seems like there's a, you know, sort of top, there, there obviously is a top-down directive to invest in America, but, you know, there, there's been, you know, on, on the topic of China, China will give, you know, companies, you know, very, very low or zero interest rate loans to do development. We're not quite there yet.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  I think DeepSeek's taken one of those.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  DeepSeek turned down all their venture capital interest and said, oh yeah, we're just going to take a 0% loan from the Bank of China. I love it.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, what like it doesn't it's almost like it's not an impossible task, but it's a very difficult one. Are we doing enough? Do we need to do more? What's your take?

• 1:44:13Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, so in my four years at the White House, I ended up taking over this port not or not even taking over, but owning this portfolio of like technology supply chains. And it's it's hard, you know, the Chinese are literally, just like you guys said, they're out there giving these 0% loans to these companies to try and build what they call national champions. And so, and so, how do we compete? I think the answer is just the market, you know, and I don't mean that in a sort of like lame kind of way like, oh, the free market will take care of it. But like, there is an incredible amount of dynamism in the American system and in the American markets.

• 1:44:55Joshua Steinman?

  So like, the Chinese can certainly go out and try and drive attention or monopoly towards their chosen, you know, national champions. But we've got a bunch of people that want to make a ton of money here in the United States, a bunch of people from around the world that come here because they want to make a ton of money here in the United States. I think that presents us with different advantages. And so I think that, you know, when it comes to financing, there are lots of tools in the toolbox. There's the Defense Production Act, there's, you know, DoD procurement, there's a whole bunch of things. I do know that the team right now is thinking about all of them. Again, having sat in the seat, you know, I'm not going to take shots at anyone, not that I have any shots to take, just that like, I'm confident that they're thinking about it.

• 1:45:39Joshua Steinman?

  I'm confident that they know, you know, what's available, and I think we're seeing great stuff already.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  What do you think about the debate between supply side and demand side stimulus in these projects? Like, the CHIPS Act, obviously, $50 billion, I think $8 billion was going to go to Intel, provided some milestones, but Ben Thompson has been advocating for flipping that around and instead just saying, hey, let's have the US government say, we're buying chips that are made in America. If you show up with chips that are made in America, we are the buyer and then maybe someone else will buy them. Maybe Google will buy them. Maybe Apple will buy them. But we but you can guarantee that there's demand, but we don't care about what's happening on the supply side as long as it's happening in America. Do you like that change? Do you like that V2 thinking?

• 1:46:27Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. I think, you know, right now, I've heard a lot of strange things about how CHIPS Act has played out. I haven't followed it as closely as if I was, you know, some analyst covering this stuff for the banks. But I mean, it was one of the approaches that we pushed was this like, look, you just have to have it made in America. That's it. Show up again, show up and buy.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:47Joshua Steinman?

  That's one of the things on the table, and I hope they do it.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  What's just pivoting back, I don't know if you're in California right now or up at the Northern office, but how do we solve the wildfire crisis in the in California, right? It's this sort of very complicated issue. You've worked in government, you know, you're very in tune with with what's happening in hard tech. It feels like

• 1:47:15Joshua Steinman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  there's a public role, you know, to play. There's a private markets role to play. There's obviously the whole insurance side, but you're sticking it out here in California, I hope. So what what do you what's your position on, you know, what we need to do as a state?

• 1:47:31Joshua Steinman?

  I mean, we got to let the forestry guys like actually operate. You know, it's insane to hear them talk about like what was going on in Altadena where like years it took them to file these crazy applications with like 15 different state boards, letting them do controlled burns and brush clearing and they'd get said no to. Like, we just got to let these guys do their job. Like forestry management is a solved problem, right? Let these guys get out there. The Europeans laugh at us. The president talks about this all the time, but it is literally true. They don't have these types of catastrophic forest fires because they have good forestry management. There's an amazing account. Mann, M A N N, made films on Twitter. You've seen this guy? He did.

• 1:48:17Joshua Steinman?

  He did a film, he took a red camera and he became one of these, uh, what are the, what are the fire, the, um, smoke jumpers?

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:29Joshua Steinman?

  Smoke jumper and he, he did this amazing film, follow him on X. But he talks about it, it's like, look, yeah, these places are prone to fire, but if you let the forestry management folks do their job, like, you know, you can manage it. And the same thing with the water stuffs, like, the solutions are known, like, there's weird blockages in the way in which water comes into California and the president's trying to deal with some of that stuff. Like, the state of California, like, people know what the answer is. They're just not being allowed to do it because crazy weird bureaucracies.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  That's right, the movie was called Hot Shot. I remember seeing a trailer for this and being blown away by the visuals. I need to watch this movie, this looks fantastic. Available on Amazon Prime, Apple, Google Play. Go check it out, folks.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  I think that's all I got.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Thanks for stopping by.

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to, you know, we'd love to have you on when, you know, there's, there's a bunch of these topics.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Cybersecurity correspondent.

• 1:49:25Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're our new cyber, cybersecurity correspondent or brother, depending on.

• 1:49:30John Coogan?

  Or just a morning pump up speech.

• 1:49:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Just hop on, just tell us, good morning, we're gonna win, then you can hop off, get, get to the rest of your day.

• 1:49:37Jordi Hays?

  We've been starting the show with, by singing a little bit, so if you ever want to like, you know, create like an anthem or anything.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need, we need good mantras, we need good mantras. We have a few, Temple of Technology, Fortress of Finance, Capital of Capital, but Good Morning, We're Gonna Win works too.

• 1:49:52Joshua Steinman?

  See you guys.

• 1:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on. It's great. Cool, we have five minutes until the great debate.

• 1:49:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's hit a couple posts.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  Let's hit a couple posts. What do we have in the queue?

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so this is a crazy story from this account, Rob.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Rob Wiblin.

• 1:50:08Jordi Hays?

  So he says, this is a tiny niche story, but it may actually be the most catastrophic thing to happen globally yesterday. Bold start, bold start, I'm not gonna go out on that with him.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  We'll be the judge of that.

• 1:50:19Jordi Hays?

  We will desperately need politicians. Okay, so the headline here is that, um, that this media company news. Scientist has used the freedom of information laws to obtain the chat GPT records of Peter Kyle, the UK's technology secretary in what is believed to be a first world first use of such legislation.

• 1:50:40John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  So, Rob here says, we will desperately need politicians to be able to use AI advisors to keep up with the intense pace of events that recursively self improving AI agents will bring. AI advice will improve in scale proportionately to the social impact AI is having given given governments some shot at keeping up. But if any conversation with AI can be extracted using freedom of information laws while advice from humans given verbally cannot politicians and civil servants will be hugely biased towards worse and slower human advice and analysis. They'll fear looking stupid for asking clarifying question or outrage if the AI advises some un PC course of action. Just as we need humans in government to be able to have some private conversations.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  We need humans to be able to get AI advice without journalists being able to publish the transcript. These conversations must

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Must urgently be carved out of.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Out of FOI legislation. So anyways, interesting, interesting point. Yeah, you know, you want politicians have a lot of pressure. They have hard jobs. You want them to be able to like, you know, have their, you know, their little friend companion. Like, maybe they're using AVs. It's like, sometimes it might just say, you've got this. You know, but other times they might ask, you know, hey.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Hey, you need to brush up on your linear algebra.

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like what, what is, when, what's this maximum speed limit?

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  So he didn't know, he didn't know that. He should have known that. Yeah, it's interesting. I wonder, I mean, there are ways to use LLMs in more secure and less FOIA able ways. I mean, certainly you can run your own llama or deep seek instance on a computer. George Hots has a project Tiny Box. But I mean, even if you just have a, you know, a new generation Mac. It's now big enough that you can run and powerful enough and the models have been condensed enough that you can run them locally. That obviously makes it harder for them to be seized without your permission. Also, you could see a, an LLM or an AI service, you know, basically built on top of something like Signal where there's end to end encryption where.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  You know, if you're using an unencrypted network, the government can go and ask the tech company to, they have the keys, so they can unlock the servers and pass over the records. But that's not the way it works on Signal and other end-to-end encrypted communication apps. So you could imagine a world that where someone is vending an LLM through an end-to-end encrypted service, not saving the records and offering a different service. Feels like a niche, but potentially important use case. But it'll be interesting to see where it goes. I mean, this is actually maybe the bull case for Apple because Apple's whole thing has been end-to-end encryption everywhere, including the Messages app.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  If I'm talking to you on iMessage, Apple cannot see those. And even if the FBI shows up and says, we have a warrant, unlock Jordy, John and Jordy's latest memes. We want to read them. They've been posting bangers back and forth. We want to access them. Apple doesn't have the keys. And Apple, if they're running the LLM locally on your device, it's locked behind your passcode.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  But is that true for if a government employee has a government phone? Shouldn't the government be able to like see that itself?

• 1:54:01John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you have, if you have the passcode to get into the phone, you have full access. So it needs to be on a personal device that can't be monitored in order to truly do that. But then, of course, the flip side is that then, you know, bad actors can use the encrypted. And this has been the privacy debate forever.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And OpenAI has historically just been very careful around anything, anything political. They don't want to be positioned as, you know, OpenAI influenced this election or things like that. But these are some of the big problems that they're going to have to.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Let's go to Blake Robbins. He has some random thoughts. We love these posts from Blake. He says, "There might be an entirely new generation that now thinks of Nokia as a Drake song." That's funny. "To sort of insane how much mobile games like Candy Crush leverage haptics." So as you're using the game, it's vibrating. Kind of an underrated way to increase engagement and I guess decrease regretted user seconds or just keep people addicted. And then number three, whoever runs Stakes clipping strategy slash network is on a different level playing 4D chess. I'm sure you've seen those steak ads all over.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the thing that's been relevant to X is they've taken over or they're partnering with these accounts that post these.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  Viral videos.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  Viral videos and or just posts, images, things like that.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  News, anything.

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  And if you look at the bottom, it'll say like, this post is presented by Steak. So it's like very kind of.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Just a tiny logo.

• 1:55:28Jordi Hays?

  You're getting the steak.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  It's not a full ad, it's just Steak.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Logo.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  And every time one of those goes viral, there's a community note, this is against the terms of service, you can't promote this, this is undisclosed ad, but this still goes viral, still gets a ton of impressions.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  I had a fourth random thought.

• 1:55:43Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny, well, so he's bringing up Steak. Steak has like this massive partnership with Drake.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they do. They keep doing like stunts.

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Steak and Drake.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  Steak and Drake, it's a lot of.

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Steak and Drake. No, but I mean, the very, the funny thing is in this one post, you have him calling out that a whole new generation doesn't realize Nokia is a Drake song, which implies that and Drake partnering with Steak means that Drake is just marketing, you know, basically gambling products to the youth. And he should.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Clean it up.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Should look in the mirror.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Clean it up. Well, I have a fourth random thought here. You should get an A sleep. Nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to Aidsleep.com/tbpn and.

• 1:56:27Jordi Hays?

  Get $350 off the pod. I slept very well last night, which I'm glad I got a 98 because this debate is about to be tense.

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  It's gonna be difficult. It all could come crashing down. I got a 94. You beat me.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Good night.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  But I slept a lot.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Good night for you.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Nine, nine hours, 21 minutes. How is that even possible? That's a long time.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  I put up some crazy numbers.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  You put up some crazy numbers and.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  But you gotta be well rested for these debates. They're hot. They're aggressive.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be surprised if, so Lessen is not in the waiting room yet. I guess Seth is, but I wouldn't be surprised if Sam was just taking a power nap on his eight sleep.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised, yeah.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, to just sort of get really into that sort of state of mind.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  Should we bring in Seth? Do some pre-game strategy? I want to hear his strategy. I want to hear how he's thinking about going toe to toe. Let's bring him in, into the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Hey, good to see you. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Oh, you got the custom background with the billboard there.

• 1:57:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm starting with a little psychological warfare.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:41Speaker 07

  That's my strategy. Just get him, get him a little uncomfortable.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does it say? It says, Lessen, south, shoot, Lessen a message, not Seth Greenberg.

• 1:57:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Very AI-generated.

• 1:57:55Speaker 07

  It says, it says, got a weird meme coin, shoot Lessen a message, not Seth.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's cut off.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, it's cut off over here. But yeah, give us the breakdown. How did we wind up here?

• 1:58:06Speaker 07

  So, about a year ago, or maybe six months ago, Lessen and I had a public debate about, you know, is the AI opportunity for startups or incumbents?

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:19Speaker 07

  And it got heated. And so, yeah, we've kind of just been going back and forth. And then, and then he actually took out a physical billboard on the 101. Like with all, like amongst all these like advertisements for AI companies that says, AI is not your mote, like love slow kind of thing.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:38Speaker 07

  And then I just kind of tweeted back at him saying, I'm gonna like take out a billboard on the other side.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:43Speaker 07

  And then they updated it, yeah.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so then he, Lessen threw up a new ad yesterday that says, got an AI startup idea, shoot Seth Rosenberg a message, not slow. So this is basically the Drake and Kendrick of allocators.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  The Tupac biggie of this era, really.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. No, but it's great, it's great to have you on. Sam's, Sam's a fierce debater. We were talking with Logan Bartlett earlier.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  He's moderated a debate before.

• 1:59:11Jordi Hays?

  So we're gonna try to keep it, I'm gonna try to keep it very, very similar.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Keep it tight, keep it tight. Cause he's known to filibuster a little bit when you get him going.

• 1:59:19Speaker 07

  That's right, yeah.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  So you gotta.

• 1:59:21Speaker 07

  You guys gotta help me and just cut Sam off.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, he might not even show up and then you win by default.

• 1:59:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:59:29Speaker 07

  It's a forfeit.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, yeah, why don't, why don't, like, since we have some time.

• 1:59:33John Coogan?

  Give some background on yourself.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Introduce yourselves, some background, uh, for the, for the listeners.

• 1:59:38Speaker 07

  Sure. Well, so Sam actually hired me at Facebook in 2013. So we've gone way back.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:59:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So I was like this young analyst at Goldman Sachs, like, spending a hundred hours a week in spreadsheets. And then Sam invited me to this backroom dinner in New York, talking about the future of the world. And this is back when Facebook had a little less baggage. It was still like a startup energy, like future of the world, giving individuals a voice, like Arab Spring, all that. And I was just super inspired by it. Um, and so it was like a four hour dinner conversation. I'm like, Sam, like, I definitely, like, that was the first time I met him, but, you know, he's quirky and futuristic. And so I'm like, I need to do this. So I spent like any spare time I had, like, learning how to code and just like getting up to speed on tech world. And then I've just been in the, in that world ever since.

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  How long were you at Facebook?

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:32Speaker 07

  I was there for about four years. I, I led the separation of Messenger into its own app. And then David Marcus came on to lead it and Stan came on and built kind of an empire around it. And then I was running.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  Was that like post Project Titan? Cause it wasn't Titan, like the, the whole project to like, put everything together and then you kind of.

• 2:00:49Speaker 07

  That was after I left. That was after I left. This was, this was the opposite of that, which was the separation. Yeah.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Speaker 07

  This was back when it was like Facebook chat.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  That's the game at a hyperscaler. You just break it apart, put it back together, full employment for PMs in the valley.

• 2:01:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So I was there for phase one.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:08Jordi Hays?

  And then you went straight to Greylock or what, what was your next move?

• 2:01:11Speaker 07

  No, no. So I was running the, uh, the product for the developer platform at Facebook, which was like AI bots, Messenger bots. It's like the hottest thing in Silicon Valley for like four months before everyone realized it didn't work. Because we were seven years away from LLMs actually, you know, being released.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, those bots, lots of business logic, lots of if then statements.

• 2:01:31Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  Dressed up with a nice UI every once in a while.

• 2:01:35Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got your former, uh, your former boss, or at least the guy that hired you is in the waiting room now. So we can bring him in.

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Bring him in.

• 2:01:42Jordi Hays?

  And, uh.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Bring him into the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Uh, and if they, if they get out of hand, I'm going to be ringing this gong, telling you hurry it up. Finish what you're saying. No filibustering on this debate.

• 2:02:00Speaker 07

  Sam, you almost forfeited by being late.

• 2:02:02Sam Lessin?

  I was in the waiting room. I'm sitting there. I wore my Team Canada, uh, Canadians Team Canada like archerics for you, Seth.

• 2:02:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that.

• 2:02:12Sam Lessin?

  I support your 51st state.

• 2:02:16Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm American now. I kind of support it too, honestly.

• 2:02:19Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, welcome to the stream. Welcome to the debate. Uh, should we do some, some opening arguments? What, what, lay down the, the, the general, uh, the, what is the actual point that we're debating here? Uh, sustaining versus disruptive innovation for artificial intelligence? Is that kind of where you guys are differing most?

• 2:02:40Speaker 07

  I think the debate is that Sam has too much disposable income to waste on billboards.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah. So Sam, what's the ROI been so far? Are you?

• 2:02:48Sam Lessin?

  I don't know, Seth. How many, how many AI pitches have you gotten from my billboard?

• 2:02:52Speaker 07

  Actually, honestly, like the, the inbox is full.

• 2:02:55Sam Lessin?

  There you go. You're welcome. You're welcome. I see no debate here. I'm very happy to send Seth all the AI pitches and life is good.

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this, this debate is presented by AdQuick, the number one way to buy billboards on the 101.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yes. If you're trying to duke it out with a rival, get on AdQuick, get a billboard.

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  It's underrated to take, you know, debates from the timeline to the 101. Yeah. Just, you know, air it all, air it all out. Um, but yeah, so, so Sam, uh, you know, we had, we had lesson on the show, I think last Friday, broadly, you know, talking about opportunities in AI and the whole kind of full spectrum. Uh, maybe, yeah, I mean, I, I don't even know necessarily where to start. You guys were the ones that were.

• 2:03:36Sam Lessin?

  Well, okay. Here's what, I'll, I'll, Seth and I have been debating this for years. Let me, let me try to tee it up, which is I for several years, so I try to be self-consistent, have been very pro that AI is going to make the big, big, big platforms a shit ton of money. Um, and it's going to be really good for small businesses, but it is a terrible place to hunt for startups, right? It's a great way to lose a lot of money on startups. Now, I, my refinement of that. That which I which I will give as like a refinement from my like I do really believe in what I'll call AI cherry on top businesses. Which is businesses that are good, that there's a sweetener because of the efficiency of AI.

• 2:04:17Sam Lessin?

  But broadly speaking, when people come in and pitch AI, my answer is pass, please go call Seth. Seth's answer, I think, is please call me.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Okay, Seth, what do you got to say?

• 2:04:29Speaker 07

  So I think that tees it up well. So I'll I'll give you two examples of where I think massive new businesses can be built that are, let's say, AI native. I think one is like networks and marketplaces based on new democratization of being able to create new types of content. So like the analogy on the phone is you now have a camera as everyone in everyone's pocket. The first wave of apps was like camera filter apps and then Instagram.

• 2:04:59Sam Lessin?

  No, the first wave of apps are fart apps.

• 2:05:02Speaker 07

  Fart apps and like drinking a beer app.

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Beer drinking.

• 2:05:05Speaker 07

  Fair, but like the first camera apps were like, you know, just like little fun tools you could do with the camera. But then the real mobile first business were things like Instagram and Snap, right? Which basically created networks around democratization of creation of new content. And I think if you think about AI, like what new types of content can now be created by everyone? There's a few examples. One are games, like what's the next Roblox? Two is music, you know, is Suno gonna have like a consumption experience? So there's gonna be a new type of network there. Three is software, right? Just generally, I don't know if if there's enough out there to build like a, you know, a web app store around productivity or vertical SaaS or whatever.

• 2:05:47Speaker 07

  But there's basically democratization of new content type. And I think you could create a marketplace around that, think you could build a big business.

• 2:05:54Jordi Hays?

  So I mean, I guess.

• 2:05:56Speaker 07

  Go ahead.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  I guess to like maybe push you a bit further there, like specifically around Suno. And I don't have no insight into what they're actually doing. But if I create a great song on Suno, don't I want to share that with like the most amount of of people? So just like take that to YouTube or or X? And wouldn't that be an argument that, you know, that like the the value just kind of continues to just like anchor around the sort of distribution platform?

• 2:06:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that would be, um, you know, a base case or kind of like smaller outcome for Suno if it just kind of gets relegated into the creative tool. But I think if like the number and quality of things that are actually created on the Suno platform starts to exceed, or at least like take a meaningful but separate piece of the market, then they they could just create a more closed ecosystem. Where the only way to get that content is on Suno.

• 2:06:52Sam Lessin?

  I'd say that's extremely unlikely. I mean, the the thing that I think is like, that I would say I buy is, I'd say that there is, in general, the medium is the message, right? And so you have in a lot of places. And so when you have a new technical tool.

• 2:07:06Speaker 07

  By the way, Sam, Sam made me read that book as onboarding for Facebook.

• 2:07:10Sam Lessin?

  I did. I used to control, I used to have the distinction of controlling the reading list, which I invented for all on boarded PMs. And I hired Seth and then made him read, what was it? It was, it was. Marshall McLuhan, Snow Crash.

• 2:07:23John Coogan?

  Snow Crash, okay.

• 2:07:24Sam Lessin?

  Um, Snow Crash was well, well before Oculus on the required reading list.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:07:28Sam Lessin?

  Others. Um, but look, I mean, I think, here's what I was gonna say is, um, I do, if you think about like a lot of what the internet is, people like to think about it as a technology, right? Or a lot of that's tech. What it really is, is like an information economy or a content economy. And like, I think if you start thinking about things on economic terms of like, producers, consumers, like what's the, what's the holistic picture of that? You do get some really interesting frameworks for talking about AI. So I'll give you an example. What is Facebook? Or what is social media? It really is a content pump, right? There are rules, there's an economy established with it, that economy then produces a certain type of content pumping out of humans that otherwise wouldn't have been pumped out.

• 2:08:10Sam Lessin?

  And then recirculates and shares and creates an economy around it. If you said, hey, AI creates some new affordances that makes it cheaper to pump information. Like all of a sudden, we can track humans, right? In a new way. And by fracking them, there is some sort of like new content type that comes out that is super compelling and super different. Sure, like, maybe that there's something there, but I think that the the most likely outcome by a mile when you think about products is it just turns out that like, most products and the platforms already exist. It's all about getting later, getting paid. These AI is one of the greatest extensions of existing platforms you can imagine. It just makes everything better. And just like fracking, you kind of get new content or cheaper content from people because AI makes it easier.

• 2:08:55Sam Lessin?

  But it all flows through the same fucking pipelines, right? And the money is not in the fracking because the fracking itself is commodity.

• 2:09:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, I definitely agree that the fracking is commodity, meaning the creation. The question is, can you frac something new that then creates a new network, right?

• 2:09:09Sam Lessin?

  And I just think it's extremely unlikely because the pipelines exist, right? Like, there's no, like, what is the new, like, you don't, it's just oil.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but does that make it a good VC, does that make it a good VC bet? If even if it's, even if there's like a, you know, 5% chance, but the new network is, you know?

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what happened with TikTok, right? Like, it was first just those lip syncing app and you would repost that content elsewhere. And then they bootstrapped a network on top of it and became a very good outcome for, I guess, the CCP. But, uh, you know, in, you know, you could imagine an American.

• 2:09:38Sam Lessin?

  Content type, that was the new content, like Snap.

• 2:09:41John Coogan?

  Doesn't Harry Potter or Balenciaga videos, couldn't that be the, the, the lip syncing video of this era?

• 2:09:47Speaker 07

  I feel, I feel like I'm a Democrat with CNN on my side here. You got the hosts on my side. But

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  No, we're, we're, we're just, we're just guiding the conversation.

• 2:09:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  I think you're both, uh, I think you're both wrong. No, I'm kidding.

• 2:10:01Sam Lessin?

  The problem, the problem with AI in general, and I think the entire AI discussion is, um, I always like to point out, it's like the, the average of infinity and zero is infinity, right? And so VCs aren't very good at math, but they can do that one. And so the problem is you say, okay, this is so disruptive that even though the likely outcome is zero, because there's like no math you can do on this and market big, then you're like, well, I'll pay anything because maybe it's a thing, right? And like, I think that's actually what's going on in the industry a lot. I think it's quite bad because it leads to this like complete lack of like thoughtfulness and discipline. It's just like the most rudimentary math on what happens.

• 2:10:40Sam Lessin?

  I look a lot. There are actually projects. I'll give you an example of something I actually believe is like new content that can exist because of AI that not only I've invested in, I helped start, right? Which is we work on this thing called Merit First with Joe Lonsdale and his team. We have some good announcements that'll happen. Yeah, I like this, Sam. Here's the thing about it. Here's the basic, here's the basic setup for it. And it is, it is an interesting AI oriented business because you say, look, the way you hire people to date in most worlds is credential based. You're like, ah, you went to Harvard, you studied this thing, you got this checkbox, now you're in my pipeline. Hell, I hired Seth because we used to go to New York and say, we want to talk to the smartest people from Bain, McKinsey, Goldman, BCG,

• 2:11:25Sam Lessin?

  uh, and Morgan. That was it. That was like the entire thing. Like, we don't know how to look at everyone. We're just gonna like go call those people and we'll like pick some of them, right? That was how we did hiring. Um, at least in the alternative PM hiring we were doing. Um, what is way better is to do it based on what you can actually do, based on tests, based on, you know, forget credentials, I don't care how you gotta go to something like, what, like, show me what you can do. Here's the problem is if you go to a most hiring manager and say, hey, hire based on tests, you have three problems. One is you're like, well, I don't know how to design a good test, right? Like, what is a good test for this role? It's actually pretty hard to figure that out and make it meaningful. Two, how do I know you're not cheating? And three, the biggest, most non-obvious, once you have like 10,000 applications for something, you're screwed.

• 2:12:10Sam Lessin?

  Because you can't possibly actually grade all those tests, right? Unless it's like a multiple choice, which is like not sophisticated. So does AI have leverage on that? Absolutely. Does that mean that there's like a new way to think about a human interaction? Like, how do you hire people because AI exists? Absolutely. Like, that is the type of thing. But it's not, you're not investing in the AI. You're investing in like a new way or a new approach to hiring, which happens to leverage AI, right? And I think there is an important distinction there.

• 2:12:40Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, I'm glad I already got hired, so I don't have to compete with

• 2:12:44Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, you don't have to do it.

• 2:12:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't have to compete with 20,000 other people. But the that's actually kind of the second big bucket, Sam, of AI opportunities that, to me, are very obvious, which is just AI opening up new markets that were historically owned by labor, right? And right now, you're talking about recruiting, massive industry, it's mostly human-led. There's a long list of others, right? Where technology is now taking labor spend, whether it's legal, whether it's accounting, compliance. We have a company in our portfolio called Greenlight that's growing super fast. And it's just, you know, these large banks and fintechs have like thousands of compliance analysts that just go through checkboxes and write reports. And so you're competing with BPOs in these cases.

• 2:13:29Sam Lessin?

  Well, kind of, but I think this is something you have to be really careful about. Because this goes back to the whole, like, what are you actually investing in? And is this an AI company? Like, one of the big memes right now in venture capital is, oh, we should like buy accounting firms and make them robots.

• 2:13:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, and by the way, I'm not doing, I'm not doing the roll up.

• 2:13:45Sam Lessin?

  And it's like, I mean, we've actually done a bunch of roll ups that we think do make sense. But like, this is one in particular, I think, is really stupid. Because it, people don't understand the point of accountants, right? The point of an accountant is not, like, you could have a robot, you could have a, you know, some fancy AI that has a 1% error rate, or even a 0.1% error rate on your taxes. Your accountant might be running a 3% error rate. Who do you hire? You hire the human. You know why? Because you know what you're really hiring as an accountant? You're hiring someone so that when the IRS is like, you fucked up your taxes, you're like, I don't know, talk to Steve, right?

• 2:14:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you could still do that. You could still sell software to big account, like, 1.6 million accountants right now.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Send them the chat GPT dot com link.

• 2:14:29Sam Lessin?

  So the basic point is like, there's a lot of jobs that people want to like, ooh, machine can automate. And you're like, you don't understand, like, this is a liability shifting thing. Like, most, a lot of human jobs are not actually about doing the thing. They're about shifting liability and responsibility, right? That's actually what the humans are for.

• 2:14:45Speaker 07

  I agree that the job will change to its essence, which is like trust and sales, right? But that just means that that individual guy, Steve, who everyone trusts to put a rubber stamp. Can do 10 times the amount of business with.

• 2:14:58Sam Lessin?

  But the basic, but the, but the, but every, the problem is the AI itself is commodity and everyone will have it. And like, that's not where the leverage is. So you're not really investing in the AI business, right? You're still investing in the accounting business, Steve's business, right? And everyone has the same level that it's, it's a classic war of attrition where like you, you. The, and I just don't think this is a place where like, unlike a, where you're going to like make money on the arms dealing. Because the arms dealing is all commodity.

• 2:15:24Speaker 07

  How, how do you map this? Does Steve, like, is the software that Steve's using to leverage himself? Is that OpenAI and ChatGPT?

• 2:15:32Sam Lessin?

  It doesn't.

• 2:15:33Speaker 07

  Is that Thomson Reuters? Or is that a new company?

• 2:15:36Sam Lessin?

  It just doesn't matter. It's all commodity.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Okay. How, how do you map this to the mobile wave? Because we were just talking to Logan Bartlett about this. It's like, kind of the classic innovator's dilemma, sustaining innovation versus disruptive innovation. And with mobile, it's like, it was, it did feel like a sustaining innovation in that the mobile sales force was just sales force. And yet, a lot of VCs made a lot of money betting on mobile companies if they got into WhatsApp. You don't think so?

• 2:16:00Sam Lessin?

  They didn't make that much money on it. I mean, I think Silicon Valley has a story that venture capitalists like to tell LPs. Which is every X years, the whole thing gets reshuffled and there's all this money being made. It's bullshit, right? Like the going from shrink rack software to internet, that was a big deal, right? That was a paradigm shifting, broke the machine thing. You know, I would actually argue that the shift to mobile was not disruptive at all, right? Like you have all the same winners, they're just bigger, right? I would argue that the shift to cloud was barely disruptive, right? And it just turns out that like, there's, there's a very big difference between things, things that are so important and paradigm shifting. They break the incumbents and there's huge opportunities for, like, that's why crypto is really interesting.

• 2:16:43Sam Lessin?

  Think what you will of it, it's, crypto is extremely hostile to incumbents, right? As like a concept, we can talk about how it's being now co-opted by incumbents, but like in general, like it fundamentally is. Whereas I could not think of a more classically extending innovation than AI, right? It just makes the rich richer.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  When's the Sam Lessin Mag7 ETF coming then? If you're so bullish on the.

• 2:17:05Sam Lessin?

  No, you gotta buy Jelly Jelly. Well, first of all, I'd say the Mag Seven, like, I would actually argue, I was, I, because I like to lick the cookie on these things. Yeah. Uh, is like, I, I was like, I think, you know, if you go back two years, like pitching the like, these are the five companies that are gonna win in AI, and it's all the same ones that already exist. I mean, it was, you know. So I'm into the Mag Seven thing. I also would say, like, when people ask me, like, my AI investing strategy, I'm gonna say, like, thank God I held on to some Facebook stock. Sure. Right? Like, that's the answer. It's like the best AI bet.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about the idea that, like, Apple's slipping, or Google's not shipping fast enough? Like, this does create opportunities for entrepreneurs, at least, to build a company that gets acquired or something, like.

• 2:17:40Sam Lessin?

  They're not gonna get acquired. They're just gonna get copied.

• 2:17:43Speaker 07

  Here's what I'd say. Like, I, I don't think the AI, I think here's maybe some common ground with Sam and I. I don't think AI is gonna kill incumbents in favor of startups, but I do think it, it opens up new markets. And yes, there are outliers, but that's kind of what we're in the business of doing and funding. And, um, like, for mobile, yes, like, it didn't kill Facebook, it didn't kill Airbnb, but it created Uber. It created DoorDash, it created Instacart, it created TikTok, right? It created Snap, it created Instagram, uh, created WhatsApp. And so these are tens of billions, hundreds of billions of, of, of value that, that were kind of mobile first. And it's a similar thing, which is like, what are the new capabilities? GPS, camera, video?

• 2:18:24Speaker 07

  Can you create, can you use that as a hook to then create a sustainable business, whether it's a network? You know, I agree with you, Sam, that, like, AI buy, like, doing an API called OpenAI is obviously not defensible, but can you use it as a hook to then build a real business?

• 2:18:38Sam Lessin?

  And I just think the answer is, in almost all places, no, right? Like, I think it's a thing, it's just like, oh, everyone uses it, everything gets leveled up. You know, like, to your thing about, um, incumbents and Apple, look, Apple is common, we talked about this last week, like, the Apple stuff is, like, pretty funny, right? It's so bad, right? Um, but. It's not going to make me buy an Android phone, right? Like, and so you're like, so they have a hell of a lot of time to figure out something. Like, it's, we are a long way away from that being a real issue for them, even if it's pretty funny.

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  What about the more sclerotic industries? I mean, you're thinking about, you know, like, management consultants seem to be printing money on AI, just strapping on AI pitches onto legacy businesses. As I see, like, oh, I go to IBM or something with, oh, I want to replatform my app, and I just need a bunch of programmers to do that. It feels like an AI-native company there could potentially scale up and get really big.

• 2:19:37Sam Lessin?

  I don't know. I mean, like, look, Accenture is going to make a lot of money short-term on this stuff, right? Short-term. The problem is Accenture is mostly in the business of BPO outsourcing, and they're going to kind of eat themselves in doing that, right? And so it's very, it's going to be a very different world for them in terms of how they navigate this. Good, good, any, but like, anyone who sells business consulting is going to do pretty well in a period where like-

• 2:19:59Speaker 07

  IT transformation.

• 2:20:01Sam Lessin?

  For a little bit. It's just like, these are not VC-backed businesses. Like, these are consulting firms that will make money for a little bit, right?

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  I mean, it seems like you're just super bearish on VC as an asset class. Like, should founders just go and build, uh, just, just go and build a, you know, lifestyle business or something? Or pick some different capital structure?

• 2:20:20Sam Lessin?

  So, go for it, Seth.

• 2:20:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, I mean, AI is also great. I think AI is just an accelerant for everything. It makes large companies more profitable. It opens up new markets for startups, whether it's services businesses or new networks. And it's, uh, it's also great for lifestyle businesses. You can, there's a long tail of random problems that you can now solve really specifically with a very small team.

• 2:20:43Sam Lessin?

  So, the way I would phrase it is related, but a little differently, which is, in life, the middle usually drops out, right? And I think AI is a great example of dropping out the middle. Like, no one wants, being a, there's no such thing as being a $10 billion public company anymore. It's just like a dumb place to be. No one cares, right? You either want to be a hyperscaler, right? Which is a great, I mean, it's a great place. Like, most of the market says, AI, interesting. Where put money for AI, right? And like, that's like been the, the Sikh. And that's why you've seen like the Mag7 and particularly things like Facebook just crushing it. Cause you're like, no liability, tons of upside, like, easy bet. Like, why does everyone buy Nvidia? They're like, we don't know how to invest in this. Nvidia seems fine. Or like, we don't know how to invest in this, let's just buy power, right?

• 2:21:29Sam Lessin?

  Like, cause we're not sure how this plays out. So like, the big will keep getting bigger and there'll be like a massive thing. And then on the very small end, you're like, you know, lifestyle. Look, I, the reason we have a creator fund, right? The reason that we do a bunch of stuff at the low end is I, I totally buy the thesis that you're gonna see individuals that have a lot of trust and brand and community and deeply understand a niche, do things you haven't seen before. Like, I, I buy the one-person billion-dollar company thing. Like, I think that's real with like, with the leverage you have. I think the key is you just have to have the right capital for the mission you're on. And having the wrong capital is a really bad place. And by the way, the worst capital you can have, I personally think,

• 2:22:09Sam Lessin?

  is being a subscale company competing with hypers, hyperscalers using venture capital, right? That's like a recipe for total disaster. Because the hyperscalers have orders of magnitude more money and time, right? And you're just like, you're kind of truly bringing a knife to a gunfight.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Well, isn't it possible that we wind up looking back on this in a few years and think like, oh, we just hadn't thought of what the Uber for AI is? How do you think about the Uber story with mobile to, you know, today? Like, Uber was hard to predict when the iPhone dropped.

• 2:22:41Speaker 07

  I mean, we, we're already seeing the Uber for AI, they're like...

• 2:22:45Sam Lessin?

  What's the Uber for AI?

• 2:22:47Speaker 07

  Cursor, like, the next Roblox?

• 2:22:50Sam Lessin?

  No. Those, like, they're fine, they're fine. I, I think, like, it's interesting. Why do you think Cursor is interesting? Like, it's, Cursor's, I like it, I use it as a product, I don't see it as a good business.

• 2:23:02Speaker 07

  I just think like it's the classic like startups need to get distribution before incumbents innovate. And now because these tools are so powerful, you're actually able to get distribution as a new company very quickly. So if you're first to market with the best product, then you can start leaning into all of the other things that kind of give you defensibility.

• 2:23:22Sam Lessin?

  I don't know. I think that's true. The thing is people are applying network thinking to what's fundamentally just a technology, right? It's not a net. There's no network. There's no lock in.

• 2:23:31Speaker 07

  Curse is not a network.

• 2:23:32Sam Lessin?

  So there's a lot of SaaS products that become very sticky because they become a default. I think the whole point of AI is the switching cost for almost all this stuff goes to zero, right? And because switching cost is zero, there's just no, I mean, people like I have, I use Chorus. Have you guys played with Chorus?

• 2:23:47Speaker 07

  No.

• 2:23:48Sam Lessin?

  It's awesome.

• 2:23:48Speaker 07

  I haven't used it.

• 2:23:49Sam Lessin?

  It's great. It's basically just like a desktop app and you plug all the LLMs into it, right? Like you have keys for all of them and like, I don't care, like use the best one marginally. When a new one comes out, you know, the only defensible thing it is, is there are so many fucking LLM models at this point. I'm happy to give someone the job of actually researching them all and deciding which one to send a specific query to. Like there's some sort of aggregation value there for a little bit for now, but I don't know, man.

• 2:24:16Jordi Hays?

  One, one fun thought exercise on the social side is that, you know, we went through this generation. You know, social media was great initially because people were like, oh, it's actually more interesting to see what my friends are kind of talking about and doing versus just like traditional media, which is like random people. And then it was like the Kim Kardashian era of, you know, it's more interesting to like follow a famous person's life. And it's, it's possible to imagine a world where just being in a version of Instagram where everyone's a bot and they all like, you know, are either polarizing or exactly aligned with your views. And there's just like this kind of constant stream and you get, everybody gets a thousand likes on their posts and they post.

• 2:24:58Sam Lessin?

  This is, yeah, my, my line on this has been that the, for, for 20 years, the way you start a social network is you say, who do you want to follow? And the way to start a social network today is say, who do you want to follow you, right? Um, is like the inversion that you You can see like I'd actually argue Twitter is already doing this like Twitter I think is intention my I'm not I have no inside information. My sense is it is intentionally full of bots, right? Because people are lonely, people want responses, it's clearly.

• 2:25:24Speaker 07

  They want the dopamine.

• 2:25:25Sam Lessin?

  They want the dopamine.

• 2:25:25Speaker 07

  We talked about this Sam as like a new social network.

• 2:25:27Sam Lessin?

  Yeah, so you're like, look, it doesn't you clearly there just aren't mathematically enough humans to fulfill people's need for like validation. So like, sure, throw a bunch of machines in the mix so that people have more validation floating around.

• 2:25:39Speaker 07

  This is why I debate Sam, I just want more billboards.

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I think one one example that is way too easy to like or way too early to make a call is you have.

• 2:25:52Jordi Hays?

  So Seth, you guys are in Tome, which started out as like the ability to like generate. Slides which like people spend a ton of time all day long making slide decks like there's probably billions of dollars spent just producing slide decks in the US for various use cases. They recently sort of pivoted into a space around, you know, automating sales, research and outbound. You can imagine like, you know, like a real test will be can Tome compete with Salesforce? When Salesforce has this sort of just, you know, army of people like jamming comparable products, you know, and actually for, you know, there was some news in the information, I think yesterday.

• 2:26:33Jordi Hays?

  That Salesforce is basically saying if you don't pay for agent force, we're like raising your your your regular, you know, rates on the CRM side like three X.

• 2:26:42Sam Lessin?

  I can already hear the essence, so let's say I fancy his company, but I love Keith, I really respect him, he's a great guy. He used to work with me too, same team, is no way can Tome compete on this, but I'll go even a step further, which is this entire industry of outbound goes away. This is where we're talking about the real displacement of what's going on. So first, I mean, I have several portfolio companies, they're calling saying. You know, we have this thing, we tried this thing in in AI, but now all the platforms are just bundling it and giving it away and we and we can't compete because even if we're better. So like that's happening all at the place and you're like, duh, of course that's going to happen. This is an easy tack on. But then the the step two, which is where the really interesting social displacement comes in, everyone's excited about. Oh, I can use AI to like customize outbound sales or something. You're like.

• 2:27:28Sam Lessin?

  Your inbox is now worthless because once all the sales are customized, you can't tell what's real and what's fake. That entire economy collapses, right? So I'd actually go, the more likely outcome is A, no, Tome can't beat Salesforce. But two, even if they could, that entire emotion goes away because of AI.

• 2:27:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, look, I don't think you need to be beat Salesforce to be very successful and to find a segment of the market that wants a more modern product that, you know, understands your business, has everything in one place, and can actually make your sales seem a lot more effective with a more modern architecture. So I think Tome is going to be successful. Because again, you can think about this hypothetically, or you can talk to customers, especially in different segments, and just see where the pain is. But I, one thing I'll agree with Sam on is I think we're in an outlier business. You have to be very selective. I think people who are overpaying for things that are not durable at like crazy prices, that's not a game that we're playing and not a game that I believe in either.

• 2:28:27Speaker 07

  I think, you know, backing like amazing product builders and technologists, going after either existing markets that need to be totally re-architected using AI, or totally new markets that open up, whether it's like a gaming network, or replacing services in, you know, a very long tail of really large markets. I still think there's like a massive amount of value to be made.

• 2:28:52Sam Lessin?

  I just think that it's such a different, like, I'll give you an example. Like, I think it's, you don't want to back generic Facebook PMs anymore, who know AI and product, right? Because they don't know anything, right? And like, it's just, if anything, the irony is it's all getting, all those things are getting hyper-commoditized in terms of, and AI only commoditizes it faster. It's like, how do you build and what is a product? This stuff doesn't, like, if you told me, and we look at some of this too, you have a truly unique market insight. You understand a market that no one else gets because you've been a specialist for 20 years in it, or whatever. By the way, the tools of building and the patterns have changed so quickly. There's an opportunity building new. Yeah, there's interesting stuff there. We do businesses that are AI quote unquote enabled all the time that fit that pattern.

• 2:29:36Sam Lessin?

  But those people are generally not building quote unquote AI tools. They're just like, it's kind of like saying like, they're not building cloud companies or internet companies. They're just building great companies that happen to leverage technology.

• 2:29:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I agree. There was like an AI conference last week. I'm like, this concept of an AI conference is gonna last like six months. Cause eventually, you know, it's just.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  It's like building an internet business. Everything's computer. Everything, everything's computer. Everything's computer. Everything's computer. We're at 30 minutes. We gotta ring the gong. We gotta wrap it up. So who won the debate, guys? Closing arguments. We'll let the, we'll let the fans decide.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Let the, let the market, I mean. We'll let the bots decide. I'll let the boss decide. It's an economic battle. It's a capital war, capital fight. Whoever deploys more bots to vote wins.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  No, no. Here's the real way we're gonna do it. I will put a, a calendar invite for like five years from now.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Okay. I love that.

• 2:30:34Jordi Hays?

  And we'll just come back, we'll watch the debate and we'll just pause and, and people can take little victory laps. They can talk about companies that.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  I love that. I love that.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Five years from today. Mark your calendars. Uh, I look forward to it. Thank you guys for jumping on. Have fun on the 101.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Enjoy it. Have a great weekend.

• 2:30:52Speaker 07

  Good to see Sam.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should, uh, host the follow-up to that debate at a wander. Go to wander.com, book a wander today. They're also doing a giveaway. Sign up and, uh.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  Wander.com slash TBPN. Uh, you can also use TBPN to get $300 off your first stay. Uh, one thing about wander is the properties are so amazing. They do get booked out.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  Pretty far in advance at times.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  But not five years in advance. So we could definitely get something.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  We can get something in the book.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Home sweet castle. That's what I'm looking for. Inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Check it out. Let's go back to the timeline, wrap up.

• 2:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Uh, we got.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  And that was, and, and just, just to summarize, that was fun.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  Who do you think won?

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I.

• 2:31:46Jordi Hays?

  I do tend to side with Sam. I think Seth has good points. I think Seth's an optimist. He's in the outlier business. You know, the entire model of running a fund like Greylock is if we can back, you know, one, one or two, you know, really impactful companies per fund. They have more AUM, they can, you know, make bigger investments.

• 2:32:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:08Jordi Hays?

  And I think they're, they're in the, the sort of optimism business.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Sam is much more of a pessimist.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  But he has some, he has some real points, right?

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  You know, the Tome company specifically, I brought it up, they, they started, they were very hyped. Sort of AI slides company, didn't find a market for what they were doing. Now they are competing with Salesforce and I can imagine, I mean, anybody in sales is competing with Salesforce. They're an AI assistant for sales.

• 2:32:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's, and it's.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  I mean, it is good to kind of like break down like what it means to be bullish on AI generally, because you could just say, yeah, the AI thing is real and the way I'm expressing that is in a Mag7 ETF and going long hyperscalers. Or it could be, I'm building a lifestyle business as a solo developer, vibe coding, pumping it out on X with videos and making money that way. And so there's always a bull market somewhere, but I think Sam is narrowing it down to, hey, maybe $20 million Series As are particularly fraught right now.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:12John Coogan?

  And I don't know, it's possible. It just, it just depends on if you get in the right business. I still think it's early enough that we could get our WhatsApp, we could get our Uber, and you might see some funds dump $20 million at $200 million post.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  And still get 100x return.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  The big thing is, is it seems like what we now define as AGI is an extending innovation, but it's the sort of looming ASI that all.

• 2:33:36John Coogan?

  Oh, that's the disruptive.

• 2:33:37Jordi Hays?

  The, the real disruptor is ASI, not AGI.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:33:41Jordi Hays?

  As we've sort of currently defining them.

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. My joke with that is that eventually when ASI comes, you say, set up a website or buy me something and it rebuilds Stripe from first person, like all the way. It writes all the code that's ever existed on the internet in, in five seconds and builds you everything.

• 2:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  And, and that would be very disruptive, but I think we're a long way, way from there. Especially on how much it costs to inference these models and how, how rough the vibe coding thing has been amazing, but then we've heard a lot of accounts of people saying, yeah, it'll get you 80% of the way there, 90% of the way there, but there's still a lot of humans in the loop.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Working product.

• 2:34:15John Coogan?

  And maybe we are seeing not acceleration, but deceleration in, in the, the efficacy of these models. But they're still really fun. They're cool. And I want to check out some of those ones that he recommended. I actually did play with Suno last night for the first time.

• 2:34:28Jordi Hays?

  Bedtime song?

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  No, I was trying to make a theme song for TBPN. I was thinking, we need our own, you know, NFL. Do, do, do, do, do.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  No, so what we should do is get a symphony.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  And we stand in the symphony.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  I think we need.

• 2:34:47Jordi Hays?

  And they play it and we, and we just, you know.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  My takeaway was that, yeah, I would love to get a human to do this because

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  The first version that came back, I was like, you know, ESPN style football song intro. And I didn't have lyrics turned off. And so it generated all these funny lyrics, like football game starting now and like all these really ridiculous things. But lots of promise there. And I mean, just the mid journey of music seems fun. I don't know if it'll replace everything, but certainly like a tool in the tool chest for the artist.

• 2:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Overall, I think having a debate, letting people share their opinion and then circling back to it.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Is really the best solution because

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  You can't win a debate like that.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:29Jordi Hays?

  In the moment. It's just vibes right now.

• 2:35:31John Coogan?

  Yes, definitely. And I think keeping it tight and short is key.

• 2:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to the opposite of tight and short. Larry Ellison's longevity, which is unreal. He's been in the game for decades, putting up these numbers. Look at this chart. Oracle Corporation is up 210,000% all time, dating back to the eighties, putting up these numbers for life, for the lifetime of the modern tech industry, while also being the true Brian Johnson. If you are not familiar with how young Larry Ellison looks, he's looking fantastic. When he was born, for context, we were still in World War II. Wow. Fantastic.

• 2:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, Oracle, not mentioned as much as the other magnificent seven companies, the hyperscalers, but clearly doing something right. The stock is up and to the right.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  And so we love Oracle here on the show. Um, big news. This really shook the tech industry to the core. Uh, Jawan over at Ramp got a raise.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  He said, turns out.

• 2:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Hit the size gong for Jawan.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Uh, day one of asking Ramp for a raise. That happened November 13th of last year. Now it's March 13th and he got it done. Based on your accomplishments and results in 2024, we're pleased to provide you with an update to your compensation package. Congrats to Jawan.

• 2:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Big milestone. I mean, nobody, everybody said, oh, this is never gonna work. This is never gonna happen. Possible. Um, but, uh, he did it. He was consistent. He, you know, survived and thrived through controversy and he got the raise.

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  This, this would have been a great debate to have on. We could have had Eric and Kareem come on, debate it.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  With Jawan. No, he's gotta make a presentation.

• 2:37:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. He's live on the show. This is how raises will be done at Ramp in a few years. Uh, anyway. Let's move on to Luke Metro. He's quote tweeting Michael Dempsey. Uh, YC used to feel like a window into understanding the areas progressing from what the smartest people know. Uh, what the smartest people are doing on weekends to VC backed startups. Today it feels like the best window into the current consensus thing. And Luke Metro says, lots of tech feels like this now. Here's my theory. Pre 2020, there were still novel insights in lots of small offline subgroups. VC scout programs existed to capitalize on this, but post COVID, uh, Silicon Valley moved entirely online. Now the time from out group to consensus is miniscule. What's your take?

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  I think this is totally right. It, it feels like YC now is a reflection of what the internet is interested in.

• 2:38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Right? What the sort of community is interested in. And I think that that's fine. Um, it's, it's, if, if ideas are important, we should have a bunch of people attacking them. That's the beauty of the free market.

• 2:38:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I think this is totally on point. Uh, the, the other thing is that you, the companies that are truly. Not like that don't feel relevant at YC or that feel weird are the ones that don't get the hype because they're just tinkering on some weird thing and then six, yeah, flock safety is a good example, right? I'm sure the flock safety batch was just a bunch of sass. So, and Luke also had another good post from today that I'm just got pulled up here. He says, "The real project Europe is VC spending three months in the south of France this summer."

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Wait, were you gonna say that? You had the same idea?

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  I had, we had a similar idea.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Genius, I love it.

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  We had a similar idea.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, yeah, go enjoy Europe. Book now. Book on Wander. Book your trip to Europe. Get out there and spend some time recuperating while the, while you can feel the AGI.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  You can feel the AGI.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  Let the innovation, the acceleration wash over you under the Tuscan sun.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  Albedo has some news. They are launching, I was texting with the founder, we're hopefully gonna have him on early next week. Clarity One will launch as the first commercial satellite to operate in very low earth orbit, beginning with 10 centimeter resolution imagery, previously only possible with aircraft or billion-dollar government satellites. Albedo is redefining what's possible from space. And so, we'll have to have him on. I saw a picture of the fuselage of the Falcon 9 that they're riding on.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  And good luck to them. There's been a few delays, as there always are with these launches, but it's looking good. And so, you can tune into that launch tonight. SpaceX is going back to LEO.

• 2:39:56Jordi Hays?

  What time is it?

• 2:39:57John Coogan?

  I think he said like midnight Pacific time or something. He was also like, "You guys are live, right? Saturday at midnight?"

• 2:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  I was like, "Not yet, but stay tuned."

• 2:40:08Jordi Hays?

  We're getting there. We're working on it.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  Let's move on. Typesfast, Ryan Peterson, founder of Flexport, friend of the show, been on. He is quoting Leonard Bernstein, who says, "Two things are needed to achieve great things: a plan and not quite enough time." Civilization V: When Building the Big Ben Wonder.

• 2:40:28Jordi Hays?

  He's been pulling quotes out of Silver Station 5.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome. A bunch of bangers in there. We had Captain Price.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I've never actually gotten into Civ. I've wanted to, but it's a big investment because I think the time to actually play a full game is more than like a few hours. And so I haven't been able to find the time, but he's spent a lot of time on planes. He's got Starlink locked in. Actually, I think you can play Civ offline. It's not even a multiplayer game necessarily. So good way to spend a few hours in the belly of a 747 ferrying packages around the globe for Flexport. Anyway, should we move on to Augustus Durico?

• 2:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Augustus himself, he says, "Every 20 to 30 year old man I know who is great, or that's aspiring for greatness, seems to get mentally and spiritually obliterated daily. They're not without joy, wisdom, or purpose, but constantly raw." And Sernovich says, "Adult men are not supposed to feel happy. It's abnormal. You should question what you're doing. You should feel the tinge of fear. It means you're pushing yourself. The alternative is sitting around waiting to die like some Muppet." And yeah, I think I put this in the stack just because I think it's important to realize that,

• 2:41:45Jordi Hays?

  you know, optimizing for feeling good all the time will be your downfall. And part of, you know, having a great life is not just not optimize, you know.

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  It's not optimizing for happiness specifically. We talked about this with the Lone Ranger. The goal of a startup is not to be a happy startup. It's to be a successful startup. The goal of a marriage is not to be a happy marriage necessarily. It's to be a successful marriage. And that's a different vector. And happiness is derived from that and adjacent to that, but not the end all be all goal. Because as soon as you start optimizing purely for happiness, you put a lot of the grind to the side.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  Rest on your laurels. Should we go to Nikita? He was talking about vibe coding and where some of these apps are going. "If you've tried following vibe-coded games over the last month and have tried making one yourself, it should be abundantly obvious that we are very close to someone building a creation ecosystem or app store where anyone can be a game developer. And success of the creators within this future ecosystem will be determined by pure merit of their concepts, not technical execution." The only gap that needs to be closed for this ecosystem to exist is abstracting away the remaining pieces that are too complicated for the layman: authentication, server networking, and deployment. Once that's achieved, the only thing left for a creator to do is to dream up their concept and click "publish." And suddenly, we will have millions of people

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  making 3D online games with graphics comparable to N64. I love that.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  We talked to a YC founder who's basically working on this exact problem.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  One of my friends, Kyle Russell, built something like this, I want to say like, five years ago. He was working on it right in 2020. I met him through Andreessen Horowitz. He was like the associate on the deal. And, great guy. He built this company called Playbyte, and it would let you, it gave you a bunch of primitives, and on your phone, in a browser, you could build like a top-down 2D game. And he was just like, maybe a little bit too early with that concept to really get escape velocity, because it was easier than Roblox, but didn't really have the same like viral breakout moment. But you can certainly imagine, like, what the vision of what he was laying down makes a lot of sense in terms of App

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  Store. Of course, Nikita got a lot of pushback here. Everyone said, he said, "Stop saying Roblox. I'm talking about something much more customizable." The thing is that I've seen some Roblox games that are incredibly customizable. I've seen people say like, "We rebuilt Call of Duty in Roblox, and it looks like Call of Duty almost." I don't know if it's fake, but, um, it'll be interesting.

• 2:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, somebody rebuilt the TVPN set in Roblox.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  They did?

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Oh, they showed.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll record a show there.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. In the metaverse. Um, should we go to Bo Nickle? We got some breaking news on UFC.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  We got some breaking news from Bo. Um, Bo has a new fight. It's gonna be on May 3rd. Uh, I'm gonna pull up a supporting article here.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  It's a middleweight bout.

• 2:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Bo is a middleweight. He has been-

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  I assume that has something to do with like, the size of the guys? Is that how it works?

• 2:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. This is the joke. John is obsessed with, uh, professional bodybuilding. I follow UFC closely. Uh, but anyways, so, uh, Bo, uh, friend of the show and listener. He's also an entrepreneur, has his own business. You can check out, um- He started in Dana White's Contender Series, so he got a couple wins in there. And then has gone on a tear. He's 7-0. He's 29, for those that don't know, which is like kind of the prime years, right? He's got a bunch of wins under his belt and now it's time to make a run at the title.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  And they're allowed to punch and kick in this league? Is that how it works?

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  The last, the last time we covered Bo on the show, Bo texted me and he was like, "I'm always amazed with how little John knows." So his, John's knowledge is actually even like going backwards now.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  And the ring, the ring isn't square, right?

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's almost like, it's like an octagon.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  It has more sides. It has eight sides. It's an eight-sided. Okay, I know that. Yeah. Good, learning this stuff. Thanks.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, Bo is one of the top prospects in MMA right now and he's, his next fight is, is against this guy, DeRitter, who was at one championship. He's been a two, two weight class champion over there. So this will be a huge test for Bo, but we are very excited for it. He's been training hard and.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  Good luck to him.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Good luck to him. We'll be watching, hopefully live.

• 2:46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:13Jordi Hays?

  But we'll, we'll see.

• 2:46:15John Coogan?

  Good luck to him. I hope he can go all 25 rounds. Is that how many rounds there are?

• 2:46:20John Coogan?

  I hope he makes it.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Honestly.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  I hope he gets a gold medal, honestly. I really hope he gets a gold medal.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I think, I think he's gonna make short work.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:31Jordi Hays?

  Of DeRitter, but.

• 2:46:33John Coogan?

  Good luck to him.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Good luck. Good luck, Bo.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  Let's go to another friend of the show, David Senra. He shares some sage advice from Peter Thiel. "Superior sales and distribution by itself can create a monopoly even with no product differentiation. The converse is not true." I love that. And it's funny because it's, it's, it's like MBA advice almost, but it's contrarian in the, in the VC context because for so long, there were these, you know, naturally growing, like Facebook, they didn't need to run billboard ads for Facebook because it was the social network and it just grew. But they really did have better distribution because of the network effect and the model.

• 2:47:09Jordi Hays?

  And so an example of this, right? So we were just talking about Salesforce versus some of these upstart sales assistant companies.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:17Jordi Hays?

  Part of Salesforce's monopoly is they have thousands of people that sell Salesforce. And they're going to new, to customers, current and new, and saying, "If you don't..." If you don't buy our AI assistant for sales, we're going to increase the price of the product that you actually want. And for many companies, like it's just the default CRM. And so that by itself is like, they have the distribution, they have, you know, the, the labor force. And yeah, it's going to be very tough for, for a lot of those players to, to get anywhere close to threatening sales forces market cap.

• 2:47:54John Coogan?

  Should we close out with a fantastic private equity story? Boiler Room is apparently private equity back now. Levels IO shares, "The financial story of Boiler Room is interesting." Boiler Room started in 2010 by Blaze Belleville with weekly live broadcasts on YouTube. If you're not familiar, they're DJ sets essentially. Over the years, he raised $12.6 million in VC funding in total. Then in 2021, while Boiler Room was heavily struggling financially, he sold it to Dice FM, an event ticketing startup. Dice had raised more than 200 million in VC funding. Then Dice sold Boiler Room a few months to Superstruct, a festival organizer that owns festivals like Mystery Land, DEF CONs, a bunch of others.

• 2:48:36John Coogan?

  Then last year, Providence Equity, a $35 billion private equity fund, sold Superstruct to KKR, which is a $100 billion private equity fund. So a $100 billion private equity fund now owns Boiler Room. Many articles state Boiler Room's founder Blaze Belleville exited around 2021, but he's still involved in the company. So more likely he received more stock while working at it.

• 2:48:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is just, this is just a beautiful story.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49:00Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, a celebration of, I mean, I hope that they do private equity night at the Boiler Room. We don't go to events like this. We're just not big into that world. But Boiler Room, celebrate, celebrate the shareholders. You know, put, do, do a big party for KKR.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, I want to see the champagne bottles popping and the big KKR sign walking out. So like, when you spend $10,000 on this bottle of, of cheap champagne, just know that you're just sort of like supporting big private equity.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  Driving EBITDA multiples.

• 2:49:31Jordi Hays?

  There's other, there's other, you know, we've said on the show before, there's other fantastic companies owned by private equity, TechCrunch.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  Vale.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  Vale.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  This could be the next Vale.

• 2:49:43Jordi Hays?

  You never know. Yeah, I mean, we made the argument earlier this week that TechCrunch should merge with Veil and just become a ski lifestyle magazine. Ski Lifestyle Magazine. That's the real way. Anyways, it's been a fantastic show. Thanks for tuning in. Go leave us a five star review. Put an ad in it. It helps with discovery and We'll see you on Monday. We hope you have a good weekend. If you, if you're working over the weekend and you're missing TBPN, you can go back. We have some The back catalog's full, folks. We've got many, many, many episodes of this show. And if any of you have listened to every single hour, I would be very impressed. But there's probably an hour in there somewhere that you haven't listened to. So It's okay.

• 2:50:26Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, we will see you on Monday. See you on Monday. Cheers. Bye.