Marc Andreessen on M&A, AI Ads & His Advice for Young VCs, Shopify's Harley Post-Earnings, Google's Genie 3 Potential & More | Marc Andreessen, Harley Finkelstein, Anton Osika, Thomas Dohmke, Alex Jacobson, Nicolas Kopp

(01:41) - Timeline (04:28) - How Serious is Google's Genie 3 Model? (22:42) - The 5-Level Framework for Robotics (40:35) - Cerebras Proves it Can Actually Work (48:36) - Timeline (01:26:53) - Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, software engineer, and venture capitalist. He is best known as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications. Andreessen later co-founded the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which has backed companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Coinbase, and OpenAI. A prominent voice in Silicon Valley, he's known for his essays on technology, including the viral "Software is Eating the World." (02:02:28) - Harley Finkelstein, an entrepreneur and lawyer, is the President of Shopify, a leading global commerce company. In the conversation, he discusses Shopify's strong Q2 performance, highlighting an 87 billion GMV and 2.7 billion in revenue, and emphasizes the benefits of going public, noting that it has enhanced the company's transparency and operational discipline. He also touches on the integration of AI in commerce, introducing tools like catalog search APIs and universal cart features to enhance shopping experiences. (02:33:55) - Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, discusses the platform's rapid growth, achieving $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months with a 15-person team. He highlights Lovable's mission to empower users to transform ideas into production-ready applications swiftly, emphasizing its appeal to both entrepreneurs and larger companies. Osika also touches on the future of web development, suggesting that websites will become more personalized and optimized through advanced algorithms, while acknowledging a countertrend towards minimalistic design. (02:42:50) - Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, has been leading the company since 2021, following his tenure as Chief Product Officer. In the conversation, he discusses GitHub's significant growth, including surpassing 150 million developers and over a billion repositories, the widespread adoption of GitHub Copilot, and the company's commitment to offering developers a choice of AI models to enhance their coding experience. (02:52:14) - Alex Jacobson, co-founder and managing partner of 137 Ventures, discusses the advantages of private companies offering structured liquidity to employees, highlighting SpaceX's model of regular tenders at controlled prices to provide predictable equity value growth. He contrasts this with public markets, where stock prices are more volatile and less predictable, emphasizing that private companies can offer employees greater certainty regarding their equity's future worth. Jacobson also expresses skepticism about initiatives aiming to provide retail investors access to private company shares, noting that such efforts may undermine the benefits of being private, such as controlling shareholder composition and pricing. (03:10:55) - Nicolas Kopp is the founder and CEO of Rillet, an accounting platform for software businesses, and previously served as the U. S. CEO of N26. In the transcript, he announces Rillet's $70 million Series B funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconic, discusses the company's growth and customer base, and highlights Rillet's AI-driven integrations and reporting capabilities that distinguish it from legacy ERP systems. He also emphasizes the importance of human oversight in AI processes and outlines plans to enhance product features and customer success initiatives to meet increasing demand. (03:19:41) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.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://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, August 6, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Portraits of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Jordy, how are you doing? Have you been sleeping okay? You were up late, partying, hanging out with some of the greatest, the greatest capital allocators of a generation. We won't say who you were hanging out with, but give me, give me the redacted read. How did it update your AGI timelines? How did it update your, your worldview, hanging out with some of the, some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley last night?

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  I, I don't really know what I can say on this front. I feel like it was all-

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Well, did it make you more optimistic? Did it make you more pessimistic?

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  It made me extremely-

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Like, is this a top? Is this a local bottom? Or do we have a long way to go? Is there more? Are you more excited about technology? Are you more excited about capitalism?

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  I left extremely bullish-

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  On enterprise SaaS.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  That's fantastic to hear.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Even in the age of AGI.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  I also listened to a friend of mine say that he wanted to drink the blood of his enemy.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Wild guess who that is?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  I wonder who that is. But anyways, it was very, it was very inspirational.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  And I think everybody should have a friend that gets so fired up about winning in their market-

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  That, that they have the sort of bloodlust.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, you know who's fired up about winning in their market? Eric Gliman at Ramp. Go to ramp.com. Time is money saved, both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  That was right.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  I wanted to highlight this post from Nikita Beer, who said, "Getting the algo just right." And he shares a beautiful photo of the Vibealiner himself, the Tetramaton host.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  All these AI researchers talking about fine tuning.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  We care about fine tuning the, the X algorithm.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  I think people, I think people haven't noticed how good it's been because you only notice when it's bad. I feel like the X algo has been incredible lately. What have you been thinking? Have you been satisfied?

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  I think it's good. I think it's good, but we.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Oh, Tyler's got Tyler's got something to say.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Hot takes. We train.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Okay, Tyler, sorry, and then we'll go to Tyler.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  So for us.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  We constantly are sending our favorite post to each other.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  And so we're just like manually training.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Crazy reward signal.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  To, to, to show us more of what we like.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Also.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Very good at that.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  I've noticed that like, I really like retweeting stuff. If I just see, if I see any post I like, I'll like it. But if I see any post that I think, oh, that's my friend. And they're just trying to like, mention something, even if I don't think it's the most incredible hilarious post. I'll repost it just to amplify it. Cause just cause I'm like, yeah, yeah, show some love.

• 2:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  So I've been more liberal with the like button, more liberal with the retweet button or the repost button. And I think that's also amplified the algo. So I feel like my algo is dialed, but Tyler, what do you think?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  I feel like I'm getting like massive amounts of normie slop.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Dude.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Are you engaging with normie slop?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  No, I, I always press.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  I always press not interested.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Not beating the allegations. You know that these algorithms are reflections of yourself. You just, you just toll on yourself. Normie, normie, normie, normie.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Judd, Judd.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  What, what is an example of a normie post? Like, are we talking thread boy stuff? Are we talking like thread boy tier? Like, here's how to start your first company or like, here's the secret.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  No, like, just like not anything that has to do with technology or business. I never engage. It's like about like some like dating thing or.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Well.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I swear I don't engage. I always, I negatively engage. I say, I'm not interested.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  You say not interested.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  I say, I mute this account.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  And they just feed me more and more stuff.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Feed you more and more.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  It's just cause it'll be like a hundred thousand likes on some random.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Tweet. It's like.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  I am getting, I am getting some of that.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I try to not give it any of my attention. So I try to move past quickly. I don't want the algorithm to, I don't want to send the signal that I want more of it, but it's tough.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I don't know. Maybe it's a skill issue. Maybe it's just Nikita Beer working his magic in the algo. But thank you for your service, Nikita. We know it's a hard fight getting the algo just right. And I think, I personally think you've been doing a great job. So, thank you. And you know who else has been doing a great job? Restream, one livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Go to Restream to get started.

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Show wouldn't be possible without them.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  It truly would not be possible without, without it. We talked about Genie 3 yesterday. I wanted to noodle on it more. So, Genie 3, if you're not familiar, is a new frontier world model from Google. And we played around it with a little, a little bit yesterday. We saw some demo videos. We, we don't have access, right, Tyler?

• 4:43Speaker 02

  No, like no one has access. Just like engineers.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, this is at what, like, this is Bard tier software? We never got access to Bard? And then Gemini was the consumer application?

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:54John Coogan?

  And then there was Palm 2. Palm was their big, multi-billion parameter, large language model that Google did not release to the public, but they started writing papers about. And even the transformer paper, that was just an architecture. There was no product associated with it. It wasn't until, what, February or March of 2023 that Google came out with their first consumer chatbot for public consumption, correct?

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's mainly, there's probably a bunch of like, safety stuff they gotta figure out. Especially Google, they're pretty safe about that kind of stuff.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  That's a good, that's a good point. That's what I want to debate today. So, interestingly, Google creates the transformer. They create Palm, they create Bard, they have all of these incredible AI researchers. DeepMind's fantastic research lab. They, they, they're scaling up large language models, transformer-based large language models. They are on the correct path in the tech tree. And yet, they don't release the consumer product fast enough. ChatGPT releases in, I believe, November, May, I think it was, I think it was November 30th of 2022, maybe December 1st. So you can think about it at the beginning of December 2022. Google takes three months to respond. They respond with a product that's pretty close.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  And yet, consumer adoption is power law distributed and ChatGPT has been the runaway success in consumer. And so, the lesson there is you gotta be first. If you have the technology, you got to get it out in the public, even if it's messy. And, I mean, maybe this is apocryphal, maybe this is like the wrong way to frame it, but like, there is a, there is a story out there that people are telling in the media, in books, that basically says Sam Altman got fired because he launched ChatGPT. Right? They say, the board, he didn't go to the board, he didn't go to the board and say, hey, we, I want to launch ChatGPT. He didn't tell the board he was launching.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  I want to make a consumer SaaS product.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to make the next consumer internet company. I want to make something that makes a tri- a billion dollars a month. Is that okay, guys?

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  I want to launch an app.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  I want to launch an app. Is that okay? Is that okay? That's basically, that's basically what they did.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna fire me, right?

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, not a fan of the board here. But, the, the, the interesting point is that, is that that move fast, break things mentality, like, when ChatGPT launched, people forget how bad the first version was, because, I mean, it was amazing, it passed the Turing test, but it was built on ChatGPT, or it was built on GPT 3.5 002 Da Vinci, right? And so, the, the model was hallucinating constantly, it would, it had no access to tools, it had this crazy knowledge cutoff, so you couldn't ask it anything about the last six months, or the, or what's going on today. It was, it was like, pretty useless, it was magical, and it was useful for some things,

• 7:45John Coogan?

  but for like, 99% of prompts that we hit ChatGPT with today, they would completely flop on the V1 of ChatGPT.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I remember when it launched, there had been a bunch of companies that had been building on GPT, doing like text generation for different use cases. There were a number of companies that were generating text for marketing assets, or emails, and things like that, or essays. And those companies had absolutely ripped. They had insane revenue ramps. And when ChatGPT launched, there were still some people that thought, oh, you're still going to be able to build a business here around just like generating generating text for like niche use cases.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  And then like a month or two, and it was very clear that like all those companies had gone ramped and then like basically, you know, right back to where they started.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Totally. I mean, I talked to a YouTuber at the time, someone with like, I think many millions of followers in the in the true crime horror genre and his whole, his whole channel was like designed around finding an interesting case or, you know, crime and then telling the story.

• 8:50Jordi Hays?

  An interesting crime.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's a true crime podcast. We saw Odd Lots, like true crime podcasts are the number one and the number two biggest podcasts in the world right now, above Joe Rogan, at least in the charts. And so the like true crime, it's all about storytelling. It's all about just writing, getting the facts together, assembling them into a script that makes sense on YouTube. This guy, he's not, he's not like the, the most insane writer. He's just like somebody who figured out how to write for YouTube and do the video production. And he has a good voice for it. He's a great voice for it, actually. And he has good lighting and he does all this, all this great stuff to make the stuff work really well. He's good with thumbnails and, and titles. And so he'd grown to the point where he could just put up a million view video like every day. And he was like, I'm going

• 9:35John Coogan?

  to use ChatGPT to write all my scripts. And he did that for like a week. And then he just completely quit doing YouTube videos entirely and switched to a, switched to an interview show. This is the guy who interviewed Andrew Tate. He interviewed a bunch of people, but there's one, there's a couple like super viral, like clips of like hustlepreneurs that he's the other guy interviewing them. He's the reason that he, that like this clip exists on the internet. He's a really nice guy. But it was just funny because he went like so hard into this and the product wasn't there yet. And now maybe it is, but still people, people still can tell the flavor of, of text written from GPT four point five

• 10:18John Coogan?

  even. And but at the same time, the actual use case was

• 10:24John Coogan?

  Information retrieval, transformation of information, translation, all the things that we use ChatGPT for, for thirty minutes a day. I'm not telling it, write me a novel. I want to read a great novel. But I am saying, you know, give me, pull all this data from the internet and from all your resources and put it together in a table, teach me this thing. It's super helpful for knowledge retrieval. And when you look at Fiji Simo's, five things that ChatGPT is going to focus on, like, writing new books was not one of them. And I think that's by design, because that's not where the models excel. We're in this age of spiky intelligence. And so, you want to do, you want to let the models cook on what they're good at. And they're good at knowledge retrieval, and they're good at, hey, my knee hurts, here's some symptoms, let's go look up, it's another

• 11:08John Coogan?

  knowledge retrieval task. And they're also good at just chatting back and forth, having a conversation, and that's a therapy angle.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  But, my question is, Genie 3, Google is clearly at the very front of this, from a research perspective.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  And, so, it's super high fidelity, it looks HD, it's rendering at twenty to twenty-four frames per second, you can prompt it, it seems super fun. There's this world memory, they've clearly gotten a number of fundamental improvements. Like, you know, you, you, you watch what has happened in the LLM world with adding reinforcement learning, adding memory, adding tool use, and, and a web browser, and a Python REPL, and a bunch of other tools that have made it great. Clearly, in this Genie 3 model, there's a bunch of those tools, like, you know, they figured out how to do memory. It's probably not just one simple algorithm, it's a bunch of things working together. They're, they're crushing it. DeepMind is doing what they do best. They've done the research, and they've created something awesome. The question is...

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  What are they gonna do with it?

• 12:07John Coogan?

  They can't get in the ChatGPT world again. They can't let another lab do the same research, and then productize it first, and then be playing catch-up. So, three months is, is enough to lose the race in the chat world?

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think one, one question I have is, is this the kind of tool that's, that's sort of like a Google Earth, that I remember as a kid discovering Google Earth, and realizing that you could just explore the real world from your computer, and it was this like magical experience. And I definitely spent a bunch of time just like going around, bopping around different places, being like, I'm gonna drop into this continent, I'm gonna drop into this city. And that was really cool. I think the question with Genie 3 is like, is this something that people are just gonna be? You know prompting themselves, generating worlds. Is this the kind of thing that video games will adapt and build on top of? Is it more of a developer focused product?

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Unclear so far. We should probably have Logan on the show to break it down.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  I'd love to.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Because I think there's a lot of people, game developers specifically, that would look at this and realize just the incredible potential of this. If you can, you can integrate some type of game engine into this and rules.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Our people are gonna be doing design in this.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine? I mean, it's an interesting thing. When you think of like first person shooter games, when I think of my memories playing those games, there's like a few key maps and a few key games that were just like iconic.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  And like people loved playing in those maps. And I think the interesting thing is when you have infinite optionality, you can imagine a world in the future where Call of Duty lets you just prompt battlefields, prompt, you know, different kind of arenas, settings for, for different gameplay. But it'll be interesting if people still gravitate towards certain maps, just because it's fun to have consistency with certain games.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Completely agree. There will definitely be a power law. And the only way to actually realize that power law and find out what's at the long tail of that power law is to get it in the hands of millions of people.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  And that's the same thing that happened with ChatGPT. And so beautiful website, by the way. I wonder if they designed it in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. So my, my point is, is that I, I agree with everything you're saying. Is this going to be just like this meditative hangout space? Will it be something that people put on in the background and then they're studying? Or will they be, you know, maybe people will be using this as a development tool to then go and hard code a new video game? Or they'll use it as an exploration canvas in the same way that people use, you know, a lot of people use generative imagery as I was listening to a, a talk about this where someone was

• 14:50John Coogan?

  like, like, if you're an artist, you probably can't just.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Just turn in a final, turn in a prompt as your final work. But you're going to be on Behance and you're gonna be on, there's a bunch of these services that like.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Mid-Journey now.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're gonna be on, before you would like scroll Instagram for references.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  And you would put that into a mood board and you'd be like, okay, this is the brand that we're going for. Now we're gonna create our own and it's not gonna be derivative of any one thing. Like if you look at like, I don't know if we, I don't know if we ever actually did a mood board for TVPN, but you could imagine there's like, you know, there's the, there's the hardwood aesthetic, the mahogany, the official wood of business.

• 15:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Then there's some racing livery, there's the green that you really liked, that you were like, let's do green. And that was great. And then there's, you know, a little bit of sci-fi, there's a gong for some reason. You mix all these up and all of a sudden, it's not just, we're not just doing a racing team shtick. It's like racing team plus gong plus hardwood, plus all these different things, suits. And you add all that up and you get something new. And people used to do that just by pulling imagery on Pinterest and Instagram and Behance. Um, and Arena was one of them, I think. Uh, and, and now people use generative art to do that. And you could see that happening there. But the main thing is that like, there's zero chance that we figure that out in the lab. I think you can only figure it out by actually getting it into the consumer's hands.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  And being very responsive to it. But yes, there are safety concerns, but this is a game where the, the, the, the most risk-taking person, the most founder mode company wins. And that's exactly what happened at Chet.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  The two, two use cases for Genie that I'm, that I'm interested, uh, like I would be interested in playing around with. One is like a voice prompting functionality where you can just be sitting with the screen and just be live prompting.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Like no hands on the keyboard.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  No hands on the keyboard. You're just sitting there and you're saying, a dolphin just skateboarded by.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna skateboard by, right? Uh, then you're like, oh, it's like, uh, and there's a LaFerrari.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  That has wings.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  And it's like taking off into the sky, right? So you're just like giving people the ability to like have this almost like lucid dream effectively.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, and then, uh, what was the other thing I was thinking?

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Blank King Tyler, did you have a thought?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think obviously it's like super cool as a consumer use case, like I want to play with it. But I mean, I think you could definitely make the case that the main value of this is it being used as training data for like robotics. Like if you train a humanoid robot off this, that's like, everyone says like the main issue, like, why don't we have humanoids yet? Because it's a data problem. We don't have like insane videos of first person like doing every single task, right?

• 17:35John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about it, but you'd think that you'd be able to generate endless procedural worlds with just traditional game development pipelines on Real Engine, Houdini, you can define, you know, endless corridors. Like, there's that game No Man's Sky. Have you heard of that? It's like every single planet you go to is procedurally generated. There's an unlimited canvas. And so you'd think you'd be able to walk around with that and then just do some style transfer on top of it to get to something that is trainable, but maybe this is better. I don't know. We need to talk to some robotics people to see if this is actually like a major breakthrough.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when we've talked to, we talked with the team from Physical Intelligence and they said they have effectively, they're like generating a bunch of live real world data. The question is how valuable is this synthetic data?

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Waymo, Tesla and Cruise all had very serious simulation teams that were developing, they would, they would go and map the world, take all the pictures, reconstitute that into essentially a video game, and then the cars could virtually drive around. And then they, they did have the trouble of like, they kind of needed hallucinations. Because the first time that like, it wasn't just like a dog running out and thing, but like what, what happens? How much did train data is there on like a cow going in the middle of the road? Like, that happens like one in 100 billion vehicle miles traveled. So you could have like petabytes of, of data of cars mapping the road.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  And maybe the big Tesla data set has like one image of it, and so you can train on it. But in a simulation, you're going to get a lot more crazy hallucinations and then that might be valuable. I guess my point Tyler is that like you're describing like the B to B use case. And, and I think that there might be a A consumer use case.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Here's the consumer use case.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  And the consumer use case will be more monopolistic. So, so yes, like OpenAI and Anthropic are duking it out in B two B, right? And, and it looks like that will be a lot less, lot less winner take all than chat. Like consumer chat, like the, the interface, the, the new consumer company with all the aggregation that ChatGPT has is going to be incredibly valuable. And then all the hyperscalers will have a frontier model that they can sell at, you know, somewhat competitive rates and they'll make a lot of money and they'll do great. And it's a big new market. So that could, that, that could happen here. Thing is that if they, if they, if they start selling this to robotics training companies, what's stopping someone else from training a similar model and then selling it to another robotics company?

• 20:11John Coogan?

  It becomes more oligopolistic, I would think.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, isn't it like, okay, if you're super AGI pilled, then.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  As you are.

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Then like consumer doesn't matter as much because they're not doing as like economically valuable things as a, like as B two B would, right?

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  So in that case, then B two B is like way more important, even if it's not like as monopolistic.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, so much of the economy is raw consumption. It's the will of the American.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Does, does consumer matter in an AGI world?

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  So here's the, the other use case I was thinking. I think it'd be cool if you could upload some images and some video and like recreate a scene that you're in. So think about like, uh, uh, your oldest, like first birthday. If you could take like three images from, from that, like, you know, celebration, like cutting the cake or whatever, and just like drop it into Genie and just like recreate the scene and be able to just like witness it again.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  And in like virtual reality, that would be an absolutely wild experience. And I think a lot of people would, would do that when, you know, you know, just reminiscing on.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  And that feels entertaining and important, whether or not I have a job. Like if the robots take all the jobs in this ASI future, I still want something to do with my time, right? So like, why not go hang out in Genie three? Tyler?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  That's like pretty blackpilling, right?

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Why?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Just like wireheading all the time if everyone lives in the simulation?

• 21:36John Coogan?

  You don't need to be wireheading. You can just, you can just watch a movie. Like, is that wireheading? You know, you have more free time. You can, you can, you can watch Dunkirk. Geordi's gonna have the best time in the Singularity. He's gonna be like, "I've never seen a single movie."

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  I have so many movies to watch.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  And I'm gonna be like, "I need generative slop. I've seen everything." And Geordi's gonna be like-

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've just been building up an incredible backlog.

• 21:58John Coogan?

  Incredible backlog.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Almost a 30-year backlog at this point.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  It's gonna be amazing. You have, you have a decade worth of films to watch and enjoy and discuss. It's gonna be a fantastic post-Singularity, uh, life for Geordi. Well, until we hit the Singularity, you're gonna need to stay compliant. You're gonna need to get on Banta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Banta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. So, speaking of robotics, Tyler, I want to talk about the, the five levels of robotic autonomy from semi-analysis. This article dropped when we were in New York last week. We didn't get a chance to cover it, but I thought it was pretty interesting because

• 22:42John Coogan?

  just like with autonomous cars, they're, uh, like, we had the five levels of autonomous cars. Like, level zero is basically no autonomy. It's your Carrera GT, fully, full driver engagement, no, no-

• 23:00Speaker 02

  What is it, uh-

• 23:02John Coogan?

  No traction control. Is that, is that levels, level one autonomy? No. Uh, level one was like cruise control, basically, lane keep assist, the basic stuff. Uh, level two was it, it does lane centering and adaptive cruise control. So, it will, it will, it'll brake if a car's slowing down in front of you. It'll speed up, um, but you have to be very engaged and you have to be prepared to take over at any time. Level three is, is the car is basically driving itself fully, stops at stoplights, does everything, but it can tell you, "Hey, you gotta get back in the driver's seat." Uh, and then level four is, is the, the human doesn't need to be involved at all. And level five, I think, like, no steering wheel, something along those lines. Um, but there was always this question, um-

• 23:45John Coogan?

  You know, the humanoid robotics discussion has become really, really focused on like level five, the most insane, where AGI pill, it's going to be humanoids that can do everything. They can do plumbing, they can move perfectly, but clearly there's going to be a rollout here. And so semi-analysis did a great job of kind of breaking down like where we are, because there's actually a continuum of robotic capabilities, and you'll see some of those in that image. So level zero is scripted motion, this is high accuracy, high repeatability, but this unlocks 24/7 automation and high throughput. So this is when you see the car factory with the robotic arm that just moves the windshield, picks it up, puts it on the

• 24:28John Coogan?

  car, moves the windshield, puts it back. Like, that is perfectly scripted in a computer simulation, like the keyframed animation essentially, does the same thing every time. There are no cameras on that robot whatsoever. And so if you are next to it, and it decides to go like this, it will hit you and it might kill you. So you have to be very careful.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot there.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  So there's typically like fencing around these, and they have these... Have you ever been to Hadrian and seen the light curtain? Have you seen this thing?

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  So the light curtain is a bunch of lasers, and if you break the beam, it will immediately trigger, stop everything on the line. So it just knows if you go.

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Don't kill the humans.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. But there's no cameras involved, there's no machine learning, it's purely just a big powerful, you know, arm that is scripted to do exactly what it can. But that's extremely useful, and we use tons of these, and these robots have been around for, you know, decades at this point, and they're definitely out there. They're expensive, and you need constant oversight. And interestingly, even though they do, in theory, enable 24/7 automation, they often don't run 24/7 because they need a person managing them all the time. And so, like, there are tons and tons of facilities that actually just straight up shut down the robots when they go to lunch, which is kind of crazy, but that's just the nature of these things, they're so precise. And then we've talked to other folks about,

• 25:52John Coogan?

  like, you gotta change out the motors, change out the grease, you gotta put the oil can in the joints, basically.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the big, you know, we've talked to a few people around trying to get a sense for where humanoids will be valuable and people that run factories with traditional robots, you know, these sort of the arms that you're describing, talk about just how often they're having to replace parts and motors. And when you have a humanoid, you're like adding, you're basically like multiplying the number of motors that need to be functioning properly in order for the robot to be like online and productive. And that's just going to be one of the challenges that anybody building humanoids is going to have to deal with.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Techno Chief 2000 in the chat says, "Good morning, brothers. Good morning, Techno Chief. I hope you're on Graphite code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster." Now, back to the semi-analysis breakdown.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  That's a new transition.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Level one is intelligent pick and place. And this is important because this is also something that we've had. So you put, you put motors on a gantry, X and Y axis, and then you put a little grabber, it can be anything from like a suction cup to a little like actuator. And all of a sudden, if you just say, "There is the Diet Coke, move this over, pick it up." It's like the claw game, you know, the claw game at the carnival. So you put a camera, some object detection, and then you map that. And this is like very basic OpenCV, computer vision, very, I mean, it's amazing, it's a miracle, but it's still like, it's very doable at this point. There's plenty of like open source packages. There's a bunch of companies that have done this. And it's important to, to define this as like, this counts as level

• 27:26John Coogan?

  one autonomy. There is machine learning in the process. There is computer vision at work. And because of that, this is a tool that can be used and has benefits and costs.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  But is it end to end?

• 27:35John Coogan?

  I mean, it doesn't matter. But, but sometimes it can be, sometimes it isn't. But the, I think the more important thing that you're getting to is that there are a lot of people out there who are showing humanoid robotic demos doing things. And they're saying, "Hey, we have a level four, fully autonomous humanoid robot. It can do anything." And they show it doing a level one task. And it's like, like, I remember seeing some, some demo of, of a humanoid robot just taking parts from one place and putting them to the other side. And it's like, well, for that, you just need a robotic arm with scripted motion. You need level zero autonomy, actually. Like, you haven't, like, you're not demoing it in the way that, that would actually necessitate that. And so even if you did it, and even if you are successful,

• 28:19John Coogan?

  it's a waste of money. Because you'd be better off using a simpler robot for that. And the analogy here is that Like L L Ms are clearly incredible to the point where I believe the OpenAI IMO model was purely text based, like it didn't have access to Python, it didn't have tools, right? And so, but at the same time, no one cares, like, like, why not give an L L M tools? Like, obviously, ChatGPT is better when it has a browser, when it has a Python REPL, when it has, you know, access to a database, when it has just things that it can actually look up a calculator, like, it should, there's no reason to artificially constrain it just because, like, oh, that's, that's more impressive from an AI research

• 29:02John Coogan?

  perspective. And so, in the same way, a humanoid robot should also have access to a standard robotic arm if it needs to, and the, and like, you should, if you're running a factory, you should say, hey, for this task, we don't want to use the humanoid robot.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  In the near term, John?

• 29:15John Coogan?

  We want to use conveyor belt.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Potential job opportunity for humanoid robots to just turn the, the regular robot arm on and off, just be the guy that presses the button.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  You're joking, but it's real. It's 100% real. Just like, just like, you know, the L L M could try and memorize everything on the web. That was the first version of ChatGPT, didn't have access to a web browser.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Now, if I ask it, you know, how many, how many, you know, how many, how much sodium in a can of Diet Coke, it probably has that memorized, but also it can just Google it and look at the results. Well, maybe not Google it. Maybe Google it. We don't know. We don't know how they use it.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  We don't know. We don't know.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  I don't think they're Googling it. I think Google does not allow other people to use like Google searches in API, but who knows? Big question.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  You might never know.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  I can use Google. I can use ChatGPT. Why can't I tell ChatGPT to use Google? Yeah. Open up Google.com ChatGPT. ChatGPT agent. Go to Google.com, download, hit, query Gemini for me.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Search this for me.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Search this for me.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  And so there are there are other levels and I think these other levels from two to four are going to become increasingly more important because these are the ones that are more on the frontier and they're more and they require more and more AI, more and more, you know, and and machine learning. So level two is autonomous mobility, scene understanding, higher order planning, long horizon reasoning, agile movement capabilities or open world navigation and traversal. So these are like the Boston Dynamics robots. So when you have that like Boston Dynamics dog that runs around, that dog is very useful

• 31:01John Coogan?

  for, let me see, so number two is autonomous mobility, robots that can understand the open world, navigate and traverse various terrains. And so early production phases for inspection and data collection roles, you send a drone out somewhere, construction sites, oil and gas refineries, critical infrastructure. The the default example is like you got the nuclear power plant and you want the robot dog to run around and take images of everything. But there's a bunch of different places and there are a bunch of different companies that essentially offer level two autonomously mobile robots now. And it's real. It's like it's a real thing. It's just a narrow use case. They can't do everything. But if you want to send the dog out on patrol, you can. And and

• 31:46John Coogan?

  of course, occasionally you'll want a humanoid, not a dog for certain things. But this is not, it can't do everything, but it can get over rough terrain, it can climb stairs, it can do things that aren't pre programmed, where it has to understand, okay, there's a stair coming, I gotta move my paws.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  There's a Chinese company that's been showing off a robot that can crawl, swim, and fly. They're gonna just like walk, it can walk around like it's like a spider, and then it can jump into the water and swim through the water, like actually go under and then come up to the surface and actually take off into the air. So.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Can it do sales tax or does it need to use numeralhq.com?

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  It will have to use numeral.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we'll tell the robot, put your sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com. So that's level two autonomous mobility, the robot dog. Level three is low skill manipulation. These are getting more humanoid like robots that can perform basic, non-critical, low skill tasks. The unlock here is generalizable manipulation, advanced pick and place as capability and mobile manipulation. So you want a robot to go and pick up a box and move it across. It's not a defined zone where the pick and place robot is going to sit. You can kind of set it up anywhere, give it some basic rules, but you're still going to be, you know,

• 33:05John Coogan?

  somewhat piloting it, giving it general, uh, general like, uh, you know, um, overview of what it needs to be doing. And so this is actually already deployed in some pilot stages in kitchens, laundromats, manufacturing and logistics. And these are like bipedal humanoid robots. Now they don't have five fingers, five toes. They don't look perfectly human, but they can actually carry boxes.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  And a big thing is even a remotely operated humanoid that had the ability, that had fingers that could do traditional, you know, activities that were more complicated.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Even a remotely operated humanoid could be completely valuable, right? Because you could have, you could have somebody somewhere else say like, pick up every single leaf, leaf in my backyard and put it in the green bin. And there's, and there's like probably, there's like a bunch of like, uh, bunch of use cases you can think of. I mean, the big debate is around, um, uh, what is the level of human involvement in Waymos, right? That, uh, allegedly, uh, there's, there's at least one person kind of overseeing every active Waymo remotely.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  I think that number is blended across the entire org. So like at a given time, there's probably like one human looking at a screen with four Waymo viewpoints on it. And they can kind of jump back and forth, but then there are other people like monitoring the network and checking on the tires.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  I guess my, my point is that, is that, uh, like having somebody remotely observe the activity of a robot. While we're trying to get to the point of full autonomy is totally worthwhile and is what people should expect, right?

• 34:48John Coogan?

  This, yeah, this should be pretty searchable. Uh, Tyler, can you look up? The number of employees at Waymo and then the number of Waymos on the road and get the ratio there because the real test of robotic leverage should be more vehicles on the road than employees at the company, but it seems like it might be.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Okay, so there's 2,500 employees around and there's only 1,500 Waymos.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that's the number that we're that we're hearing. When people say like 1.4, 1.5, I think that's it.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry, these could easily be contractors that aren't technically employees that are hired to work around the clock for every single, you know, active Waymo, so.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  But still, you would expect, I mean, the bottom line is that, is that.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  It's still a massive step up from not having somebody that's just sitting in the vehicle observing it real time.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but e- even if we assume that there are zero contractors in there, like the job displacement narrative, at least at this moment in time, is completely debunked because, because we put up 1,500 taxis on the road and it took 2,500 people to do that. Right? Like now, the, obviously, the technological vision is that you'll have 2,000 employees, 200,000, yeah, yeah. Just like, you know, you don't need, you don't need, just like you used to have, you know, one paper boy delivering a newspaper to every city block. Now you have, you know, a number of engineers that serve, you know, social networks and they just kind of go out and they're distributed across the internet. So, but, but that is

• 36:27John Coogan?

  an interesting, that is an interesting benchmark and, and, and something that should be, like the ratio of, of vehicles on the road for Waymo to employees at Waymo is an interesting stat to follow, even, but the, I agree that the contractor thing is, is, is important. Anyway, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned by ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Profound is our latest sponsor and we're very happy to tell you about Profound today.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  Get on it. If you're running a business or a fund or anything like it, you should probably know how people are understanding your business through LLMs. Profound makes it super easy.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  So, the last, the last level of robotic autonomy. Level four, force-dependent tasks. These are things that must be done very precisely. Robots can perform delicate tasks at this level that require force and weight understanding, i.e. binding a phone in a pocket. Sounds easy, very difficult if you're a robot.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't sound that easy. I think everybody here is experienced.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you actually drop your phone a bunch. It's pretty, it's one of the harder things you do. Driving a screw in on the correct threads. So this is purely in the research phase. The capability is that this will unlock her delicate, force-dependent tasks, fine-grained manipulation, and this is purely in the research. So there are different, and one of the examples that they give is like, place the soft bread on a plate. So you could imagine that being valuable in the kitchen context, but if you're just like, the robot's just crushing the bread every time, that's not gonna work.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Trying to pass steak to your friend that are sitting in a different part of the plane.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  That requires, that's a force-dependent task.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Definitely, because you might get tackled by the flight attendant.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  And when the flight attendant comes up to you, you have to put your hand on their chest, not fully threateningly, so that you get on the no-fly list, just gently.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  So they don't.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  But you want to touch them. You want to place your hand on their chest, just a little bit, just to let them know, this could go one of two ways.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Probably shoulder.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably shoulder's more respectful. But you want, you want to let them know

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  Don't get in my face.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  That you're ready to die.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  I took custody of that steak.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This is happening one way or the other. This can go down one of two ways, but you don't want to actually cross the threshold. So, you know, if you're passing, if you're passing steak to your buddies in economy, don't use a level three robot.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  And have a tough time.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Because the robot will just shove right through them. Other examples include unstacking single plastic cups from a stack. Any fraternity member should be familiar with that, but the robot is still working. So there's still full employment for the solo cup distributor.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Out there saying, I'd love to see a robot, a robot, unstack solo cups.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  It's a beer pong, yeah. Robots, you know, not gonna be able to set up a beer pong for a while, but they're researching it right now. Place an egg in a pot, place a bag of chips on a plate, twist and lift a bottle cap, literally like open a bottle of medicine. Actually, one of the more useful things that a robot can do.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  Very hard for children.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Very hard for children.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  They're working, they're working on it, but.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. What's the arc AGI of, of, of robotic tasks? That, that's what we need. Maybe it's taking the phone out of the pocket, something that anyone can do, even a child, but, but it'll be the last task solved by a humanoid robot.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  But I mean, you can imagine like twisting a bottle cap is actually, you know, we, we have an aging population. We need more help in the, in the elder care market in, in hospitals and, and nursing contexts. And if you have a robot that can, that can dispense medicine effectively, you can imagine that that being very valuable. But right now that would require like an entire rebuild of the way we distribute medicine because we distribute it in child safe and also robot safe bottles.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  So, anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. All of these companies that are going to develop level four force dependent task robots, they're going to need to be on Linear.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  It probably already are.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  The system for modern software development. It allows you to streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So, moving on to the next story, there's a lot going on.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  What do we got?

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Well, the big thing, we should talk about Cerberus because this was a company that was kind of dogged for a while. Are you familiar with this company?

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  So Cerberus makes a wafer scale GPU, wafer scale chip. When semiconductors are made, you go and you want an Apple, you know, Apple silicon chip or an Nvidia GPU. There is a wafer that is grown of silicon and then the wafer is etched with all the different transistors on there. The three nanometer, the four nanometer, the six nanometer transistors are put onto the chip. And then the chip is, the wafer is sliced up into individual chips. And the benefit of that is that if one of the chips is bad, one of the transistors is off, that chip's not working, you can dump that one and the rest are going to be fine. But with wafer scale computing, with wafer scale chip manufacturing,

• 41:34John Coogan?

  if there's even one defect anywhere on that wafer, you gotta throw the whole thing out. See ya. So everyone was very worried that the yields would never get high enough. And they were saying, Cerebras, also there's other trade offs with when you're at wafer scale with memory and inference. But what we've heard and what Andrew Feldman, the CEO, is saying is that a lot of the crazy bets that they placed, they're paying off and it's working very well. So Andrew Feldman says, in 2016, Sam Altman and Andrew met. OpenAI was a vision, Cerebras Systems was a PowerPoint. Sam and the OpenAI founders became one of the early investors in Cerebras Systems. Good to see Sam getting a markup. He needs it. He needed that. He really needed that.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  That badly, badly. In the following years, the Cerebras and OpenAI frequently met, the teams frequently met to explore working together, but the timing was too early. Large language models hadn't been invented yet. This is what being early looks like. Truly. Like developing a foundational technology. That's dependent on another foundational technology that doesn't exist yet. Yeah, insane. Today, the story comes full circle. OpenAI just released its most powerful open weight reasoning model, and it runs fastest on Cerebras Systems, not a little bit faster than the competition. It smokes the competition. Running on our third generation wafer scale engine, GPT-OS S120B,

• 43:02John Coogan?

  runs at up to 3,000 tokens per second, the fastest speed achieved by an OpenAI model in production. Reasoning that takes minutes on Nvidia GPUs can take a single second on Cerebras Systems. Good things take time. Congratulations to the Cerebras team, an overnight success. Been in the trenches for a while. But I think this is interesting. We've talked to some folks who have started using Cerebras to speed up inference for specific use cases within larger AI systems. I think that's very interesting. And I think that we are, like, it's very easy to collapse the narrative of AI into, you know, there's going to be one single technology, one single path, one single implementation.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  But as we're seeing with the development of the new. GPT models and the new OpenAI ChatGPT functionality. It's like you squeeze out performance in a bunch of different ways. You give it a browser, you give it reasoning, you give it, you know, a Python REPL. You give it the ability to write code and like you add all that up and you get something great. And it's the same thing on the inference side. Sometimes you want to do things on device. Apple's, you know, kind of steering towards doing that with Apple Intelligence. Sometimes you want to do it on a really big cluster of Nvidia H100s or big GPU cluster. And sometimes you need to just run something extremely fast and that's what Cerebras is powering.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  So I'm interested to understand what 3000 tokens a second unlocks. Yeah, because I was thinking about it in the context of that that famous Amazon.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, an example being like right now, if you want to use, like if I open up ChatGPT and I want to use it as functionally like knowledge retrieval, Google search, then doing 4O and just getting something like relatively instantly makes sense. And then, but I know I would get a better result with O3 Pro. And but if you're using using O3 Pro for like raw knowledge retrieval in terms of like, I want to understand this fact or this person is just not a great experience, right? Because I don't want to figure it out in like a few minutes. I want to figure it out now, right? And so theoretically, you could get to the point where you could get O3 Pro quality answers relatively instantly.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  I want two things. The first thing is I want you to sign up for fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. The second thing I want is I want when I go to ChatGPT and I type in a query, I've been extremely frustrated by the the model picker because I'm constantly going back and forth between 4O and O3 Pro. And one takes, you know, five seconds, the other takes 15 minutes. And sometimes I accidentally hit something with O3 that I should have gone to 4O with. And then I have to open a new one and then I copy my prompt over and put it there. And then I'm like, actually, yeah, that's a great one. Like this was Googleable and so it just put pulled it into the nice format. What I would love is is a system where I can.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Where I can hit it with a prompt and it goes to Cerebras and it gives me just, hey, off the top of my head, here's what I know, here's the basics of what I, what I'm pretty confident about, but I'm going to keep working on it. So I kick, hey, I, I kicked off an O3 Pro, heavy duty reasoning, I'm searching, I'm collecting data. I'm going to get you the best possible answer on this, but while you're waiting, here's the thing that I can turn over in two seconds. Here's what I know right now.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:39John Coogan?

  And I think that that

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that's the same experience you might have working with somebody where you ask them a question and they're like, I'm 90% sure it's this. Give me 30 minutes, I'll come back to you with confirmation. We'll figure out the plan from there.

• 46:52John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And, and that also allows you, if somebody says, I'm 90% sure that, that it's this direction, that allows the person that you're interacting with to go and think about that path and, and now there's a 90% chance that the work that they do.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Something mission critical that you can't make mistakes.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  And then, yeah, and then if they, and then if they, if they need to adjust course, they haven't burned a bunch of time. So I'm excited for more, you know, advanced model routing. We've talked about the, the mixture of experts. We, Tyler, what was the Grok of evolution? It was like mixture of models?

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Mixture of models of experts.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, what, what was the, the latest Grok heavy architecture was something else. It was like, it was a mixture of something on top of a mix. It was a bunch of mixture of experts' models and then, and then, and then it was a bunch of mixture of models and then we were going to do mixture of models on top of models, mixture of companies, mixture of

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Cause we're going to make a router on top of that, which would

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Every time you prompt, it prompts all of them.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  And then, and then there's a

• 47:50Speaker 02

  Mixture of models of, models of experts.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then it, and then, and then there's a scoring that gives you the final best. Okay.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  But I think apparently people, I mean, this is all like leaked stuff on Twitter. So it's like probably not true. So people are saying like, uh, GPT-5 is like supposed to be kind of

• 48:08John Coogan?

  What I described.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Some kind of routing thing.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Put me on the team. I just predicted it two days before it comes out or something. I'm good. Yeah, it took me a while to get there, but I think I think I'm excited for that.

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  I'm excited. Anyway, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  Get on Adio.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Did you see this Hunter Biden clip? We stay away from politics, but this is.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Can we pull up the video?

• 48:37John Coogan?

  We should pull up this video. This was this was very, very insightful as to how people think about artificial intelligence and automation. So this is from Channel 5, Hunter Biden on AI automation and whether or not you should tip it in and out. And growing Daniel has a very insightful post here says, when he says AI, he really means software and simple robotics. But still, I'm actually very surprised by how smart by Hunter Biden is like my friends are smarter, but I thought he'd be way dumber after all the crack. But listen to what he has to say.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  In and out is fine. You don't tip it in and out. I do. What? You're tipping it in and out? Yeah, they have to wear those hats. You know what that feels like? Dude, did you serious conversation? I met somebody that is in the, you know, owns fast food franchises. His McDonald's employs 55 people. Okay. He went all AI. Oh, man. It's about a $2 million investment.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  And they just show you a humanoid robot. It's like.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  He only employs five people now. Oh. So his margins go up by like 27%. And he'll make back the $2 million investment in under like 18 months. Think about this. There's about like 13,500 McDonald's in the United States of America. I did the math. If every one of them went down to five from 55, lost 50 on average, 50 jobs, it's 670,000 jobs in America. And that's like, it's a certainty. And that's just McDonald's. You think that Burger King, Wendy's, Taco Bell, I mean, across the board, you're talking, what, like, probably?

• 50:17Speaker 03

  Three and a half million jobs in the in the in the fast food industry alone. That will AI with easily within the next five years, if not three years. So I have I've flipped my thinking about this whole AI thing. You're either going to have a massive extinction event. Or it's going to be really good with a rough patch in the middle. Because if between supercomputing power, which we're we're there already. Okay, like quantum computer. And

• 50:49John Coogan?

  We're not quite there on quantum computing. Put that in the truth zone.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Figure out the

• 50:53John Coogan?

  I think we are we are generating exactly zero tokens.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  Fusion within the next like five years. And if we do that.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  And now fusion.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Limitless source of power.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  I have some friends that work on fusion.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  I've seen enough.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  I've seen enough.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  Give him a give him a hard tech fund.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, he doesn't even he doesn't even. Yeah, he doesn't even need to be in the private markets. There's plenty of public names he could get into if he's bullish.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  Fusion quantum.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure that'll work out great for him. It's in this be rough. Anyway, the interesting thing here, yeah, he's talking about automation. I actually know an entrepreneur who built a, you know, you take a TV, you turn it horizontally. You touchscreen and you can order at McDonald's. I don't know if he actually had McDonald's as a client, but he had a number of those types of customers where you shop on a screen and checkout on the screen. And that's something that the we had the slowest take off ever for that technology. Truly, like, when do you think it would have been capable from, you know, from first principles, just the capability of software and hardware to show up, click buttons, pay,

• 51:59John Coogan?

  and then and then send the order to a human cook who's still cooking.

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. Even even even at grocery store grocery store checkout.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Two thousand and five level technology, in my opinion.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  A lot of grocery, I mean, Air One still doesn't have like self checkout. But I just actively avoid self checkout. And you wonder, you know, I think a lot of people feel the exact same way. It's like being able to sort of outsource the scanning.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Of items.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  People do the self checkout because it's a thrill. Because like it's this negotiation, like, will they catch you for how much you're stealing? Because like they're not really watching, but there's someone that's kind of watching and you could get in an altercation. And so it's about like, it's about getting your.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  It's about going risk on.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  It's about going risk on.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's like the girls.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Grocery stores to, to encourage thrill seekers should actually start having like armed security there.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it needs to be high stakes.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  Standing there like this.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, high stakes.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  So if you mess up and they catch you, you're getting tackled.

• 53:00John Coogan?

  It is, it is hilarious how, yeah, they kind of got rid of like the scanner, but they definitely need to watch that stuff because people will just like fake scan and then check out. I don't endorse doing that.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  Chris from Pace has good takes here where it's like in areas where.

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, this is a great take.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  There is.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  And Aaron Gittin too.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically this idea that like, I think that 20 years from now, I will still go to restaurants and have a human waiter.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  Because it's a great human waiter improves the experience, right? It's, it's enjoyable to have somebody that understands the restaurant you're hanging out with across.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  The person will look more like an educator and an entertainer than a, than like a plate carrier.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if anybody, by the way, I wonder if anybody's building.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Bus boy, you will be someone who talks about the food and gives you advice.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  So here's, here's something, I wonder if anybody's building like a friend pendant style device for waiters. You just walk up to the table, have a conversation, but it's just actively like submitting them through like the restaurant's like order management system. So the waiter's just hanging out there. They don't have to be like writing down stuff or in a phone. They can just have a conversation and be like, you want this? No cheese? You want fries with that? You want a side salad? Great, great, great. And it's just automatically in the system and starts getting made.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Like this idea, usually when, when like consumer hardware goes to the enterprises, like where it goes to die. Like the original hollow lens and the Google Glass, like as soon as they said like, hey, we're actually going to be focusing on niche enterprise use cases. Usually a bad sign, but that could be kind of like a toast type, you know, vertical SaaS outcome. I don't know. I, I'm, I'm more bullish on that idea than. At least hearing it for 10 seconds. But I don't know, at the same time, if you go to a really nice restaurant, I would, I would be leaning even more in the pure human world and being like, I would like to go to the restaurant that doesn't even have phones. And there's actually a great post in here by Hip City Reggie. We will read through because I want your take on this.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  So Reggie James, friend of the show, says, "Screenshot essay on wearable AIs. Will all AIs leave the room? Sitting down at breakfast, Yatu reveals he's wearing an AI pendant product on me." I've never heard of that one. Very cool that there's a bunch. Shaun in Jackson frees, "A couple of days later, I'm wearing a friend necklace," shout out Avi, "and talking to my wife and I stopped to look at it, wondering if it should be included in the goings on of my home life. I think it's clear that we will start to create a set of social norms around AI that's extremely explicit. We will state things like, can all AIs leave the room? Spaces will have machinery running that renders connected electronics useless."

• 55:47John Coogan?

  So yeah, we should have a Faraday cage that we can go hang out in. At the core, it's a question of which minds authority and priority in a given space, it's probably a good idea to assert the human ones. What do you think?

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  So Jackson Dahl had a review of Friend. I guess you got an early one from Avi. The review was generally positive. He said, "Clearly feels different to talk to a thing you're wearing and must touch to get a response from. With Friend, you put voice in and text out, which is like kind of an interesting feature. So you're, it's just hanging out with you, but then it's messaging you on your phone about your day, which is kind of a new, it's just a new format." He, he says, "All said, feels like Avi have built something truly different, a hardware device that embodies a new set of values. I suspect they will find it an especially young group of people who quickly find themselves in daily communion with their new friend.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  And again, this seems to just continue to be incredibly controversial, and I'm sure it will for a while. Daniel says, "How do you feel about recording everyone you meet without their consent?" Jackson says, "Bad. Lots to figure out societally with these types of things."

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, the voice in text out thing is interesting. I feel like there's, there's a ton of different surface area to explore outside of just give someone a blank text box. Like that worked for Google with the ten blue links. It works for chat GPT. But I think now the new surface area is figure out how to push stuff to the user. And this is a way to do that. You're just ambiently recording and then I feel like the retention is gonna be way higher than other devices. Because as long as you put it on, it's going to be sending you messages.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  And so I think that's gonna be really, really good for retention.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's this, there's, do you get push notifications from chat GPT at all?

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Only if only post prompt.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  So if I fire off deep research, it will give me a push notification telling me, hey, we're done with that. But I've never just-

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  But there's a world in the future, for example, where chat GPT has access to your calendar. And it's like, hey, I saw your meeting with this person this morning. Do you want me to run a deep research report on what they've been up to in the last like few months? And it's like, oh, they shared this update on LinkedIn and they were in this article and they went on this podcast and talked about this thing.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 58:12John Coogan?

  You can see glimpses of it.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  More proactive.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  If you go to the chat GPT app, it will actually populate ideas for prompts. And so for me right now, tells you a lot about me, it says Hollywood movies, AI and filmmaking. Clearly because I was searching about Disney, stock market, mag seven performance. I can just click that and get an update. And it says, how have the mag seven stocks performed over the past decade? What factors have driven their, driven their growth? And it just boom pulls that prompt up.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Media industry, luxury watches, automotive industry, F1 schedule, venture capital, tech business. And so some of those, if there was something triggering in the system that, you know, hey, this is, there's, there's this interesting thing going on. We should just generate this prompt and send it to John. That's, that's probably an interesting feature that they'll probably explore at some point. But friend seems to have at least be, they at least seem to be exploring this type of thing. But- Voice in, text out, very exciting. Sleep in, rest out, also exciting. 8sleep.com, Pod 5, 5-year warranty, 39-risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go check it out.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  I was riding a high Monday night. I put up a 95, and I'm down in the dumps again, John. I got a little cocky going into last night.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Well, you know what's not in the dumps? The future of nuclear uranium enrichment, because General Matter is bringing uranium enrichments back to the United States, starting at the site where the US enrichment industry was born. We've signed a lease with the Department of Energy to establish the nation's first US-owned privately-developed uranium enrichment facility at the former Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. Seventy-five years ago, the US Atomic Energy Commission selected Paducah to help lead the nation's original enrichment efforts. Today, we are proud to return to and rebuild this historic site to power a new era of energy independence. This is Scott Nolan's company. I hung out with him while I was at Founder's Fund. He's an absolute dog.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  One of the greatest to ever do it, and he's been on absolute tear. Spent, I think, over a decade at Founder's Fund, helped Peter Thiel with the original Zero to One Lectures while at Stanford, helped ideate and bounce ideas around for that book, then invested at Founder's Fund for a decade, and was kind of thinking about maybe starting a company, but didn't want to force it, and just waited, waited, waited until the perfect opportunity came around, and really put together the perfect team, perfect partners, and has accelerated way faster than I think he expected.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  When General Matter first announced, my first reaction, which is always a positive reaction, is nobody, I haven't seen a pitch for this anywhere, but it's incredibly obvious that this company needs to exist.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. And so, it seems like it's working. They won a contract with the government very early, earlier than they expected, and so... They are moving timelines up and now they say we will enrich our uranium by the end of the decade. U.S. leadership and enrichment will allow us to lead once again in nuclear energy. This lets us lead in everything downstream of safe, clean, baseload power, AI manufacturing economy. Today marks the beginning of America's restored leadership in nuclear enrichment. We thank our partners in Kentucky and at the DOE for supporting us. And you can see a beautiful render of the future facility that is absolutely massive.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  But, you know, they're thinking big and they're going for it. There's also a great post in PirateWire, which you should subscribe to, digging into this from a different perspective and profiling the company, which is very exciting. Anyway, if you are interested in investing, go to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They have multi-asset investing, industry yields.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  And they're trusted by millions, not for casuals.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Taking investment, investing seriously is not financial advice.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Let's go to Adam, person of swag. He says he started a startup to impress a girl, starts seeing product market fit, gets more compliments from male users, girls don't care, keep trying to get more MRR. Now I spend every day in a dark room coding with four men. What is even the point of this? And the best photo you could imagine.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, I would love to see Adam ring, hit the gong with us at the New York Stock Exchange and say, Adam, why did you start this company? And he just says, I just did it to impress.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  You know, you know what's funny about this? This is, this is the apocryphal tale of the founding of Facebook. Like in the Aaron Sorkin Social Network movie, the whole premise, I know you haven't seen the movie, but

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  I have seen that one.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  What? Jordi Hays has seen a movie? Incredible. But the, the, the, the story that Aaron Sorkin decided to tell was basically that Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook as like, you know, a way to get a date or something like that. And then Mark was like, fact check, false. Like I was dating Priscilla happily for years before starting Facebook. So your whole, your whole

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Nor the truth.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Your whole plot is fake.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  But he was kind of just like, whatever, you know, people like telling stories and maybe a better story that way. But The Social Network 2 will be dropping soon. If you have a way to get us in that movie, make it happen. Hollywood, you're listening. We're ready to be extras. Get Tyler in this movie. I think it'd be so good if we could be extras just in the background. I think it's pretty doable. We're in Hollywood already. Make some calls. This is my number one, like, manifest it, put it on the vision board.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it happen.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  It's a very small crew of people. Those of you in the chat, Azar, DeGame, you guys would see the movie, you'd see us and be like, wow, they pulled it off. So we'll have to make that happen. And then we'll have to buy a billboard on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless advertising.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Adam D'Angelo says, I love the fact that all the billboards on 101 are for AI products. And certainly, many of them are for regular enterprise SaaS companies announcing AI products.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  What is this? Oh, interesting. Hmm. Do you see this? Do you see this response from Jasper? He is advertising. And he says, cheap on-demand GPU clusters, hyperbolic.ai. Hyperbolic is an on-trend term right now. A hyperbolic can refer to several different concepts. In language, it means exaggerated. In geometry, it's related to a hyperbola or hyperbolic space. And in functions, it's related to hyperbolic curves.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  The irony here, that hyperbolic AI, you could read it as exaggerated AI, and then every billboard on the 101 is just...

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  It's very funny, nominative determinism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The nominative determinism is that they're overpromising.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  But I think in this case, it's like a neo-clap.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Love Jasper. No hate on Jasper. Good luck to him. I hope, I hope he can deliver, and I hope he can go exponential.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  This feels like something that can be delivered quite well today.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Yes. But, but a hyperbolic function is something that goes up and to the right and reaches an asymptote and goes to infinity, essentially. So it is, it is a good example, and it is something that is important in AI as we scale to infinity and beyond. David George has a post.

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  He says, what do Roblox, Androol, CrowdStrike and Apple all have in common? None of them look like obvious winners from the start, but they built something far bigger than anyone expected. We call these companies model busters. Great. Nay, model busters either reveal a market that's much larger than anticipated or expand into new product lines so effectively that they break out of their original category entirely. We're talking about model busters now because we believe AI is creating many more of them. AI will maybe the defining platform shift of our time. It's changing how products are built, how they're distributed and how buying decisions get made. It's creating new consumer experiences, new workflows and entirely new business models. Platform shifts often create new winners. AI is no exception.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Today's most ambitious companies will grow faster and become bigger than anything we've seen before. Example here, if you were an investor modeling out Figma in the early days and you thought it would always be a design tool. Again, this is not how Dylan was pitching the business, but if you thought it was going to be a design tool, you could simply look and see, all right, how many designers are in the world? And if you could get 5%, 10%, 20% of them using it, would this be a big company? Still would have been a big company, but wouldn't have been a $50 billion public company, most likely. And it ultimately kind of like broke out of that TAM by being

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  collaboration tool across, you know, across entire companies.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  We should have, we should have David back on. I really enjoyed talking to him during Andreessen LP Day. I do wonder, like, is it a tautology that a model buster cannot be modeled? Like, are we talking about an ineffable quality that cannot be defined? Like, is there, is there a pattern for finding model busters? Because the, like, definitionally, the model busters are things that cannot be modeled. It's funny because he's also on the growth team and probably does like the most modeling of anyone at Andreessen.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, Roblox is an example. So Roblox had, has 20, 20.6 million DAUs in the US and Canada last quarter.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  And there's...

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I don't know how many people, young people under, under 18 there are in Canada, but in the US it's like something like 70 million. And so that is like a meaning, like if you were, if you were evaluating Roblox and saying, like more than a quarter of people under the age of 18 are going to be playing this game every single day by 2025, you would have sounded a little bit crazy. Because I don't know that there's that many video games, that I don't know how many video games have ever achieved that level of, of daily active usage in a cohort like that.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Video games in general have been like a model buster in the sense that people were expecting it to be comped to the film industry. And I believe the video game industry is like an order of magnitude bigger than the film and television industry. It is, it is a significant expansion of growth. But my question about like, how much time should you spend trying to codify model busters? Or should it just be something that we refer to looking backwards? Because my, my question is like, if you go back and you look at Danny Reimer in the C, is Seed, series A of Figma? Or Mamoon, a KP, doing the B? Or Andrew Reid doing the C?

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  Like, at what point did it become important to win that deal, to identify Figma as a model buster? Versus just say, the metrics are really good, Dylan Field's a killer, I'm investing on that. And then, and then yes, maybe there's a second act, but if I get a bunch of those, ultra-high-quality entrepreneur, ultra-high-quality product, ultra-high-quality KPIs, I'm good enough and I don't even need to really predict that this will, you know, have a second act or expand out and the TAM will, will moon. Like, it's not, and, and you could see the same thing about like, you know, Anduril, Palmer Lucky, like you just look at the team and, and like the market's big enough to justify the investment at that phase, and then you just keep doubling down.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  And then it busts your model, but you're in it for different reasons. You're not in it because you predicted the model would be bust. So I, I wonder what it teaches you about like, the philosophy of, of, of early-stage investing?

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think you could have, you could have underwrote SpaceX for a long time, ignoring, ignoring the opportunity for Starlink, right? And it still would probably be, I, I'd be interesting to see. You know, how SpaceX would be valued.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  When that made it into its first deck.

• 1:10:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or its first model.

• 1:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably 10 years into the business. I have to imagine it was not in any of the series A through C.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  Three, C.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  People are like, I thought I was investing in a rocket ship company.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Accidentally invested in an internet company.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Internet company, internet company, the accidental internet company again and again and again. The internet is the, it is the category and that every company makes money in.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I still, I still remember as a kid when, when I grew up in an Apple household. I never had a, like, I never used Microsoft products really ever as a kid. And I remember it was still at a time where you were kind of like weird if you didn't have like a traditional PC at home.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  And then 10 years later, everybody has an iPhone.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Right? So it was impossible to like underwrite having a breakout product of that caliber.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  Kind of like luxury watches. Not many people wear them right now, but in the future it'll be weird if you don't have one. So you gotta go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat yesterday said they got a moon swatch on bezel.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  I didn't even know that those would be on there. That's amazing.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  They've been out, they've.

• 1:11:46John Coogan?

  Moon watch or moon swatch?

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  They've had different variations.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Okay, cool, very cool. Well, congrats to them. Hope they enjoy it. Send us a picture. We have some breaking news about Sirius XM. They are canceling the Howard Stern Show. Can you call it a cancellation when the guy's 71 years old and he's been doing it for 20 years? And they say it's no longer worth the investment. They've been paying him $100 million a year. That is a huge salary and that's what, three, four times Colbert? Wow, that is, that's big. That's the power, power of, of, of radio, power of, you know, the power law. He's done fantastically. So congrats to him.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  He emerged during a time when.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  If you're looking for a new gig, you're welcome to come and hang out at the Ultra Dome. You can sit at the intern table next to Tyler and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll bounce ideas off you.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's wild. I, I really wonder where Sirius XM business goes.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  I, I know, I know where this goes. Post AGI, you were gonna listen to every Howard, every hour of Howard Stern. I know you've listened to zero hours, but there's probably. 20,000 hours in the catalog, something like that of Howard Stern content? You could listen to it from the beginning.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Do people listen to the back catalog ever?

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  But

• 1:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Sirius XM is still a $7 billion company.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  That's bigger than I would have thought.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, revenue, like, how much of that cost? I mean, it makes sense to give him a huge slice of that. It is a talent-driven business and he could go to Spotify. He could go somewhere else. My question is like, he is old. Will he retire or will he do a podcast or do something independent? Is there news?

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  Now, they, uh...

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  They apparently did how much?

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Okay, you look that up while I tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier claiming, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  So they did 8.6 billion in 2024 revenue. So they're trading at less than 1X revenue, which just says, uh, when you have a shrinking business, it is a rough place to be in.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Not a growth stock, I suppose.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of that is getting eaten up by talent.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a trillion-dollar stock if they have...

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much? I wonder what percent of Sirius XM content is, uh, like, power loss, celebrity, host red, high-salary contract versus essentially programmatic or AI content? Because it's probably not even AI, but if you're just, like, there's a, there's a station on Sirius XM that's just the Grateful Dead and it just plays them the whole time. Like, I don't think you need someone making $100 million to, like, randomly play Grateful Dead tracks. Like, there's probably some Grateful Dead fan who manages that and picks the songs and orders them, but like, that could essentially be pseudo-random. Um, maybe one day you go through the, the back catalog and then the new stuff and then you mix it up and then you play the hits or something.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  I don't even know if they have hits in that way. I know it's kind of a jam band, but, um, uh, I wonder, I wonder of their, of their, like, of their content, of their tonnage, is that the term? Tonnage is like the, the amount of content on the network. Uh, I wonder how much of it is, is driven by these high, high-dollar deals? And I wonder if they'll get, uh, a new, a new host in the seat. I wonder who this generation's Howard Stern is? Maybe it's like Tim Dillon or something, some irreverent comic essentially?

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  I think the thing is... As content is on demand, fewer and fewer people are just turning on the radio or turning on the television and listening to whatever they, whatever just happens to be playing.

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  And so if you take people that were subscribed to Howard Stern, we're like, you liked Howard Stern. We're now just gonna play this other person through his channel.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  They're just gonna be, they're just gonna ask, what's going on here?

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, certainly if you have a specific car that has Sirius XM and it doesn't have Spotify and Howard Stern's new show is on Spotify, cause it's a podcast, like, you might stick around on Sirius. Maybe they get someone new in the seat who's, you know, almost as good or can build a relationship. But it does seem like a challenge to fill that, but also, you know, it's a lot of money to pay. So clearly it wasn't penciling out, so they had to move on. Anyway, X is now noticing when you take screenshots. Did you see this? I've seen this in other apps. It's usually pretty annoying, honestly, but when you take a screenshot, it triggers a UI element that says, hey, do you wanna actually just copy the link to this post instead of taking our content elsewhere?

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  So it's a little bit of a retention hack. I don't know if Nikita Beer's in-

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Nikita's cooking.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  -involved in this, but it's, it's, it's just like a classic UI thing. I wonder what the actual like benefit of this is.

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  It makes sense, so many people still just screenshot a post and share it in like a group chat.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, cause posts get deleted and then posts, it's like, oh, that person blocked me or that person is a locked account. And so the screenshot is just the universal language of like, you know, sharing information and content. And a lot of people still share links, but the, like, the screenshot is super Lindy and I don't see it going anywhere. So, I mean, the good thing is that this doesn't block your screenshot. Like, your screenshot is still added to your camera roll, but then you're prompted to, hey, do you wanna actually share the link? I haven't actually run into this. I, I don't, I take a lot of screenshots of posts, but I do it on my computer and not on my phone. So, anyway. And Preston continues and says, Nikita is going to look like a hero for putting features on Twitter that have existed on TikTok for a decade. I don't know enough about TikTok features to know what he would port over,

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  but I know he's a student of algorithms and student of social apps, so I'm sure he'll find something.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

  TikTok has is very smart about all these type, all the different ways that people are like diverting attention and hacking it. It would make a lot of sense for to just copy best practices from there. So I think this is a great, good take.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we have Marc Andreessen joining in about 10 minutes. If you have questions for Mark, throw them in the chat and we'll try and get to them during our interview with him. Ray Sullivan says, once the summer is over and Mistral is back to work, I'm sure they're going to be dropping some cool stuff.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  1.6 K likes. How do you even fight that? It's that's so rough. Just Europe is is down bad in the meme, in the memetic war.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  I would be very interested to to actually understand. We should have somebody on for Mistral to talk about it. There are that the meme that that European founders and teams take off eight weeks in the summer is is extremely real. And it's not always a full eight weeks.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  We have taken this summer, we've taken one day off, July 4.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  And it's like extremely evident to what's going on over here in America. We run a media company. And it's like you're in the most, you're there. Yeah, you're in the most aggressive fight ever. Not not to say that Mistral is taking days off. I actually don't know about that company specifically, but but I have seen some, some friends of the show proudly take time off.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  I know I have. I have friends that are European founders that have massive companies that are very successful. And they their businesses allow them to take time off. They can go, they can have a nice vacation with family, friends, whatever it is. They can maybe just dial down meetings quite a lot and their businesses are going to be fine. They're probably still going to have great quarters and going to put up great numbers. The issue with Mistral is you are competing with the entire world, an entire world where if you're not at the frontier, you're not going to get usage. And so I wouldn't be surprised if Mistral said, hey, no, no Euro summer, summer.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  But we don't know. I mean, we don't know that they took a summer. We don't know that Mistral took time off. But yeah, I mean, there's also like the, so there's the, there's the facts of the matter, like you probably shouldn't take a huge vacation in the middle of the biggest fight over new technology in the past decade or two. Not that they are, but. The other interesting thing is like the vibes and the aura farming that comes from doing things that show that you're working extra hard. So this is the Elon, you know, taking a meeting really late at night with a journalist in the room and then that gets out and you see that, oh, he really was sleeping, the picture of the sleeping bag.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  The XAI team having tents in the office.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Tents in the office. Another example is Mark Zuckerberg. Meta dropped Llama on a Saturday or a Sunday or something. And somebody asked Mark, why'd you drop it on a Sunday? He said, because that's when he was ready. And it was a little bit rough because Meta Llama wasn't like fully ready to the full extent, but it just showed that they were trying to move as fast as possible very clearly. And then similarly, Sam Altman and the OpenAI team, they dropped that IMO stuff at like 2:00 AM on a Saturday. And it was like, okay, there's like all this debate over, you know, were they inside the stadium? Were they running in the parking lot outside? You know?

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Was it signed off?

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  Was it signed off or whatever? But you can't say that they weren't up late working.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  That's the one thing you can't say.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  You can't say they didn't have that dog in them.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. You can't say they didn't have that dog with them. They might not have been nice with it, but they definitely had the dog in them. Right?

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  It wasn't very nice with it to, you know, kind of like frustrate them.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Krishna here says the irony is that Mistral, the meteorologic, the meteorological event the company was named after mostly occurs in the winter and spring.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Dominant determinism strikes again. TJ Parker says the best Amazon leadership principle is right a lot and it's not particularly close. Quote, leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs. Thought this was interesting. I thought it was a typo.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  A typo.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  A typo.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Because Amazon famously writes a lot, W R. But this is R I G H T. They are correct a lot. Interesting.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Stuart says, kind of true with VCs too. Feels like the best ones just have good sense broadly and pick really well. TJ says, yep. TJ has been right a lot himself. Created PillPack, sold it to Amazon for a billion dollars. So pays to be right.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  He's also been right a lot about his selection of timepieces. He's a fantastic collection of watches. Some of them are on display from time to time.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Every now and then.

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid says, sector focused VC firm called specific catalyst.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Okay. Andrew's been, you know, yeah, yeah, he, yeah, he took Figma out, IPO, he's been on a generational run, he's backed like a dozen deck of horns, what potentially greatest allocator of this generation, doing very great, getting a little cocky on the timeline, coming for General Catalyst, making fun of their name, coming for A16Z, you remember this? He said, A16Z, the 16 doesn't count the space in the middle. So he's taking shots from his high perch. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Andrew, be careful or else people are gonna start asking questions about why you don't own Sequoia.com. You don't want that to happen.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  You know this?

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  No, but I think he's having fun, I don't think you cross the lines, but it is funny because he's just, he's just like, hmm, I'm, I'm having a good time, let me just, let me just fire off some, some jokes at the expense of my competitors, but.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  He's having, he's having fun.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  This is harmless, this is fun, I love this.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep, there's certainly plenty of VC firms formed to capitalize on a specific technological trend.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  And maybe one of them should be called.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  And maybe.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Highly specific catalyst capital.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  And maybe we'll ask Mark to settle the debate, is it A16Z or is it A17Z? Or is it like Wilmer Hale, where Wilmer Hale, the law firm, two names, there's no space in between Wilmer and Hale. And so if Wilmer Hale were to do the A16Z thing and abbreviate it, they would be correct.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  So you never know, maybe Andreessen Horowitz doesn't have a space in the middle.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Post here from Dan Toomey, quote, "I don't do drugs, lame, weak, beta, childish, I don't touch the stuff, refined, respectable, aged, wise."

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  It does sound like, yeah, you have experience, I don't touch the stuff.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Trump's line has never been big into that whole world.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it just, it really, really hits way, way differently when you say that. So, yeah, kids, just say no, just say you don't touch the stuff.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Post here from Carl Rivera over Shopify. Being an angel investor is just a different way of subscribing to extremely expensive email newsletters. Yeah, you're oftentimes, you know, basically giving somebody 25K for five to 10 years of monthly sends.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Don't we know an angel investor that writes like $1,000 checks to get the email updates?

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Just to get that.

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Any LPs and funds too, and then gets all of that information. He's just like a master of information collection.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  We do, we certainly do. I had a portfolio company that I hadn't heard from for years. I got updates for a while after I invested and I got pinged to sign some docs and they, and I assumed that the company was shutting, shutting down and they got a massive acquisition.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Oh, acquisition. That's great.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Was it, was it extremely pleasant, pleasant surprise? Like normally if you just, like the updates trail off, you know, things aren't going that well. But every once in a while, you get a really nice surprise.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  That's great. Reads with Ravi says, great leaders think like farmers, think like a farmer. Don't shout at the crops. Don't blame the crops for not growing fast enough. Don't uproot crops before they've had a chance to grow. Choose the best plants for the soil. Irrigate and fertilize. Remove weeds. Remember, you will have good seasons and bad seasons. You can't control the weather. Only be prepared for it.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Good philosophy. Think like a farmer.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder where this is from.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Think like an aura farmer.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Think like an aura farmer. Don't shout at the aura.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  We still need to, we still need to have this debate with, with Tyler around aura farming.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Well, I'm trying to get him to coin it Cosgrove's Law.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  I'm still writing it. I gotta get it perfect.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Because the tweet in and of itself is aura farming.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Exactly. It is. Yeah.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  And have recursive in that way.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Same with Coogan's Law. Kugan's Law is a recursive coinage.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think this could do really well. This has 1K likes written all over it.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  It's happening.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  And endless citations of Cosgrove's Law. So we will work on that. Merrill from Graphite says it's a massive week for his customers. Figma IPO'd at 36.3 billion. Ramp raised at 22 billion and Clay raised at 3.1 billion. The future is being built with Graphite. Congratulations to all those companies. Congratulations to Graphite. You got an absolute murderers row of clients. Congratulations.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Lineup.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Well, we have Marc Andreessen joining us. He's live from the TBP and Ultra Jump. Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Mark?

• 1:27:03Marc Andreessen?

  Hey, what's happening?

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:27:06Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you too.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  A lot. It's a little bit of a slow news day, but exciting stuff with GPT open source.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  It's not a slow August.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  It's not a slow August. We're glad. We were just reflecting that we've taken exactly one day off this summer. That was July 4th and we're showing the Europeans how American companies work.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  American work ethic.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  We're setting an example and we have proof of work because we exist on the internet and you can see us live every day. So we're setting an example. How are you doing? How's your summer going?

• 1:27:38Marc Andreessen?

  Fantastic, going really well. So how long is it going to be until you guys put up avatars that make claims that you're working hard all through the summer, but it turns out you're on the beach?

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  You might have caught us.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  I think you'll know better than us as to when the technology gets there. We've been demoing some of the stuff. People have been doing a lot of deep fakes of us and fortunately all of them have been clockable, so it doesn't feel like a brand risk. But they're getting closer and closer and I know that there's going to be a moment where we have to say, hey, that's actually using our name and likeness to endorse something that we don't necessarily endorse. Can you please take that down? So we're approaching the touring test, the uncanny valley. We're escaping the uncanny valley.

• 1:28:15Jordi Hays?

  I think a question, like looking back over the, you know, maybe 10 or 15 years was, what moments did you feel like there just was not a lot of action happening? Because this summer is just the pace from so many different teams has been absolutely insane. Everybody's like trying to keep up and it didn't used to feel that way, at least from my point of view.

• 1:28:38Marc Andreessen?

  So my my view of it always is there's like these there's this these disconnected, you know, kind of patterns or trends. There's there's sort of the the sort of day to day phenomenon where like engineers show up every day and they make things a little bit better. And then every once in a while, you know, you you get a technical breakthrough or a new platform. And and and that process, kind of this, you know, kind of sawtooth, kind of up to the right kind of process, kind of plays out over time, kind of regardless of what else is happening in the world. And so it it keeps happening through recessions and depressions and wars and like all kinds of crazy, crazy, crazy stuff that's happening. But basically, you know, the the technology keeps getting better. So there's there's kind of that curve. And then and then there's the the sort of enthusiasm curve and and the and then the adoption curve, you know, which is basically like, when do these things actually show up in the world? And then, by the way, when are people actually ready, uh, you know, for the for

• 1:29:23Marc Andreessen?

  for the new thing? Um, like, if you talk to the people who work on, like, I'm sure you guys have talked to people who work on language models, they will tell you that they were surprised the chat GPT was the breakthrough moment because they thought everybody already knew what these models could do for, you know, three years before that. And so they were, you know, they were shocked that it was the chat body interface that made that made the thing go. Um, and so so there there's somewhat of a sort of arbitrary disconnection, um, between what's actually happening in the substance and then what what what what people are are seeing and feeling. And so it's just, it's it's it's really hard to predict when these things pop. But also, if if you're in this day to day, it's it's really hard to tell, um, you know, when things are going to be hot or not, uh, because it doesn't necessarily map to how much the technology is improving.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were just talking about that in the context of, uh, of Google's new world model. It's this like generative video game that you can kind of move around in, and it feels like DeepMind is just absolutely crushing at the AI research frontier. They have the best world model simulator that you can walk around in. The question is, like, if they let another lab do the chat GPT thing and just get it out into the consumer three months earlier, they might wind up kind of chasing and trying to catch up if somebody actually figures out how to make it like a dominant consumer product. Now, in the enterprise, it's more oligopolistic, but consumer seems to be winner take all. I guess the question is, like, how much value, uh, do you place right now in the AI

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  race to just like moving fast, breaking things, uh, you know, uh, dealing, having like the thick skin to deal with like the safety constraints and all of the different stuff, obviously not being irresponsible, but just speeding up the organization as much as possible. It feels like now is the time to really push on that.

• 1:30:58Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, well, first of all, I need to correct you. It's moving fast and making things.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Making things, that's right.

• 1:31:03Marc Andreessen?

  I don't even know where that came from. I have no idea. Never heard, never heard of it.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  I think ChatGPT didn't really break anything. I think that's a good point. It really did just move fast and make things. The first things it made were weird, but that was fine. And it failed and it hallucinated a ton, but it didn't really break anything. I don't know.

• 1:31:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I believe that I believe in this case, total deaths attributable to ChatGPT are still zero.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Zero.

• 1:31:26Marc Andreessen?

  So notwithstanding all of it, notwithstanding all of the caterwauling, but um, yeah. So, look, I think the AI industry in particular has a very acute version of the of the of the sort of challenge that you identified with. And, and, you know, and I don't say this negatively, just an observation, which is that they're, you know, like in sort of a normal technology company, you've kind of got engineers who make products and then you've got, you know, kind of salespeople or marketing people who sell them. You know, in the in the air companies, you have this third tier of, you know, the quote unquote researchers.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so, you know, which is which has worked out incredibly well. I mean, the researchers have done, you know, they've just done like amazing breakthroughs at these companies, but, you know, the the the handoff, you know, there's not necessarily clean handoff from the researchers to the to the market. Um, and so it kind of raises this question of like, okay, like, is there is, are these companies there for kind of three, you know, kind of three segment companies where they have research and then they have product development and then and then they have go to market. Um, and I think that's a really open issue. I mean, if you, you know, Google's kind of a case study of this, you know, you alluded to DeepMind, but even more broadly, Google, you know, Google developed the transformer in 2017. Um, and then they basically let it sit on the shelf, right? Because it was a research project. They didn't productize it. They were very worried about, you know, from people I've talked to, they were very worried about the, you know, brand issues and safety issues, you know, kind of all these, all these, they had all these reasons to not productize it.

• 1:32:38Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, I talked to somebody senior who was there at the time, and I I asked them, you know, when, when, when could you have had ChatGPT with GPT four level output? Uh, if you had just got, you know, gone, gone flat out, starting in 2017, and they said by 2019.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Marc Andreessen?

  You know, they're they already knew how to do it. And then, you know, they've now caught up, but it took it took an extra five years, five years to catch up. Um, and so I I think a lot of these companies kind of have that challenge. Elon, as usual, of course, is provoking this question. It is, I'm sure you guys talked about, but, you know, he he has now, you know, with the next AI, he's now collapsed, you know, he's eliminated the distinction between research and product. Um, and so, you know, of course, you know, he's pushing this as hard as he can. And I think it's a, it's a good question for a lot of the other companies, kind of how hard they want to push on actually getting these things in fully productized form out to the market.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, on Elon's distinction, it feels like there is more research to be done, but it feels like we're entering like a new cycle of, you know, just focus on the engineering, focus on the deployment, the applications, let's get all this technology out into the world, let's reap all that benefit. And yes, there will be a different track of fundamental research that's happening somewhere, but it's really, really hard to predict. And so if you have something that's working, just double down and just go really aggressive on it. I'm wondering more on that, but also on Apple's strategy. It feels like Apple's been kind of like, you know, people have been maligning them for not for missing the AI opportunity. And Tim Cook's just there on the earnings call being like, look, we

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  acquired a couple of small companies and

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Seven this year.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Seven companies. But then it seems like they're taking more of like an American dynamism approach. Like there was news today in the Journal that they that they're investing $100 million in American manufacturing. They're certainly doing stuff. They're just not chasing the, you know, the shiny tennis ball.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Headline $100 billion capex.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  So I'm wondering about your thoughts on when you have a, you know, when you have a platform, how hard is it to resist chasing the new shiny object? Is that the right move? Or are there any other things that you think Apple should be, you know, changing their strategy on?

• 1:34:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so look, Apple's always had this, you know, very clearly defined strategy that, you know, Stephen and Tim, you know, working together, figured out a long time ago, which is, you know, they, I forget the exact term, but it's something like basically they invest deeply into the core of what they do. You know, they'll basically work internally on things for many years. They only actually release things when they feel like they're kind of fully baked. Right? And so as a consequence, they have this thing where, and Tim says this, right? You know, they're rarely first to market with new technologies. You know, they're more often in the category of what, you know, Peter Thiel calls last to market. You know, they're, you know, they'll, they'll come out whatever, three years later, whatever, five years later. You know, there were tablets for years before the iPad. There were smartphones for years before the iPhone.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Folding phones. They're about to do a folding phone. It's like 10 years into that technology.

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the last mover, the last mover.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.

• 1:35:34Marc Andreessen?

  The last mover. I guess, yeah, what I would say is like, look, that clearly works if you're Apple, right? And so it clearly works if you're Apple. But I would say there's a fine line between that strategy and just and simply becoming obsolete, right? And so the problem is like if you're not Apple and you don't have all the other kind of super strengths and you know, kind of now the market position that Apple has. You know, do you really want to be a company? You know, if you're not Apple, do you really want to be a company that basically sits there and says, yeah, the world's moving and we're very deliberately not going to lean as hard as we can into it? And so I think there's a lot of survivorship bias in these kinds of strategy discussions where people look at the one company that's able to pull this off and they don't look at the 50 other companies that are in the graveyard. You know, because they, you know, because because they didn't adapt. I mean, you know, all the other smartphone companies, when the iPhone came out, they were like, oh, yeah, well, we could do touch too, right? You know, we'll just, you know, we'll get to it, right?

• 1:36:19Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, you know, they're gone.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  What do you think? BlackBerry Bold, I remember it's like an iPhone knockoff.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, you know, right now, people are variety of shareholders are annoyed at Apple around their reaction to AI, LLMs. John's annoyed around just like transcription generally, just like super basic stuff. But it doesn't feel like the the core business is immediately threatened today. It feels like it's still on the horizon around these sort of like, you know, eyewear based computing, you know, potentially net new devices that we're that that we'll see from you know, companies like OpenAI over time. But where do you like, like, how how real is the threat, you know, this year versus 10 years from today? And kind of what's your framework?

• 1:37:10Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think the biggest ultimate danger, I mean, the biggest ultimate danger is very clear, which is just like, at what point do you not carry around a pane of glass in your hand, you know, called a phone? Um, you know, because other things have superseded it and you know, like everything, you know, everything becomes obsolete at that point. Uh, so there will, there will come some time, I'm sure when we're not, you know, carrying phones around and we'll, we'll watch movies or people have phones and we'll be like, yeah, look at, look at how primitive they were. Right. Because, because we'll have moved on to other things and whether those things are eye based or, you know, uh, you know, the other kinds of wearables or whether it's just kind of, you know, computing happening in the environment. Um, or just, you know, entirely voice based or, you know, who knows what it is, but, um, you know, there, there will come a time when that happens. You know, is that time three years from now? Cause there's like some, you know, huge breakthrough, you know, from, from some company that figures out the, the, the product that obsolescence the phone right away. Or is that 20 years from now?

• 1:37:56Marc Andreessen?

  Because the phone is just, you know, such a standard platform for everything that we do in our lives and everything else, you know, kind of remains a peripheral to the phone. I mean, that, you know, that's, you know, that, that's the game of elephants that's playing out there. Um, you know, obviously I think, you know, I, I think it's highly likely that we'll, we'll have a phone for a very long time.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Marc Andreessen?

  Having said that, it is, it is exciting that there are companies that are going directly at that challenge. Um, and you know, whoever, whoever cracks the code on that will be, that will be the next Apple. And by the way, that, that may in the fullness of time be Apple itself, you know, they, they, they may be the company that figures that out.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I remember being at a board meeting at Andreessen Horowitz, maybe a decade ago or something. And Chris Dixon showed me the hollow lens. And I was like, okay, we're one year away from this being everywhere. And, and I feel like today I'm still in the like, yeah, VR, it's definitely one year away. The next Quest I'm going to be wearing daily. Um, and, and it feels like we're always there, but it does feel like Apple did a lot of work on the, on the fundamental, uh, the, you know, pixel density of the resolution of the display. And then Meta has been doing a ton of work on just getting it light and affordable. Like it feels closer than ever, but, uh, you know, you, you, you always got to wait until you see the churn numbers until you really call the game. Right?

• 1:39:04Marc Andreessen?

  Well, you say the same, but you know, I think that's true, but you'd also say, you know, I'm, I'm on the, on the meta board. So I'm kind of a, a, a dog on this one, but like the, the Meta Ray-Ban glasses are a big hit.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:39:14Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Like, like they're, they're a big, you know, so I think we, we now have a form factor that we know works, you know, for, for, for eye based wearables. It's, you know, there's not VR and then VR, you know, on top of that, but, um, you know, just the, you know, the glasses and, you know, and then the, the glasses of camera, you know, sort of integrated camera, integrated microphone, integrated speaker.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:29Marc Andreessen?

  You know, that's a very interesting platform. Um, you know, the watch clearly works by the way, which Apple of course, you know, has played a significant role in making happen. You know, that now sells in, in, in huge volume. You know, so that's the second data point. And then, you know, like, I think these, you know, these, these, I think some form of AI pin is going to work. I also think, you know, headphones are going to get a lot more sophisticated, which is already happening.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:48Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, you do have these, you know, kind of data points coming out. And then, yeah, look, the trillion dollar question ultimately is, are these, are these peripherals to the phone? You know, which is what they are today, or are these replacements for the phone? And, you know, we, yeah, I would say, we, you know, we have, we allowed, we, I think we have a lot of invention coming, both from new companies and from the incumbents who are going to try to figure that out.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I always think about the value of like narrowing the aperture on these new technologies, like with, with the, the meta Ray-Bans, I feel like the fact that they aren't also trying to be a screen is actually a feature, not a bug. And I always go back to the iPhone, like, it was first and foremost a phone. And people bought it because it could make calls, and then it could make text messages, and then it was an iPod. But I, do you disagree with that? Please?

• 1:40:30Marc Andreessen?

  Well, you, you guys, I don't, you guys might be too young. The first iPhone actually was a bad phone.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  How so?

• 1:40:37Marc Andreessen?

  Then you guys, for the first two years, it couldn't reliably make phone calls.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  I, I had, I had like the third one, and a friend had one. But I feel like it was still like people were carrying cell phones, and that was the, at least of the expectation. But yeah, I mean, I guess you're right.

• 1:40:51Marc Andreessen?

  So for the, for the, for the first two, it was a classic Apple story, because the first, for the first two years, the thing couldn't make, reliably make phone calls. And then it turned out, there was an issue with the antenna and with, with how you held it. And there was a famous Steve Jobs email.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you heard it, and you would, and you would disconnect it.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  You could basically brick the device.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:06Marc Andreessen?

  Based on how you held it. And somebody emailed, this is when Steve would, would respond to emails from random people. And somebody emailed Steve saying, if I, you know, hold the phone this way, it doesn't make phone calls. And he's like, well, don't hold it that way.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Marc Andreessen?

  And so, and so, so even there, it was like, yeah, and people, you know, people forget, it took like five years for the iPhone to find its footing. It took like two years to get the thing. I remember also, the original iPhone didn't have, it didn't have broadband data. It was on, it was on the, the old 2G. It was called the AT&T Edge Network. So it didn't have broadband data. And then, of course, it didn't have an App Store. Right? It was completely locked out.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  So the challenges, the challenges for Apple now is that people are so used to perfection with the device, that launching a product that isn't perfect, like, is embarrassing, right? Like, you look at the Vision Pro, and it's like, well, the battery's big. Steve would have hated this, right? Like, how, he never would have shipped this. And that being constrained and not being able to innovate because you're tied to this, like, impossible standard of being on whatever generation 17 of the iPhone and perfecting every element is a real challenge.

• 1:42:06Marc Andreessen?

  So I would say there's a corollary to that. One of the things I've observed over the years is I think technology products become obsolete at the precise moment they become perfect. And to your point, what I mean by perfect basically is like, yeah, it's like the perfect, idealized, complete product. Like it does everything you could possibly ever imagine. Everything a customer could imagine, everything you as the technology developer can imagine. It's absolutely perfect. And there's been tons of examples of this over the last 50 years. Where it's like the absolute perfect, it seems to be the permanent version of that product. And then it just turns out that's actually the point of obsolescence. Because it means creativity is no longer being applied right into that platform. You're just like, there's just nothing else to do. You're just like, you're done. Right? The product has been realized. And then the cycle is what happens to your point.

• 1:42:49Marc Andreessen?

  The cycle is other people come in with completely different approaches, completely different kinds of products that are broken and weird in all kinds of ways. You know, but are fundamentally different. And so, you know, that is one of the time honored traditions. And, you know, one of the, you know, one of the, you know, things you could say about, you know, Tim is, you know, his willingness to kind of break the mold of Apple only ships perfect products. But, you know, being willing to ship the, you know, the Vision Pro, you know, you know, shows a level of determination to kind of stay in the innovation game, which I think is very positive.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  Updated thinking on open source. Since we last talked, there's, there's a lot that's been.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  OpenAI is an open source company again.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes, OpenAI is open again.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Yeah. It looked very encouraging. You know, a year ago, I was very, you know, I was getting very distressed about whether Open Source AI was going to be allowed. Uh, right. It was even going to be legal. Uh, and so, and I think, you know, we're basically through that at this point. We're through that in the US. Um, you know, we'll, we'll see about, we'll see about the rest of the world. Uh, and then look, you know, the US-China thing is obviously a big deal. But, you know, I think it's been that positive for the world that China has been, been so enthusiastic about Open Source AI coming out of China, uh, which has been great. And then, yeah, look, OpenAI leaning hard into this. Um, you know, and releasing what, you know, what they did is, I think, fantastic. Um, but both because of what they released, which is great, but also just the fact that they are now, you know, willing to do that. And then Elon reconfirmed overnight that he's going to, you know, open source, you know, start open sourcing previous versions of Grok.

• 1:44:10Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so, yeah, so we, you know, we, we, we seem to be, we seem to be in a timeline where open source AI is going to happen. Um, you know, right now, you know, what you, I think what you would say is it kind of lags the leading edge proprietary implementations by, you know, six months or something like that. Um, but, but I think that, you know, that's a good, if that's the status quo that continues, I think that would be a very good status quo.

• 1:44:29John Coogan?

  What are the rough edges that we need to kind of sand down when we're thinking about Chinese open source models specifically? Is it we need to do some fine tuning on top of them to add back free speech? Or do we need to watch for backdoors, it's phone in home if it runs into this specific thing? The Chinese open source thing, it was remarkable because I feel like it really does accelerate the pace of innovation because everyone gets to see, oh, this is how reasoning works. I think that's great. At the same time, it made me very, it made me much more appreciative of AI safety research and capability research and actually being able to interpret what's going on and say definitively, this model is going to behave weird in this weird way, like the Manchurian Candidate problem. We haven't found any of that, but it certainly seems like something we'd want to keep an eye on.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  But from your perspective, like what are the, what are the risks that we need to be aware of going into a world where China is really pushing hard into open source?

• 1:45:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, there's two, there's two, and you identified them, but let's, let's, let's talk about both of them. So the phone, so the phone home thing is the, is the easy one, which is you can put up, you know, you can packet sniff, you know, a network and you can tell when the thing is doing that. And you, and plus you can go, you can go in the code and you can see what is doing that. And so you can validate, you can validate that that's either happening or not happening. And I think that, you know, that's important. But, you know, I think people are gonna, people are gonna, are gonna figure that out. You, you can kind of get that problem practically. The, the, the bigger issue is we have this term in the field right now called open weights. And open weights is a loaded term. It uses the open term from open source, but of course with open source, the thing is you can actually read the code.

• 1:46:02Marc Andreessen?

  You know, with open weights, you have, you know, just a giant file full of numbers, as you said, that you can't really interpret. And then what you don't, what you don't have, what most, what most of the open source, open weights models don't have, including, you know, deep seek specifically, what they don't have is they don't have open data, right? Or open corpus, right? So you, you can't actually see the training data that went, went into them. And of course, you know, most of the people building models are kind of obscuring what that, you know, what that training data is in various ways. And, and so when you get an open weight model, you know, the good news is the, the, the software source is open. The good news is you can run it on your machine, you can verify that it doesn't phone home, but you don't actually know what's happening inside the wave. And so I think that that is going to be a bigger and bigger issue, which is like, okay,

• 1:46:43Marc Andreessen?

  how the thing behaves like, yeah, what what has it actually been trained to do? And what restrictions or directives has it been given in the training? You know, that are embedded in the weights that you need to be able to see. You know, this is, I would say, this is coming up as sort of, I would say, a global issue. You know, which, you know, we worry about when these models come from China. Other countries worry when these models come from the US. Which is right. So one of the one of the phrases you'll hear when you talk to people kind of outside the US is kind of this this phrase people are kicking around, which is not my weights, not my culture.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:11Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right. Or by the way, for that matter, not my ways, not my laws.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:15Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Which is like, okay, like, what actually is this thing going to do? Right. And to your point, the Chinese models, for example, might, you know, never criticize, you know, communism or something. I can tell you, the American models have all kinds of constraints also.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:29Marc Andreessen?

  Uh, right, implemented, you know, usually by a very specific kind of person at a very specific location in the US. Um, and so, you know, I think that this is this is a general issue and we're going to have to see basically people's tolerance levels. Being willing to run open weights models where they don't fundamentally have access to the data. And then correspondingly, I think what we'll see is more open source developers also doing open corpus, open data. So you can see what's actually in them.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Obviously, open source is very important in terms of just distributing intelligence broadly. Giving people the ability to run their own models and really fine tune them and have control. There's also the big push just to make frontier models and high capability models free. One model is you charge for the premium, you give the free away. It's a freemium model. That's what we're seeing at most of the labs right now. There's also this kind of specter on the horizon of potentially putting ads in L L Ms. And what that would do to the world, Jordy got in a little dust up with Mark Cuban on the timeline. Deciding whether or not it would be a net good to put advertising in L L Ms. What might happen that might be bad there? What do you have a take?

• 1:48:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my my point broadly was that ads have been an incredible way to make a variety of products and services online free. And just saying like default, just no ads would would potentially, you know, be incredibly destructive. But yeah, curious your framework.

• 1:48:56Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I should start by saying like whenever I personally use an internet service, I always try to buy the premium version of it that doesn't have ads.

• 1:49:04Marc Andreessen?

  Right, and so if I can like live personally inside an ad-free universe and pay for it, like that's great. And I'll freely admit, you know, whatever level of, you know, hypocrisy or incongruence, you know, kind of results from that.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  No, the point is choice. The point is choice.

• 1:49:17Marc Andreessen?

  Well, the point is exactly what you said, affordability. So the problem is, if you really want to get to five, if you want to get to a billion and then five billion people, you can't do that with a paid offering. Like it just, at any sort of reasonable price point, it's just not possible. The, you know, global per capita GDP is not high enough for that. People don't have enough income for that, at least today. And so if you want to get to, you know, if you want the Google, if you want the Google search engine, or the Facebook social app, or the whatever AI, you know, frontier AI model to be available to five billion people for free, you need to have a business model, you need to have an indirect business model, and as is the obvious one. And so I do think if, you know, if you take some principled stand against ads, I think you unfortunately are also taking a stand against, against, against broad access, just

• 1:50:02Marc Andreessen?

  in the way the world works today. And then, and then, look, the other, the other really salient question is, you know, the same question that the companies like Google and Facebook have been dealing with for a long time, which is, are ads purely destructive or negative to the user experience, or are they actually, if done properly, are they actually either neutral or even positive? Right? And this was something that, you know, Google, I think to their credit, figured out very early, which is, you know, a well-targeted ad at a specifically relevant point in time is actually content. Like, it actually enhances the experience, right? Because it is the obvious case. You're searching on a product, there's an ad, you can buy the product, you click to buy the product, that was actually a useful piece of functionality.

• 1:50:37Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, can you, can you have ads or other things that are like ads or look like ads, you know, different kinds of referrals, you know, mechanisms or whatever, can you have them in such a way that they're actually additive to the, to the product experience? And you could imagine, just like with searching, with social networking, you could imagine lots of examples of that. People will, you know, the people will, you know, they'll whine or howl at lots of different ways, but I think, you know, I think that hasn't been a bad outcome overall. And I think that, I think it's entirely possible that that's what, what happens with, with these models as well.

• 1:51:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Kind of similar kind of question, what should be legal, kind of trying to create legal frameworks on a number of issues with AI. There's been a number of IP cases that have been working their way through the courts. What can labs use to train models, et cetera? There's been some good outcomes recently. Sam also was talking about how a lot of people are using AI as like a confidant, like a, you know, a friend, things like that. And he mentioned that currently your chats are not privileged. They can be used in a lawsuit or other situations. How optimistic are you that our sort of legal system in the US can get some of these issues

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  right where maybe it can't just be, you know, total free markets, kind of lawless, whatever goes?

• 1:51:58Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So in the case of training data, I think that there, I mean, there's a bunch of these copyright, you know, kind of lawsuits happening right now. There's, you know, the big New York Times opening I won, and there's, you know, been a bunch of others. Yeah, I think in that, for that particular problem, my guess is that problem ultimately has to be solved through legislation. It's ultimately a legislative question. The reason is because it goes to the nature of copyright law itself, you know, which is legislation. And of course, you know, the content industry is already claiming that, of course, you know, using copyrighted data to train, you know, without permission and without paying is sort of, you know, they believe illegal on its face, you know, due to violation of copyright law. The counterargument to that, which, you know, which we believe is, well, it's not copying, right? There's a distinction between training and copying, just like in the real world, there's a distinction between reading a book and copying the book, you know, as a person.

• 1:52:43Marc Andreessen?

  And so there's going to need, I think, you know, the courts are trying to grapple with that. There's a whole bunch of cases, there's jurisdictional questions, you know, probably ultimately Congress is going to have to figure out a, you know, figure out an answer on that. And by the way, the president has kind of, you know, thrown down that gauntlet in his, I think the speech he gave last week or two weeks ago, you know, where he said that, you know, Washington probably needs to deal with that as an issue. So that's one on the on the on the on the on the privacy thing. I think that that one feels like it's a Supreme Court thing to me. It feels like that's the kind of issue that has Supreme Court. And in other words, like whether, for example, your transcripts are considered your property and whether they're protected against, you know, warrantless search and seizure. And the observation I would make there is if you look at the march of technology over time. So

• 1:53:28Marc Andreessen?

  the Constitution has like very clear, you know, Fourth, Fifth Amendments, you know, very specific rights around the, you know, the things that are yours, you know, such as, you know, your home, you know, being in your home, you know, by the way, the thoughts in your head, right? You know, that the government can't just like come in and take, they can't, you know, they can't just come in and search your house without a warrant. You know, they can't like, you know, put you in a jail cell and beat you until you fess up. Like, you know, there are, you know, we have constitutional protections against the government being able to basically, you know, take information, you know, fundamentally, you know, as well as possessions. And then basically what happens is every time there's a new technology that creates a new kind of sort of, you know, thing that you own, you know, thing that's yours, thing that you would consider to be private, thing that you wouldn't want the government to be able to take without

• 1:54:13Marc Andreessen?

  a warrant, you know, out of the gate, law enforcement agencies just naturally go try to get those things because there are ways to solve crimes. And, you know, it feels like that that's a legal thing to do. And then basically the courts come in later and they, you know, rule one way or the other. And basically say, no, that that actually is also a thing that is protected against, you know, warrantless, for example, warrantless search, you know, or warrantless wiretapping. And so I feel like, you know, this is the latest of probably, I don't know, 20 of those over the last hundred years. And, you know, I don't know which way it'll go, but I think it's going to be a key thing because as you know, people are already telling these models, you know, lots, lots of things that they're, you know, that are very personal.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Okay, lightning round, quick questions. We're letting you get out of here in a couple minutes. We're in this age of spiky intelligence. Models are great at some things and then terrible at others. Where are you actually getting value out of AI right now? Where is it falling down for you? Where are you? How are you using AI day to day?

• 1:55:05Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I have two kind of, I don't know, barbell approach. One is for serious stuff. I love the deep research capabilities. And so, and I'm doing this in a bunch of models, but like the ability to basically say, I'm interested in this topic. And then I just, I just felt like, write me a book. And I, you know, I'm kind of hoping for the longest book I can get. I always tell it like, go longer, go longer, more sophisticated. You know, but the leading edge models now, they're getting up to like 30 page PDFs. You know, that are like completely well formulated, you know, basically long form, long form essays. You know, it's just like incredible richness and depth. And, you know, if it's 30 pages today, I'm sort of crossing my fingers it'll get to, you know, 300 pages coming up here in the next few years. And so I, you know, I'm able to basically have the thing generate enormous amounts of, of reading material with just like, I think incredible richness and depth and complexity.

• 1:55:49Marc Andreessen?

  And then, and then on the other side of the barbell is humor. And I've, I've posted some of these to my X feed over, over the last couple of years, but I think these models are already much funnier than people give them credit for.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:56:00Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I think, I think they're, they're actually quite highly entertaining. A while ago, I posted, I had-

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Specific, specific formats, like we know the B, B me, B Marc Andreessen, you know, that, that format's-

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Take a dip in my pool in my office.

• 1:56:16Marc Andreessen?

  They're really good. So they're really good at green text. That, that works really well, but the, the, for some reason, the ones I find hysterical are the, I have it write screenplays. You know, for like TV shows or, or plays or movies.

• 1:56:27Marc Andreessen?

  And I, I posted, I had it write a new season of the HBO Silicon Valley, you know, set 10 years later.

• 1:56:33Marc Andreessen?

  And I had it write like an entire, I had it write like 10, 10 scripts for a complete season. And of course I just said, you know, make it like Silicon Valley, except, you know, it's happening at, it is in 2021, it kind of peak woke. And I thought it was just, I think it's just, you know, I'll sit there at two in the morning and just like laughing my ass off at how funny this thing is. And so I, I think these things are actually, are actually already like extremely funny. They're extremely entertaining when they're, when they're, you know, when they're used in that way. And I, I do, I do enjoy that a lot and I generate a lot of those that I, that I don't post.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Stay in the group chats.

• 1:57:04Marc Andreessen?

  It's probably good.

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  They're your property.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, hopefully the fourth amendment holds on these.

• 1:57:10John Coogan?

  I have one last question.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  Go for it and then I've got one more.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  How do you get a job as a venture capitalist in 2025?

• 1:57:16Marc Andreessen?

  So I think, I mean, look, the best way, the best way to do it is to have a track record early as somebody who is like in the loop specifically on new product development. And so somebody who, you know, be like deeply in the trenches at one of these new companies and one of these spaces, you know, participate in the creation of a great new product and a great new company and, you know, really demonstrate that you know how to do that. You know, there's, there, you know, there are, there are great VCs who have not done that, but, you know, I think that is sort of a foundational skill set, you know, for working with the kinds of founders that, that you want to work with, who are going to, who, you know, are going to want you to have, you know, kind of very interesting things to say on that, as I think, you know, still the, the best way to do it.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, like feel the growth, be, immerse yourself in the growth, the, the, the, the aggressive growth environment, and then you'll be able to identify it when you see it from afar.

• 1:58:00Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Last question for me, state of M and A in your mind, how are you advising, you know, companies where you're on the board or just the portfolio broadly around what they should expect now and in the near future?

• 1:58:14Marc Andreessen?

  You mean in terms of whether you can get things approved?

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Basically, yeah.

• 1:58:19Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yes. So look, approval still, approval is not a slime dunk. There was, you know, there was a, I just saw there was a medical device company this morning, you know, where the, the acquisition was not allowed by the FTC. So, you know, there is still scrutiny. It's, you know, it's obviously a very different political regime in Washington, but, you know, this is, this is not an, you know, by their own statements, this is not an administration that believes in total laissez faire. M and A, and it definitely wants to, you know, in, in their view, maintain a, a very healthy level of, of market competition.

• 1:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How many, do you expect, do you expect certain companies to be negatively impacted by the Figma story, right? You have this deal gets blocked, successful, you know, IPO, Lina Khan is taking a victory lap. You know, many people are responding and, and joking, saying, you know, someone, Lina cuts off the arm of a pianist and they endure and can create a masterpiece and then, and so I expect, and then you look at the example with, you know, Roomba, I think it was, where, where Roomba had a deal with Amazon, it was blocked and, and the company has just been a shambles ever since. So my concern is that people look at Figma and say, you should be independent, you just figure it out.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Nothing can go wrong.

• 1:59:29Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of taking a victory lap was very disconcerting. Um, and for exactly the reason you said, which is survivorship bias. Um, right, which is you, you, you, you pick the one that worked out. And then, you know, it's the, it's the airplane, the red dots, the airplane.

• 1:59:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Marc Andreessen?

  You know, you, you, you ignore the 50 that are in the ground, uh, that you've never heard of. Um, and so that, that was very disconcerting because that, you know, it's sort of the central planning fallacy, which is like, we make centrally planned economic decisions. We have one example. Uh, you know, it's like in Europe, it's like, yeah, well, the, the bottle caps actually don't fall off the bottle. Right? Like, you know, it works.

• 2:00:02Marc Andreessen?

  Right? It's like, okay, but, but do you want to live in, you want to live in an economic regime in which that, you know, the government has dictated bottle cap design? The answer is clearly no. Uh, because the downside consequences.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Or even, even looking at that, uh, you know, the Chinese model, which is, you know, people can say they're picking winners, but to get to maybe picking a winner, you have this intense bloodbath of competition where, you know, teams need to rise to the top and sort of prove themselves before they get any of that real, like, you know, meaningful state benefit.

• 2:00:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. And so you just, you just, yeah, you just, you just have this adverse selection, uh, survivorship bias thing where you just, you, you don't pay attention to all the collateral damage. So I, I, I do think that mentality is like super, it's super, super dangerous. Um, and, and so, yeah, look, I, I think companies just have to be very thoughtful about this, both the acquirers and the acquirers. Uh, you know, and the, the big thing is if you're selling a company, like you just need to anticipate that you might, you might not get it through. And if you don't, they're sort of, they're like, okay, number one, is there like a big enough breakup fee, right? Are, are you going to get, you know, paid for the, you know, paid for the, the, you know, the damage that you're going through? Um, you know, and, and how is that structured on the one hand? And then two is, yeah, look, do you have the kind of company culture that's going to be able to withstand that? Um, and, and is your business, you know, strong, strong enough to be able, to be able to get through that? And it's, it, it is a real risk and something worth, you know, taken very seriously.

• 2:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And that's, that, that's why it felt emotional. We were at Nicie last week. It felt emotional this, that, that the, the Figma team was, was able to like effectively just like restart the business and say, like, we're, we're, we're taking this all the way. So.

• 2:01:32Marc Andreessen?

  If you talk, uh, you have to think about it. If you talk to any really successful company, what they'll tell you is, yeah, over the years, we have these like crucible moments in which like we almost died, right? But we like pulled together and we pulled it off. And then that became like, you know, one of these central kind of mythical events in the history of the company that we always refer to and of like, my God, we got through that and we're so strong and tough and we've been forged in fire and now we can do anything. And it's like, yeah, that's great. And then there's 50 other companies that have those crucible moments, blew up and died. So yeah, it's all of the lessons learned on this stuff. They're all conditional on like survival. And so they, these things need to be taken incredibly seriously, you know, which, which the great CEOs do.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining. We'll let you get back to your day. We already kept you five minutes over. Next time we have to book five hours because this is fantastic. I got 10% of the way through.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Twenty four hour TV.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we would love to have you again.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Marathon.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Enjoy the rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon, Mark. Have a good day. Bye.

• 2:02:26Marc Andreessen?

  That's good. Thank you, guys.

• 2:02:27John Coogan?

  Thank you. Up next, we have Harley from Shopify coming in the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Welcome to the stream, Harley. Get that gong ready, Jordy. What happened?

• 2:02:42Harley Finkelstein?

  Talk to us.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Harley, how are you doing?

• 2:02:43Harley Finkelstein?

  The update's good. I just finished watching you guys with, with Mark. It was, it was an amazing interview. It was really great.

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  He's fantastic.

• 2:02:51Harley Finkelstein?

  Before I get into Shopify, you guys, you guys mentioned the emotion of being at the NICU with Figma yesterday, I think, right? So we, we are 41 quarters now, and maybe 42 quarters post IPO. I think it's emotional for anybody. I mean, obviously, that story is incredibly emotional because of what happened with, with, you know, with Adobe and all that. But I think it's, it's emotional for anyone who, who goes there. Although I do think, you know, you'd said that is, is that going to, you know, create some momentum for more companies to do it independently? I don't know if that's going to be the main catalyst or not, but I said this last time when I was on, on your show, I want to say it again, for those companies that are out there, there is this perception that like, the public markets are something

• 2:03:31Harley Finkelstein?

  to avoid as much as possible. I, you know, 42 quarters in, let me just say, like, one of the best things Shopify did was, was, was go public. It's, it's made us a better company. It's allowed us to, to be a lot more transparent. I think there's like this hygiene thing that that these quarterly, the quarterly reports do. So I don't know, I don't know how to, where else to do that other than a show like this. But this is my endorsement that if your company is ready, the team is ready, the business is ready, accessing the public markets should not be this thing that is like, if I don't get acquired, I guess I'll have to take the IPO route. It's been an amazing experience for us.

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Forty one quarters.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, amazing run. Advice for Dylan Field. How can he make the first 41 quarters of Figma their public debut a success?

• 2:04:20Harley Finkelstein?

  Oh, wow. I know Dylan, he's an amazing founder, a great, great entrepreneur. So I don't know if I much to teach him, other than say that, you know, we looked at the, we looked at the IPO as sort of like, we actually called it game day, like we were graduating from the minor leagues to the major leagues. And I actually think that type of, that metaphor actually works really well. It's not like you're done. In fact, it just like, you're just sort of graduating to the next step. The thing that I think, I, on the earnings call today, I spent a lot of time talking about this and getting to the results in a moment. This idea of like, providing these like breadcrumbs to the public, to the street, to your, you know, you have this huge book of investors, including retail, but you have these 10 or 20

• 2:05:01Harley Finkelstein?

  funds that if you're lucky, and we've been lucky, I assume Dylan will have the same fate, they kind of hold your stock, you know, for a very long time and making sure you leave enough breadcrumbs so that they can anticipate where things are going to provide some consistency, I think is really, really important. So, I don't know, like becoming a trusted version of Figma in the public markets is a much better way to, I think, do things than just becoming like a different version of Figma. I think the reason that Figma is so successful is because they understand their culture, their product, their customer base. I think this is just sort of the next phase for them as opposed to like, okay, we're done. Let's now change the company, become something different. And in sort of this era of founder-led companies

• 2:05:42Harley Finkelstein?

  and founders being allowed and permissible to run their companies over the long period of time, I think that works much better.

• 2:05:48Jordi Hays?

  One thing that stood out to me is Figma was launching new features on the day of the IPO, which to me just sent this signal that we're still the same company that care like-

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  Dylan was replying to the customer support posts on the IPO day.

• 2:06:03Harley Finkelstein?

  It's amazing. I mean, look, that is like, we do the same thing. There's, there's something different about founder-led companies. And with that, less about Figma, more about Shopify.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:06:13Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, so obviously, you know, we had our results this morning.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Give us the news.

• 2:06:18Harley Finkelstein?

  The news is Q2 GMV was 87 billion. That's up 31%.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:06:22Harley Finkelstein?

  Revenue was 2.7 billion.

• 2:06:27Harley Finkelstein?

  Free cash flow was 422 million, which is 60% of revenue. So, back to the consistency point. We've now had 11 consecutive quarters of positive free cash flow, eight consecutive quarters of double-digit free cash flow. And it's, you know, this is Shopify operating on all cylinders. And, and yeah, I think that it was, it was a really good quarter. I think there was like a bunch of these interesting- Uncertainties that the street had tariffs, de minimis, macro. But our merchants, you know, did disproportionately better than the overall e-commerce market, which is really cool. And then I got to announce some like amazing brands, you know, Michael Kors, Canada Goose, Starbucks. These incredible companies that are now coming to Shopify. Burton came, Millet came.

• 2:07:13Harley Finkelstein?

  So really cool to also be able to talk about some of the big brands that are now joining Shopify too.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Break down some of those concerns kind of one by one. I'm sure you did, but tariffs, de minimis, you know, the market broadly. How have you guys been kind of approaching that? And, and.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  How did you, how do you think you got through it? Is it just that it was always, you know, kind of like a lot of these, a lot of these political changes, it feels like really crazy. And then it rolls back and it's actually fine. Is that the right narrative? Or is it the actual like adaptation and agility of both Shopify and the merchants to actually work around a changing environment?

• 2:07:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's a team effort too, because each individual brand has to say, hey, we're facing some headwinds here. And we have to figure this out. We have to navigate this and, you know, just find a way.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:02Harley Finkelstein?

  It actually carries all the way to consumer because the consumer also is like, well, what if I lose my job? What if I, you know, have, have less disposable income? Now do I have to select, do I have to make choices and trade offs of, of what I buy, what I don't? I mean, you know, just to kind of at the high level, we are not seeing signs of slowdown. I'll just start with that. We can look at data actually through early August, we're August 6th today. So not obviously not, not half the month, but, but certainly the first week of August. And, and generally we're not seeing any, any slowdown. The factors we monitor at Shopify are consumer spending, household savings, tariffs, foreign exchange trends, and then supply chains. And generally. We're not seeing nearly what I think a lot of us were concerned about.

• 2:08:47Harley Finkelstein?

  The other thing that I think is interesting is that I mentioned like Starbucks and Burton Can of Goose joining Shopify. One of the interesting things that happened that I don't think we fully anticipated, I didn't anticipate this, is that because of this uncertainty, a lot of these bigger companies were beginning to be like, they were rethinking whether or not their tech stack was future-proofed. Like, am I spending too much money on technology? Is my technology partner and commerce, in our case, platform, are they future-proofed? Like, I'm hearing all, you know, you think about like, you know, think about like a metaphorical board meeting at one of these very large retailers. Someone is going to raise their hand and say, how are you guys thinking about AI inside the company? And what about like agentic commerce? And so I think one of the neat parts for us to act as a tailwind has been that a lot

• 2:09:32Harley Finkelstein?

  of the big brands that historically said, we, our stack is not great, but we're fine with it, are now looking and saying like, all right, this is ridiculous. It's like duct taped together. It's not future-proofed. We're not able to, you know, we don't even, like, our provider doesn't even know what agentic commerce is, and that's leading a lot of brands to come to Shopify. The thing that we've, I think, you know, we were around in 2010, and so sort of at the tail end of the global financial crisis, certainly pandemic obviously was, had a lot of changes too. What we try to do is not necessarily, you know, forecast what any organization, any administration is going to do from a policy perspective, but rather figure out, okay,

• 2:10:14Harley Finkelstein?

  if any of these things happen, how do we set up merchants on Shopify so that they're better off than merchants that are not? So in the pandemic, for example, like, we didn't know how long the pandemic was going to last, but we immediately were like, okay, there's a bunch of these like restaurants, for example, that are now going to have to do some sort of like delivery service. We're not, we don't, restaurants is not one of the core verticals that Shopify has ever been in, but like, let's just make sure that we help them, and perhaps they end up going to accessories later on and they'll eventually stay with Shopify. Or, you know, a bunch of physical retailers now have to move online very quickly, what can we do to actually help them do so at this incredible clip? So that's kind of how we look at these, these. These times of uncertainty, which is just simply prepare merchants on Shopify. So maybe they don't want to do a tariff calculator.

• 2:10:57Harley Finkelstein?

  Maybe they don't need to do tariff calculator, but if they decide to do so and it's valuable to them, let's make sure it's embedded in the product and they can simply just just opt into it. So that's kind of the way we do that as opposed to, you know, you can read all, you can read as much information. You can read every paper and listen to every interview from the administration as possible. You still may not know what's happening. And so rather than do that, let's just anticipate all these things could happen. Let's just make sure our merchants are prepared.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  I'm not sure if I'm like over storytelling here, but Burton, is that a full circle moment for the company? Tell me about that.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Tell me about the significance of that.

• 2:11:33Harley Finkelstein?

  The significance of it is that, you know, Why did it take them so long? What were they doing? Oh, man. Okay. So Canada Goose, Danny, who's, I don't know if you know, you guys know Canada Goose, right?

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:43Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay. So Danny Reese, incredible, incredible entrepreneur, one of the greatest retail entrepreneurs on the planet. He's a friend of mine. He's a Canadian guy. Canada Goose and Shopify are two Canadian, you know, stories, success stories. And I've been trying to get them on for a while. They finally came on too. But Burton is really relevant because the history of Shopify is that when Toby moved to Canada in 2004, he couldn't get a job because he was, you know, a new immigrant and no one would hire him. So he ended up deciding to start a business, which was, you know, if you're an immigrant, that's okay. And he decided he would sell snowboards on the internet because he was in Canada and he loved to snowboard. And he couldn't find any good software. And so he wrote, he wrote the software to sell these snowboards. The store was called Snow Devil.

• 2:12:25Harley Finkelstein?

  And that software that he wrote for Snow Devil would become what is now Shopify. And so the fact that Burton, one of the most important snowboard companies on the planet is now using Shopify is really, really cool. And but I love you. I mean, I spend, if you listen to the earnings calls, I spend quite a bit of time on these calls talking about some of the larger brands coming on. Part of it is that I'm very excited by these brands like, you know, I love the fact that these, weird, but like Hunter Douglas, Birkenstock, Mattel, these are brands. Hunter Douglas was created, I think in 1919. Birkenstock was created in the 1700s and, and I think, yeah, so Mattel was created in 1945. I like that these very large iconic retailers are selecting Shopify. The other reason I like to talk about these brands-

• 2:13:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's significant too because there's some, certainly some people living under a rock and early on Shopify was loved by small merchants that were just starting out. And I'm sure, I'm sure you went through a bunch of calls with investors and things like that over the years, which was, yeah, it's great, but like you guys just have the like long tail of enterprise. You're never, you're never going to really dominate with the retailers that matter. And like clearly that's, that hasn't been true for a while, but you still kind of have to just like say it over and over and over and over.

• 2:13:42Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. So I'm just, I'm just repeating it over and over again. The other thing that was, that we announced today was that we now have 12% of e-commerce market share in the US. So if you think about it from a checkout perspective, um, yeah, that's, thank you.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  That's really good advice for entrepreneurs over there. Just go get 12% of the entire market. You'll probably be good.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people say, I just, I just, all I want is 1%.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  No, even a little bit higher. Go for 12%.

• 2:14:03Harley Finkelstein?

  12% is pretty good, which I think makes us the second largest checkout in the, in the US on the, on the internet after Amazon.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you, um, how do you think about sale cycles? Cause for someone like a Burton, I imagine the first conversations there, like that feels like this whale that like is just a natural fit for the product, but it's not the kind of thing that was closed in like a quarter. So like, how do you, how do you kind of even work with the team on that front to understand that like, we're actually playing and, you know, ideally we close all the customers we want to close next quarter, but realistically sometimes great partnerships take time to come together and you guys almost have the luxury of like your 41 quarters in, you're probably thinking about, you know, you're, you're thinking, you know, actually able to think, you know, long-term, um, but-

• 2:14:56Harley Finkelstein?

  In some cases, it's, it's, it's actually- It's not necessarily based on size or like GMV band, but we have merchants on Shopify that are doing hundreds of millions of dollars of GMV and they have like, I'm not joking, like they have like 12 employees.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:12Harley Finkelstein?

  And then we have merchants that have, you know, thousands of employees and are doing far less in GMV. So it's not necessarily about the size of merchant. It has to do, I think, with two things. One is complexity in terms of how much, you know, technical debt and baggage do they have, meaning how much duct tape do they have to undo to migrate over? And then the second part is like, you know, what, how motivated are they to move over? I remember when Emily Weiss left Glossier, Kyle Leahy replaced her. Kyle's an incredible CEO. Kyle came in to run Glossier and Kyle called and said, you know, we're a cosmetics

• 2:15:53Harley Finkelstein?

  company. We have this incredibly, you know, complex technology stack. We have tons of people running e-commerce. Do we need this? And we looked at it and we're like, no, we can help you. And I think the Glossier migration, again, that was, that was a, that was a homegrown stack. And we said that we can help you.

• 2:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was at, that was at an era where investors.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Started as a blog, by the way.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, yes, but also investors at that time wanted to invest in consumer brands that had an insane CTO. You know, it was like, it was a point, it was a badge of honor to be like, no, we're not using off the shelf software. Like we have, we're running on our own tech stack. We're a technology company. Give us a technology multiple.

• 2:16:30Harley Finkelstein?

  Well, and then exactly, you got, I mean, you said it, right? It's a technology multiple. They're like, well, we're not really this, we're this other thing as well.

• 2:16:36Jordi Hays?

  They're like, sorry, Harley, I can't switch because if we don't have our own tech stack, like my multiple is going to get cut.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  I talked to one CTO at a D to C company that they didn't just build their own e-commerce stack. They built their own Salesforce. They built their own CRM and email, email management.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  And the good thing, the good thing is that everybody realized that you can build your own tech stack and you're still not going to get a software tech multiple.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  And your cost is going to be.

• 2:17:02Harley Finkelstein?

  Exactly. And not just, just not your cost, but just talk about your efficiency. I mean, you know, back to the 12% market share in e-commerce. There is no check. That is more performant than Shopify's checkout, simply because we have more data in which to make better decisions with. So even if you do have the most technical team, building the most incredible technology stack, you still don't have the economy of scale that you can get by being part of it. That's the weird part that people miss about Shopify. That's the reason why the 12% number is, I think, valuable. If you sort of put together, if you were to assume for a second that we were one single retailer instead of millions of individual stores, we would be the second largest online retailer in America. As part of that, you get, you are entitled to incredible economies of scale.

• 2:17:44Harley Finkelstein?

  So even if you can do it yourself, even if you can do it in a cost-effective way, you're still missing out on, like, you know, we announced the Agentic stuff, which we should talk about yesterday. You can go do your own deals with every single agent that's available, or we can just do it for you. We're already doing it for millions of others. Might as well throw in with us. Your point, though, on the multiple is interesting. Something shifted, I think. At some point, I don't know what year it happened, but at some point, the flex of, oh, I built my own e-commerce stack, stopped being a flex, and started to look like, why did you do that?

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  2016, you know, level write downs. That's what happened.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  You basically start looking at it. It's like, wait, you're spending $3 million a year on this technology team, and that is like cutting, that could be cutting, I don't know, safely like $30 million off of your like ultimate enterprise value.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  I was running an e-commerce company in that era, and I went around and I, and I went and I did, I looked at all the different companies, all the leading D to C companies, looked at their headcount on LinkedIn, how many people do they have in their technical organization, what's the average comp? And I found out the amount of money that they were spending as a function of revenue, and some of the companies were spending 10% of revenue on just building e-commerce software. And I was like, and so at that time, I was like, oh, you know, we were on Shopify Plus, and I was like benchmarking. I was like, okay, so we're like an order of magnitude more efficient, but we could be even more efficient. We need even less people. Like, it was just like, we should be focusing on the marketing. We should be focusing on the brand and.

• 2:19:17Harley Finkelstein?

  There's this great PE firm you guys. probably know it called El Catterton.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:19:22Harley Finkelstein?

  Yes, El Catterton is amazing. Michael Chu runs it. It's like Michael Chu and and the RNO family. Bernard RNO is involved there, too. And Michael is an incredible investor, but he's, you know, he's acquired a bunch of merchants, some on Shopify, some are not. And one of the things he's recently told me is that in some of those meetings where he's about to, you know, where he brings it's sort of their first meeting, once they've been acquired by them, he says, OK, well, now when are you migrating over to Shopify? Like, at some point, it flipped from being, oh, I can, I have all this opportunity because I can build everything myself to, I actually think you should be like, do what you do best, which is you're an incredible cosmetics brand. Go do that really well.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Did stables come up on the earnings call at all?

• 2:20:03Harley Finkelstein?

  I've brought them up a lot many times.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  What's your updated thinking? How do they fit into the kind of Shopify ecosystem in the near term, long term?

• 2:20:14Harley Finkelstein?

  Sorry, you said staples or stable?

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. Stable coins.

• 2:20:17Harley Finkelstein?

  Oh, I thought you said staples. Staples is a merchant on Shopify.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  Stable coins, like it feels like we're in the, they're now legal. There's a public company. They're out there. But when are we going to see people paying for it? I'm sure that there's integrations. I mean, a decade ago, you could pay for a shop, you could do a Shopify checkout with Bitcoin with the Coinbase integration and a couple others.

• 2:20:40Harley Finkelstein?

  Since 2012.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  Since 2012, I remember, because it was when Coinbase started in Y C.

• 2:20:45Harley Finkelstein?

  Exactly. Fifty Cent had SMS by 50, 50 Cent was trying to compete.

• 2:20:49John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:20:50Harley Finkelstein?

  Beats by Dre.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:20:52Harley Finkelstein?

  It was like, it was a big battle. Anyways, we had both, I think we had both of them on and 50 Cent actually, you know, I think was one of the first merchants to actually accept Bitcoin. I don't know if anyone did it, but but look, I think in that era, it was really, that was really about speculation, not about utility. The way that we think about stable coins in general, and I'll get into USDC in particular, is that anything that we can do that can bring more flexibility to commerce is a very good thing. I think stable coins, USDC in particular, it just gives merchants more choices, more security, and it offers much faster settlement. Now, the other thing it solves, which is not getting discussed, but it's important, is that it solves like a real problem, which is cross border. Cross border is now becoming this.

• 2:21:36Harley Finkelstein?

  It's not becoming a feature of modern retail. Like this, like default global is how most modern, the best merchants, the best companies I know are default global. They don't necessarily look at these geographic, physical bounds as, as different markets. It's like, well, if you sell to the US, why wouldn't you also sell to Canada? It's effect, you know, it's the same continent. And so I think with stablecoins, this idea of offering a payment method that combines like the transparency with a blockchain with the speed and a price stability of a major currency is really, really valuable. And then in terms of like, you know, doing it with, with a trusted partner with us, it was Coinbase, which we love.

• 2:22:16Harley Finkelstein?

  It means that you can actually bring all these like, you know, very familiar commerce features like authorization and refunds. But you don't actually need a new wallet. They're like, part of what I think is scary about this type of stablecoin is like, well, do I have to now, you know, create a new account? And like, what is the friction involved? And I think this, the way that we're looking at it is that merchants get paid in dollars. There's no new wallet created. If there's no added friction, but it's a seamless, flexible, safe transaction. So I, again, it is not about, it's not a speculation, it's more about utility. I think once, I think it'll be a slow sort of increase in penetration.

• 2:23:00Harley Finkelstein?

  And then eventually there'll be a cohort of, of consumers and a cohort of merchants that are just like, this is, this is so much better.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Can we shift to AI? I know that you have some stuff that we should review. I also want to ask about shopping in LLMs and then how that flows through. There's the potential of ads and there's potential of the checkout happening, you know, or, or, you know, I send my agent out to purchase it. Just give me the updated thinking on how AI is change, or how AI is changing commerce.

• 2:23:33Harley Finkelstein?

  So if you think about.

• 2:23:38Harley Finkelstein?

  If you think about it from a sort of a model perspective, think about Shopify as being the hub in the middle. This is like retail operating system where you have your inventory, you have your analytics, you fulfill orders from there, you have your customer data, everything is sort of at this hub. And you sort of think about like the main spoke off that hub is has been e-commerce for us. And then a second spoke, obviously, was like point of sale at physical retail, which is one of our largest growing segments. And then you can sort of think about new spokes. Another spoke, for example, is like social commerce. We integrate with like Instagram, we integrate with YouTube, we have a Roblox integration, a Spotify integration. So, one of the things that we think a lot about is, the future of retail is not going to be this weird binary, online versus offline. It's going to be where every surface area where consumers spend their time. And for most

• 2:24:22Harley Finkelstein?

  merchants, most of the time, you know, the Roblox integration is not going to be their main thing, although, you know, Fenty Beauty, one of our brands, is doing really well with this Roblox integration. They have figured out that their consumers are spending time. And there's actually a physical, they have, sorry, like it looks like a physical store inside of the Roblox universe. Roblox, by the way, has like hundreds of millions of monthly actives. Yeah, we were talking about it earlier.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  They have, I think it's, we talked about it earlier, 20-plus million DAUs in the US and

• 2:24:50Harley Finkelstein?

  That's unbelievable.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Under 18, under 18.

• 2:24:53Harley Finkelstein?

  It's like every, everyone. Okay, so like, think about it from like, you know, the perspective of a direct-to-consumer cosmetics brand, where their core demographic is that age group. Now, it's a new place, and there's no competition, because no one else is, like, Fenty created a store inside of Roblox. You look next door, unlike their store in Soho, there's no one else. So, we think about this idea of like, these different sort of spokes being different channels. We think that agential commerce is very likely going to be a new one of those spokes. And so, in the last 12 months or so, we began to build Infrastructure that allows these AI conversations, basically to bring native shopping inside of these AI conversations.

• 2:25:36Harley Finkelstein?

  So we launched three things, and I'll go through all three because you guys are technical and you have a technical crowd. So the first one is catalog. We launched it in this past quarter. So catalog effectively helps agents to search and to sort of surface exactly what customers want in seconds. It looks across all of Shopify's products, every SKU on Shopify, and then it uses large language models to categorize them based on like, you know, metadata and the types of products they are. It also creates sort of this like standard product data at these massive volumes, and then we package it in these, like, basically these search APIs. So if you are, if you have an agent, you simply can ingest the search API and have the entire catalog of Shopify merchants.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  And is this tech buying an MCP server or is this API that's just accessible?

• 2:26:26Harley Finkelstein?

  So you can do an MCP server with like UI components, or you can do it through an API?

• 2:26:30John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:26:32Harley Finkelstein?

  The second piece is universal cart. This is new. So it's part of what we call Checkout Kit, which I'll get into in a second, but effectively it holds items from multiple stores in one single spot. So as you're sort of having a conversation with your agent, let's say you're going on a camping trip, for example, you may want a tent, but you may want a sleeping bag, those are different stores. You may not be ready to check out immediately, but you also, you want to hold all these things in one single cart. And then that all feeds back into Checkout Kit, which we launched last year, which lets partners embed merchants' checkout directly in their agent. And it has Shop Pay built into it, but it, you know, it's the best converting checkout on the internet, which is ours, and now we're effectively giving it to these agents.

• 2:27:13Harley Finkelstein?

  What we announced yesterday was that now partners, any agent can actually theme the Checkout Kit so that it matches the application's look and feel. So it doesn't feel like some weird, you know, iframe that pops out that looks like it's a third party. So it actually looks natively integrated, and then, you know, merchants get the tools that they need. They'll get address verification, they get fulfillments. So, and actually, in the case of Checkout Kit, Microsoft's co-pilot is already using it. So the benefit is sort of threefold. The first is for consumers. Now they can get these like personalized conversational shopping experiences. From the merchant perspective, merchants on Shopify are now going to have a new place to get discovered across all these AI platforms.

• 2:27:56Harley Finkelstein?

  But from the partner perspective, which I think is the most interesting, is that they don't have to build the complex parts of commerce. They get access to millions of these merchants through this MCP catalog. And they also get the best converting checkout. And we think if this does become a place that is a predominant or a popular surface area for commerce, it means that merchants on Shopify will be very well positioned. And what's neat about it is if you think about how a lot of those, you know, like if you were trying to go on a camping trip now, you'd probably do it in some sort of search, Google or something like that. The products you're going to find are likely going to be based on, a lot of them at least may be sponsored.

• 2:28:41Harley Finkelstein?

  Where the more you pay, the more likely you are to show up. Whereas in sort of the agent world, in sort of a gente commerce world, it's actually more of a relevancy. Like it has all this history of everything you've ever talked to it and said to it. It knows that you're price sensitive for certain things, but not for other things. So it may, it may turn out to be a really new sort of vector for commerce. And we want to be at the center of it.

• 2:29:06Jordi Hays?

  How do you, what's your kind of looking out into the future commerce within LLMs? Are you bullish on paid placements? Are you bullish on referrals? I was obviously like in the same thing as, you know, in the influencer world, like consumers deserve to know what's an ad and what's kind of an organic mention and all that kind of thing. There'd been a debate recently around, you know, should ads be banned entirely from LLMs? And I generally don't agree with that just because I think, you know, these tools should be broadly accessible and ads are potentially a way to do that. But the other thing would be ultimately like do LLMs,

• 2:29:48Jordi Hays?

  would LLMs at some point earn referral fees from merchants? I mean, all this stuff is like extremely complicated and can have, you know, positive effects, negative effects, but what's your framework?

• 2:30:02Harley Finkelstein?

  Uh, it's that, that, that I think is the $64 question. I, I, I'm not sure. I don't know exactly. Because part of the reason that I think agentic shopping is so interesting to so many people is because it feels more democratized.

• 2:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:17Harley Finkelstein?

  It feels more based on it has a great understanding of who you are. Therefore, you know, you guys started the show with me today saying like, I'm gonna have my agent go and buy me a bunch of stuff. I want my agent to go, if, if that is, if that is how I am purchasing in the future, I want my agent to go buy things that I actually really like, not the thing that my agent is getting paid for.

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. When I, when I think about the use case here is like, I have certain brands and I only buy their T-shirts. And if I could just be in an LLM and say like, hey, I want to get some new T-shirts. Can you like, and they're like, cool. Here's the T-shirts you normally buy. Would you like, and I'll be like, I'll take five white T-shirts and five black T-shirts. And that's just done. Like, that's amazing because I don't want to be navigating around and, you know, it's just like removing that friction, which is kind of the, I mean, has been the history of Shopify. So all these new products.

• 2:31:09Harley Finkelstein?

  If you, if you think about, you know, I think Toby told me this, that like, if you want to look at, you look out to where technology is going, look at what like rich people currently do, and then everyone else will be able to get that feature. So you go back to this idea of like personal shoppers. If your personal shopper is constantly selling you the thing, or trying to sell you the thing that they make the most commission on, it may work once or twice. Eventually you'll stop going to that store.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna look in the mirror. You're gonna look in the mirror.

• 2:31:32Harley Finkelstein?

  You're like, dude, this is like, this is like some gold chain or something. I wear a black T-shirt. You know, like, I know you're getting paid more for this gold T-shirt, but like, I wear a James Purse black T-shirt every day of my life. And James Purse is a great Shopify merchant and a great entrepreneur himself.

• 2:31:45Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:46Harley Finkelstein?

  He doesn't advertise. Doesn't advertise. So like, so like, he's not going to participate in that. But if it knows that I really love James Purse black T-shirts, it has to be highly contextualized. So that, that is a really good question. I think the way that we look at it is like this. There is a, there is, there is a decent chance that agentic shopping will become very relevant for some segment of the market. Therefore, if we want to qualify and re-qualify to be the merchant that reach to operating system for all these incredible brands, we have to be there in the same way that we have to be in social commerce. And social commerce, you know, for some people, it is a really, really important channel for them. You know, my mom is, I don't think my mom has ever bought something on social commerce. She still goes into a physical store.

• 2:32:31Harley Finkelstein?

  So we, we're not going to predict, like, our, our, our job is to make it so that wherever you want to sell, you should be able to do so really easily.

• 2:32:38Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be absolutely wild when you think about, I mean, this, this experience where you're chatting with a model and it surfaces you a product and you can ask it, well, what do people like me think about it? And it like automatically pulls, you know, reviews from relevant people. It pulls what your favorite influencer thought about the product. It, it surfaces other brands, like it, it's going to be incredibly powerful. And I think at, at best, it's like a personal shopper that's aligned with you, not, you know, trying to maximize every purchase or a great sales rep who's, if you're working with, you know, a, a, a sales rep at, at a retail store, they're not fixated on like, how do I maximize this, the value of this cart, right?

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  They're thinking about like this sort of long-term relationship with the customer. So very exciting. I'm excited to see what people build.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for hopping on and chatting with us.

• 2:33:30Harley Finkelstein?

  Always fun to be here.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Always so much fun.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic work.

• 2:33:33Harley Finkelstein?

  You guys are the best. I love your show, love what you guys are doing, and I, I like that this is becoming a, a new routine that after.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  We'll see you in three months.

• 2:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Four times a year.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  We're excited.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  We love you too.

• 2:33:41John Coogan?

  Thank you guys.

• 2:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Great work.

• 2:33:43Harley Finkelstein?

  See you guys.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Anton from Lovable coming in the studio. Get that gong ready, Jordy.

• 2:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Shopify.

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  Oh, what?

• 2:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Up 20%.

• 2:33:52John Coogan?

  20%. Yeah. I was trying to tell him that on the stream because I wanted the eyebrow raise, like the, you know, from the Brian Chesky when the IPO and Emily Chang tells him how much the stock is up. I think it's. It's like one of the most iconic moments in tech history. Anyway, we got Anton from Lovable. How you doing?

• 2:34:07Speaker 06

  What's happening? Great. Great to meet you finally.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, great to meet you too. We were going back and forth with folks in and around your orbit. Every time we talked, there was a new massive number. There was, you know, a certain amount of people on the platform, a certain amount of websites. Give me the latest headline number that's shocking. Isn't it like some insane number of websites on the internet are generated every day?

• 2:34:30Speaker 06

  That is true. What are you holding?

• 2:34:32John Coogan?

  I'm holding a gong, a mallet to hit the gong to celebrate.

• 2:34:36Speaker 06

  I just learned today, we have 100,000 new projects built every single day.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  That's fantastic news. How'd you do it? What's the key to success? What are people using Lovable for more than anything else? There's, when you think about just, a webpage can be anything. It can be everything from, from Facebook, a billion users, a trillion dollar company, to, you know, a little homepage for my, you know, my, like my resume. What are people using it for?

• 2:35:10Speaker 06

  Look, Lovable, it's the fastest way to go from an idea to a production-ready application. And a lot of people make that into a real business. And that's something we, that's in our mission to empower much more people to do. But apart from the entrepreneurs, the solo entrepreneurs, like building for the first time or building for the nth time without, but by themselves. You have a lot of people in larger companies now. And we're seeing that use case growing very, very fast, like percentage-wise, much faster. And then they go from like, I have this idea, my engineers should build it, but they don't understand me. So I need to create a full working version of it. And then they're gonna be like, okay, I get it. It looks great. Let's build it.

• 2:35:53John Coogan?

  How are you, how are you thinking about tool use right now? I feel like there's so much open source software there. LLMs are incredible. They could probably rewrite Linux from scratch. They could rewrite a database from scratch. But you want to be provisioning and standing on the shoulders of giants. But how often are you focused on allowing the, like, the, like, to grab different open source projects and tools? Like, if you want to build an e-commerce software, you probably don't need to rewrite a catalog from scratch. There's probably a tool for that.

• 2:36:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, um, how we think about making the product as good as possible. We've thought about it for a long, long time is like, we have an agent that can do things. You can browse the web, generate images, but specifically create applications and the website, personal website for you, whatever. Uh, we are making, giving this agent more capabilities. We're adding new things, okay, so for e-commerce specifically, we're taking the best of breed to build e-commerce as a tool. Uh, and more to, I'm spoiling some, I'm teasing some things there on the e-commerce side, actually. Um, I'm giving it more tools and then we're making the agent itself smarter. Uh, those are the two things, giving more tools, making it smarter.

• 2:37:06John Coogan?

  What's the key to high retention? I feel like, um, there's a world where you, you know, use a tool lovable, you build something and then you're like, okay, we're ready to go. And stand up a whole team of engineers to actually build this thing and take it to the next level. How, how are you, uh, you know, fighting that urge to just use this as a prototyping tool?

• 2:37:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, like if you have a high performing engineering team with a large existing system. Then there's always this balance of like, do I take this thing I built in lovable?

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:39Speaker 06

  And I connect it to my system, many people do that. Or do I just use it as a design? And then, um, I like know exactly how to build it, so it's gonna be super fast with my engineers, both are fine. Or do you, do I even add it to code as an engineer level, also popular? Um, I, I think regardless of all of those, you can have very, very high retention. Because if you want to just prototype in lovable, it's the easiest way to do it. You just open the browser and then boom, you have, you have your prototype. And it has access to your design philosophy, it has access to, uh, like integrations and different tools that you might want to use. So there's a higher retention, there's a very high retention on that use case, but. Um, how I think about it going forward is that we want to just build a platform where

• 2:38:23Speaker 06

  you never want to leave this platform because it provides you so much value. And what large language models have done now is that they like they generate code really well. Uh, and but that's just one tiny part of the entire life cycle of building and maintaining and operating and the product and growing a growing a business on top of that. So I'm not sure you know, uh, Eliana on our team, she's like, uh, I've been doing growth for twenty years and now I'm so excited to not have to do like the boring growth, just do the innovative growth and AI is going to handle all the growth, like all the growth things. So, so, so that that's on the horizon. And when, when you have a platform like that, um, you should be getting so much value that you never want to leave.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:39:02Jordi Hays?

  How do you, what do, what do you think is the future state of, you know, what do you think the average startup's website will look like five, 10 years from today? I feel like right now we're in this era where AI is changing everything. It's changing workflows. It's changed the way, changing the way we work with software. And yet startups, you know, still buy, they try to buy their one word, uh, dot com domain. And the, the typical website is like incredibly, you know, static and, and tries to reach a broad audience. And I can imagine, uh, I can imagine a world in the future where, where websites are being almost generated in real time, depending on the user and, and the type of customer they are.

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  More parallax. We're getting more parallax.

• 2:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Knowing, knowing the, the trend to date, there will be more of that. Um, but I'm curious, you know, kind of if you have.

• 2:39:52Speaker 06

  I think the websites of the future are going to be better at hacking the human brain and like it's addicting, the nature, addict, addictive nature and so on. What that means exactly, I don't know. We're like, we'll let algorithms figure out partly. But no, I think.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Anton is gonna hack your brain, everybody.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, do you think that starts with like A B testing because you can generate more pages quicker, that you're just kind of optimizing for retention or conversion? And then because you're just generating the entire site instead of just, you know, testing two different headlines, you're testing the entire concept of what the website is?

• 2:40:32Speaker 06

  I, I, yeah, I think the algorithm, like there's going to be more and more be algorithms that figure out how, how things should be optimized for us. And then, um, I, I think what like what you're also seeing now already is a bit of counter culture to that where a human coming in and being like, no, I want it to be much more minimalist, like a new type of.

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the Nat Friedman style that Mark Zuckerberg recently adopted.

• 2:40:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  Times New Roman, just raw HTML. Uh, there's a time and a place for both.

• 2:41:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I, I guess we'll see like some complex, um, evolution of the, of, of different, different ways of doing things. And, um, generally, I think the future, like the future has always been more and more diverse. There's like many different websites and applications. And we can, I think that trend is going to continue. It's not like it will converge to just, uh, just one way of doing things.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Last question, uh, from my side, what, what's, uh, what's next on the horizon? Are you focused on taking the product that you have? You clearly have product market fit. Are you focused on sales, marketing, ramping up, expanding what you have or, or expanding the portfolio to different areas and different markets, different products?

• 2:41:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, I'll answer it like this. So in the order of like the size of the use cases, founders are taking their ideas and they're building businesses, software businesses.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:53Speaker 06

  Designers and product managers and others in, in companies, they're taking their ideas and building, um, concepts to communicate with their team up and like a hundred times faster than building out the concept in the past. And then everyone else is building like their personal or business websites in much, much faster. And we're doing all, all of these things. And Lovable does all of these things at the same time. And it like becomes, as you use it, it becomes better and better at, uh, helping you.

• 2:42:26Speaker 07

  So that then that's what we're going for.

• 2:42:28John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congratulations on all the fantastic growth, truly staggering.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Barely a week goes by without a big lovable number hitting the timeline.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, another another lovable number has hit the timeline. Congratulations. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. And shifting over to Thomas from GitHub, another little post earnings breakdown. Get the update from Microsoft and GitHub. Nat Friedman was running the organization. Thomas has taken over and they've been on absolute tear.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Tough act to follow. Welcome to the show.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  20 million users. Its growth is serving 90% of the Fortune 100. Congratulations. Kick us off with an introduction.

• 2:43:13Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for having me on the show. Great to be here.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 2:43:16Speaker 07

  And yeah, I'm Thomas and I've been running GitHub for the last four years. I've been with GitHub for seven years since we acquired it in 2018. And it's been a tremendous run that GitHub had as part of Microsoft.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Is it fair to describe the run as as growth in overall users or growth in GitHub Copilot revenue? Or, you know, this 90% of the Fortune 100 is using the product now. Has that been the win case? Has it been a little bit of all of them?

• 2:43:47Jordi Hays?

  What's the other 10% doing?

• 2:43:51Speaker 07

  Well, the other 10% is not putting software, I think. Not putting software. That's why they are.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  This is the Apea Prada principle. The last 10% is going to take you 10 times as long to get.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, we gotta figure out the 10% and short them.

• 2:44:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, but seriously, if you're a Fortune 500 company and you're not building some software in your organization.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  There are other companies that provide similar services that do well. You know, we're not going to talk too much trash about the competitors, but you know, we are, we are big fans. But yeah, what, what, what, over your tenure, what have been the big initiatives that you've shipped? And then maybe opened a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne or, or just had a pizza with the team to celebrate.

• 2:44:31Speaker 07

  You know, we always keep pushing further, so there isn't, there's celebrations every now and then. What's really like about what's next, what's next, what's next? If I look back to 2018, when we did the deal, we really had three principles. Put developers first, and I think we nailed that one. GitHub is still GitHub, you know, we are talking about developers, we're building for developers. We are, you know, meeting with them all the time. And we have preserved, you know, that spirit of what GitHub is all about. The second one was that Microsoft helps us to accelerate. Microsoft, if you will, as an investor into GitHub. And I think that's, you know, the 150 million developers on the platform. Recently, we hit over a billion repositories, both, you know, original repositories and forks. You mentioned the 20 million Copilot users.

• 2:45:16Speaker 07

  Microsoft's little studio family, so VS, IDE and VS Code together has 50 million active users. So you can also see how much room there is still for Copilot to grow its market share. And a year ago, we passed 2 billion in ARR, annual revenue, revenue rate. And I think all these metrics show that both the business itself is healthy and keeps growing. The network effects that GitHub as a platform has. And then the third one was that GitHub helps to accelerate Microsoft. And the most obvious thing is that, you know, Microsoft developers are using GitHub and are using Copilot. So Microsoft itself benefits from the same productivity gains that our customers benefit from. And then we're sharing a lot of the AI knowledge across Microsoft, you know, within the core AI division.

• 2:46:00Speaker 07

  Azure AI, founder, and all these tools.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  I'm hearing glimpses of self-improving artificial intelligence. Microsoft is using GitHub to improve GitHub. I'd love to see it. What, where else are people using GitHub Copilot? Where are the, what are the biggest like win conditions or win use cases in those Fortune 100 companies? Where's the biggest value being derived right now?

• 2:46:26Speaker 07

  Believe it or not, I think the biggest value is still the core scenario, which is you have your IDE open, you know VS Code or JetBrains, even Apple X Code, and you have writing code. And instead of switching between the IDE and the browser, where you have, you know, all these tabs open and you watch the show and and there's all the distractions, you know, in your browser. And you try to find the answer to the problem you're trying to solve, you just have it right there where you're building. So whether it's code completions that predicts to you something that you might not have even thought about in that moment, or whether it's the ability to go into chat and ask a question about that code and find a bug. Or I was working on my blog on Sunday and I couldn't figure out how, I couldn't remember the Macdon syntax to embed an image.

• 2:47:10Speaker 07

  And I was just like, give me that really quick. Right? And then all the way to agentic scenarios, and I know you talked with Anton like before. It's this ability to give it a task and then watch it do these things and call tools. And it figures out how to install this NPM package. And then it looks at the error message and it sees that there's a test case missing. So I think this end-to-end spectrum where I'm still the pilot and I'm still in charge. Because I think, and I strongly believe that the majority of developers actually want to build something. They don't want to offload their job to somebody else, like an agent or a set of agents. They want to use these agents to do what they love doing most.

• 2:47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you talk to me about like where the boundaries of GitHub or Microsoft's agnosticism land? Like you don't make everyone write C sharp, you don't make everyone use VS Code. But how are you thinking about integrating different models at Microsoft Build? Sachin Adella was talking about the importance of Azure being a place where you could get everything from GPT-4 to DeepSeek to Llama to, it sounds like XAI is coming on as well. How are you thinking about integration with a broad suite of new tools as they come up?

• 2:48:29Speaker 07

  Choice is crucial for any developer tool to win the market. You can't be in the space of selling developer tools and not offer developers' choice. Because if you don't do that, they go somewhere else and they will find the choice somewhere else. So since last year, we're offering what we call multi-model choice. So we're not only having the OpenAI models, which are still great and many people use as their default. We also have Anthropic's models, we have Google's models. We actually have, you know, bring your own models you can connect from Copilot to OpenRouter or Ollama. And from there, you can go to, you know, every model imaginable, as long as it has an API and a key that you have access to.

• 2:49:10Speaker 07

  And so we think that is crucial and developers will not want us to tell them what model to use. Like, that's just like, you know, intrusion in my personal freedom. And they know better what's best for them. In the same way that at GitHub, we wouldn't tell you, use this open source library or, you know, use this programming language. Like, GitHub wouldn't be what it is today if it had only, you know, one ecosystem, let's say JavaScript, right, and all its libraries. And now, obviously, there's boundaries there because we have only so many people at GitHub at Microsoft that can integrate all these models. And there's a new model every single day, sometimes multiple times a day.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yesterday, there were two new models. Three, I think, if you count the two open source ones.

• 2:49:54Speaker 07

  And all these models need GPU capacity and, you know, responsible AI testing and red teaming and all that. And so we believe it's a mix of we provide models out of the box and you bring your own model through OpenRouter or Ollama and what have you.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:50:10Jordi Hays?

  Last question. You have over 100 million developers on GitHub. Have you tried to estimate how many of them are not using any AI tools? That are just, you know, hanging back, saying, "I'll make my code by hand, please."

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Handmade.

• 2:50:26Jordi Hays?

  None of that AI for me.

• 2:50:28Speaker 07

  It's over one hundred and fifty million. I think it's still, you know, less than fifty percent that use AI on a daily basis. And that's just the nature of things, right? If you look at what are these one hundred and fifty million developers, there's lots of students there, where the professor may not allow the use of AI, or they haven't made that step because they're really just trying to solve that, you know, task from their homework or from the test. But at the same time, we see more and more developers making their jump. Software development has always been a spectrum, right? There's those that are still working on COBOL mainframes. In Germany, there are still companies, I think the train system is looking for people that have Windows ninety-five experience in twenty twenty-five, right? Like, that's the, like,

• 2:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Hey, any of you new grads know Windows ninety-five from when you were?

• 2:51:10Speaker 07

  But believe it or not, even if you, you know, are new grad or post-grad, and you join a company and you have to work on a COBOL project, as long as you can then also use, you know, GitHub and Copilot and AI tools, that might not be the worst job in the world, right? Because you can combine modern technology and apply to that old stuff. But what I was going to say is that we have this huge spectrum between the people that are most ahead on the curve, you know, those watching your show and or talking on the show here, and then those that are still having to maintain the systems that power the world. And we, our mission at GitHub is to cover all these developers and enable them, you know, to collaborate between humans and humans and very soon, between humans

• 2:51:52Speaker 07

  and agents and agents with each other, right? That's where the platform is going.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for your service and congratulations on all the growth. It's been great chatting with you. We'll let you get back to your day.

• 2:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you for joining. Super insightful.

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 2:52:03Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we have Alex Jacobson from One Three Seven Ventures. We've had Christian Garrett on the show many times for One Three Seven Ventures, and we're excited to catch up with Alex.

• 2:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Alex is a friend of ours. I'm excited to hear it.

• 2:52:16John Coogan?

  We had a great conversation with him a couple of months ago. Excited to catch up and chat with him about everything in the One Three Seven Ventures profile. How are you doing, Alex? Good to see you.

• 2:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, good. You too. Sorry, we're running late.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we ran a little late. We got a bunch of very yappy people. This guy, Mark Andreessen, came on. He was talking a lot. We were asking him a lot of questions. So we put us behind, but good to catch up with you. How are you doing?

• 2:52:41Speaker 08

  Good, I was just watching, but I was three minutes behind, so I thought I was, I had a bit more time. Sorry about that.

• 2:52:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna figure out how to feed you the show, so that as soon as you join the room, you're seeing it live instead of with the delay. But anyway, thank you so much for joining. What's new in your world? What's the biggest news in the 137 Ventures portfolio? I'd love to just get the general update.

• 2:53:05Speaker 08

  Oh, uh.

• 2:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Better start, well, I'll start. I'll start. Christian, Christian had like a screenshot.

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  He was on Squawk Box about Talenture.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  It was, I know, but it was, it basically had the 137 portfolio up, and it basically looked like the top 10 most in-demand private companies. And I was like, oh, that looks like a pretty good portfolio to have. So you guys have been everywhere.

• 2:53:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we have, we're building this general concept of Mag7 for private. And so we have, there's this idea of there's these companies that grow indefinitely in the public markets, and they've built themselves to do that in the public markets. The strategy for doing that in the private markets is different, because you need to do different things in different ways. And so SpaceX has led the way on this, because they give employees equity, and they then also run tenders regularly, so that that equity can become liquidity. And the important, the important bit about that strategy

• 2:54:14Speaker 08

  is that the price at which they're providing liquidity is materially lower than what the market would pay in a fully liquid public market. And so you can say, oh, that's terrible, the employees aren't getting the right thing. But that's not fair. The actual thing that's happening is when employees are issued equity when they get hired, they know it's gonna go up, because SpaceX keeps growing. SpaceX is one of, all of these companies have the property of having a huge amount of power in their market, and... Even larger TAM. And so you can, you can understand this indefinite growth. And you can talk about for the public companies or the private companies.

• 2:54:56Speaker 08

  But the general thing that you're looking at is this combination of power and large TAM. And so in a private, in a private market context, all these companies need to hire people to go capture that TAM. And the value of these companies keeps going up. And the strategy is to give the employees certainty that the equity they've been issued will be worth a lot more in the future. That's harder to do in the public markets because everything's perfectly priced. And so you don't really know if the stock's going to go up. You think so, you hope so, but it's harder to tell. In the private markets, the nice thing is you control your price. And you can, if you're, if you run your process properly, you can have this very deterministic outcome for your employees. Which I think is super powerful.

• 2:55:41John Coogan?

  We talked to Harley at Shopify about the benefits of being public. You have a liquid currency for acquisitions. It, it, it sets him up. He referred to it as being in the major leagues now. Give me the pitch for staying private as long as possible.

• 2:55:58Speaker 08

  I mean, I don't think SpaceX isn't major league.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree.

• 2:56:05Speaker 08

  So there's.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  What are the benefits of staying private?

• 2:56:09Speaker 08

  I think the big one is hiring.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:12Speaker 08

  This is, that's the thing that I think people underestimate, which is that if you can issue people private company stock at your 409A.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:56:23Speaker 08

  And then you, and, and you control the price, it keeps growing. Then this is all a much more deterministic thing and a super powerful to be in these companies. Because the nice thing about these companies, there's this funniness of they're always underpriced. So there's always investor demand for them.

• 2:56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:44Speaker 08

  So as long as they, as long as, so you just have this positive feedback loop of there's always investor demand for them. So the investors want to buy more and the stock price keeps going up, which means the employees can look at these companies and go, oh. This equity is really worth something because they know it's going to go up. If you're getting public company stock, you don't get that.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And there's not the volatility that comes with, I checked my portfolio today. I'm down a little bit just because, oh, there's some weird tariff thing going on in some foreign country. And how does that affect my business? Whereas, yeah, if you're in the private market, you don't have to deal with that. What about these new, what's your take on some of these new initiatives to give retail investors access to private company shares or put private company shares on chain and create tokens and SPVs and all these different financial engineering efforts to bring, to give retail traders access to private market company stocks? What's your take on all that?

• 2:57:48Speaker 08

  We've been seeing people trying to do this forever. It's an ongoing thing of, oh, we find it inconvenient that these companies are private. So we're going to try to do things to make them seem more like public companies. But the, one of the big values of being a private company is controlling who your shareholders are and controlling your pricing. And so if you're trying to stop that from happening, that's, you know, maybe that's an opportunity and maybe you can force one of these companies to be de facto a public. But that's not a service. If they want to be public, you know, there's this mechanism called the public markets to do that.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about a higher level of abstraction? Like, I believe, I believe Goldman Sachs is public.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  You know, certain private companies don't want to be public because they don't want to be on the sort of regular reporting cadence. They just don't feel like they're ready for it. But the idea of like taking private companies, putting them on chain, letting private company shares, putting them on chain and then just letting anybody in the world buy access, buy them, but not giving them any of the information that allow, that makes the public market so beautiful, which is like, anybody can read this information and you can come up with a decision on your own. And there's like rules and frameworks to make sure that people aren't insider trading and things like that. And so it's like, who's benefiting here? It's like retail has a potential to get even more hosed.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  And, and then the companies are having to deal with shareholders that, that now have an opinion about how they're operating the company, but none of the real rights, rights associated with, with owning the shares.

• 2:59:29Speaker 08

  Let me be charitable to these people. There's a real thing of the only people who get access to these private Mag Seven companies are institutional LPs who invest in our fund or funds like ours.

• 2:59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:43Speaker 08

  And, you know, we're not, we're not, we don't have retail investors in our fund. There's, there's a sort of, in the manager class, there's something referred to as retail, which is, there's a longer tail of, of wealth that is now trying to play in and invest in these things. So there's some, that is in some sense a longer tail, but there isn't the people who have, who are public markets players. There aren't non-institutional players in the game, really.

• 3:00:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:11Speaker 08

  And there's something real about giving people access to the growth that these companies are going to have. There's, and it's unfair in some general sense that, that these retail investors don't have access to this growth. And so I think there is some amount of institutional design around how do we give them access to this growth. But turning these private companies into public companies is not necessarily the way, the way to do that.

• 3:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like, what if, like, what if the Yale endowment was publicly traded? It's like, then I'd have broad exposure to a bunch of venture capital firms, which have exposure to a bunch of private companies. And, you know, it still just rolls up to just a few line items on the cap table and not, you know, this random, like, retail trader doesn't, isn't actually on the cap table.

• 3:01:01Jordi Hays?

  And it's also, it's also disingenuous to say that, like, everyday people don't benefit from the private Mag Seven, as you've described it, because, you know, a lot of venture capitalists raised from pension funds.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Teachers and firefighters and things like that, who are actually, you know, benefiting from the performance.

• 3:01:20Speaker 08

  I mean, I, I think there, there's a pension, we're definitely in the, pension funds are definitely beneficiaries, and that's very real. But I don't know how much of the, like, there's definitely these, you know, those types of pension funds that are out there. But there's lots of people who aren't in these sorts of pension funds. I think you're right. There's, there's definitely, that, that sort of universe is taken care of. But I think there's plenty of people who aren't in that type of pension fund either.

• 3:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:01:51Speaker 08

  And, and Generically, they're in the pension, it's a pension fund. They're not able to say, oh, I would like more exposure to privates.

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:02:01Speaker 08

  Right. So at a, at a, at the, there's, there, I, I, I understand the feeling of that there's, these people are underserved in some way. It's not, they're not my customers, but I get the feeling.

• 3:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:15Speaker 08

  I just think we need to design institutions for it.

• 3:02:17Jordi Hays?

  It is funny to think about if, if, if a bunch of Stripe shares were dropped on Solana. Like what Stripe would actually trade at? Because I would guess that it would look like, it would look like it would be like the most insane pop. And then suddenly it's like, okay, if you want to buy Stripe on chain, you gotta pay like $400 billion. Or trillion dollars, right? You could.

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  And for some of the even bigger, like, like, like, potentially like me, me, uh, private companies could be even crazier.

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:48Speaker 08

  I mean.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:49Speaker 08

  There, there's the whole Elon universe of companies.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:52Speaker 08

  We, we have a sample of one of them that's public.

• 3:02:54John Coogan?

  Yep, we know what happens there. Uh, speaking of that, I mean, he was talking loosely about, uh, taking Tesla private at one point. That, you know, obviously didn't materialize, but is there a world where the private markets evolved to such a point and it becomes so elusive that you see a take private of a company specifically to get back on that track? Or, or once you IPO has the ship sailed and it's gone forever?

• 3:03:24Speaker 08

  I mean, I'm, I live at the private markets. I like the private markets. I think there's a huge amount of value of being here in the private markets. And so I'm definitely talking my book. But the, the, the big thing that has changed over the past some number of years is how big the private markets now are.

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:43Speaker 08

  Right? So we, so the, how much we can invest in SpaceX or Andorl or Gusto, or any of these companies has gone to be large numbers. And so, you know, there's this argument of I, when you're public, you have this currency that you didn't have because the public markets have more money. And I don't think that's as true anymore. I think that there's this real chance that you could decide, I just want more control. I don't want to deal with this regulatory nonsense and be private. There is this, they're both.

• 3:04:18Speaker 08

  It's a regulatory ritual, but it's not actually a different company and you might want to just have a different regulatory environment.

• 3:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm thinking specifically about Snap. Snap had earnings, they're down 17% today. They live and die by the earnings call. Meanwhile, Apple's up 5%, Meta Platforms at 1%, Amazon's up 4%. And it's only a $13 billion company. The capital exists and there's always been this narrative like it's easier to turn the cruise ship when you're in the private markets. You go to just a few investors, you say, hey, we're going to miss earnings really bad for a couple of quarters, but then we're going to build something new. I don't know.

• 3:04:51Jordi Hays?

  You're going to have three Snaps or one perplexity.

• 3:04:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:04:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, sorry.

• 3:04:56Speaker 08

  I think it's...

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  No, there are 20.

• 3:04:58Speaker 08

  I mean, the hard part is these things are now priced. And so you're going to take it private and you now have to go resell this to the private capital markets who have looked at this in public markets and gone, well, that didn't look right.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:16Speaker 08

  And so I think there's a hard sell of going to the private markets and selling Snap to the private markets. I think it's entirely possible that it could do better, but you know, they have to go, they have to sell it. There's a founder-led story. I mean, I think we can like sit here and script it and maybe we can make it work, but I think it's not

• 3:05:40John Coogan?

  easy. It would be a super exciting story. I think the best example is probably Dell, which went through Take Private and then later went back public at a much higher price. But I mean, these stories are extremely few and far between.

• 3:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, switching gears, I wanted, we had Dan on from Armada earlier this week, super exciting company. I know you guys have been involved from probably before the company was created. Wanted to get your view on the opportunity and what made you so bullish.

• 3:06:14Speaker 08

  Now or back then?

• 3:06:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, both. I mean, we got, we got, uh, last time we talked, I think we got a good, good overview, but it was kind of hearing the kind of landscape and, and the initial catalyst was, was interesting.

• 3:06:31Speaker 08

  I mean, the, the original version of this is if you think about what a data center is, a data center is a point source is, is trying to maximize the value of a point source of connectivity and power, right? That's like structurally what it is. Uh, and so, yeah, power has, is available at different prices, at different places, fiber is available at different, at different levels of reliability. How many fiber points do you have? Are they really one or two? Like it's doing the underwriting of what, it's actually a lot of work to make a data center. But the whole premise is that you have sufficiently reliable and large power and sufficiently reliable and large connectivity.

• 3:07:13Speaker 08

  SpaceX changes that. So SpaceX says, actually, there is no longer this concept of a point source of connectivity. It's available everywhere. Uh, and in any one point, it's not, you know, it's not as good as, as fiber, but the world's pretty big. And so the aggregate bandwidth of Starlink is huge, even if the avail, the availability in the square foot you're in is not as big as holding a fiber in your hand. Uh, and so the insight is, okay, well SpaceX gives us opportunity, this opportunity to rethink how we do connectivity. So does that mean we can think, rethink how we

• 3:07:58Speaker 08

  think about power? And the interesting thing is if you're looser about connectivity, now you can look at power in a bunch of different places and you can say, hey, there's solar everywhere. So now you just simply put a solar panel and a dish and you're live. Uh, and the, and is the solar panel enough for the amount of compute you want to do? Maybe, maybe not. But that, but that's the beginning of the conversation. And then, you know, so in the original design for this, it, I sketched out a shipping container that unfolds solar panels on a roof. And I figured out that you need a lot of solar panels to power a rack, but you can do it.

• 3:08:37Speaker 08

  But and so that's but that but you know, the math on that actually worked. So it was like a 3% IRR when you did the model. And the 3% IRR isn't glorious, but it was just a model. And then you have the testing. So we say, oh, this is it's sufficiently interesting that it's worth testing. And then when we then we got Dan and Dan is this phenomenal has phenomenal network, has phenomenal sales. And his solution wasn't, hey, let's build it and sell sell cloud. His solution was calling people he knows and asking them, what do you think? Because that's how he works. And so we get on the phone with the CTO of Aramco. Somewhat of a surprise to me. So I'm suddenly on the phone with this guy who is.

• 3:09:20Jordi Hays?

  San Francisco, San Francisco company.

• 3:09:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, founded in San Francisco.

• 3:09:25Speaker 08

  Right.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  West Coast tech wins again.

• 3:09:31Speaker 08

  Yes. And so I'm suddenly pitching this to this guy. And the insight is, well, there's this other problem. You know, the underlying story that I just told you is about stranded energy. There's stranded energy all over the place. Let's do stranded energy. But the thing that's happening on an oil platform is there's stranded data. And so these data, these oil platforms produce huge amounts of data that get effectively dropped on the floor. And they have some amount of compute that is in in a closet somewhere that some guy on the platform manages. And Halliburton and Halliburton sells them the software. It's like the the actual architecture of that market's crazy.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:16Speaker 08

  And so it's like, oh, we we could do better. And so if we if we provide a cloud at the at this locus of stranded data and stranded energy and and a global communications, we can create a lot of value.

• 3:10:36John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 3:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Very exciting. Well, well, next time you join, we'll have you on for an hour.

• 3:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we can go so much deeper. Thank you so much for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. All right.

• 3:10:46John Coogan?

  Good to hang out soon. Bye.

• 3:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Nick from Rillet coming into the studio. I think we gotta get the mallet ready. We gotta get the gong ready. Jordy, you want to take this one?

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  I'll take this one happily.

• 3:11:01John Coogan?

  I think I hit the last one, but let's bring him in. Let's play some music. Let's play some soundboard. Let's bring in Rillet. How you doing? Welcome to the stream. Thanks so much for joining. Sorry, we're a little bit late. How you doing?

• 3:11:14Speaker 09

  Hey, check, check. Do you hear me? Okay?

• 3:11:15John Coogan?

  Oh, you're great.

• 3:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Alive.

• 3:11:16John Coogan?

  Uh, is it Nick Nicholas? Is it Rillet or Rillet?

• 3:11:20Speaker 09

  Rillet. Rillet. So the American spelling. Yeah.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  There we go. Okay. I wasn't sure if it was French. Uh, anyway, give me the update. Give me the news. Give me the overview of what you're building.

• 3:11:30Speaker 09

  Awesome. Yeah. Excited to be here, guys. Uh, thanks for having me on. So today we're announcing our $70 million Series B, uh, colet by Andreessen Horowitz and iconic.

• 3:11:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Oh, that was good timing, Jordy. Good timing. Congratulations.

• 3:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 3:11:46Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 3:11:46John Coogan?

  Uh, I give us a little prehistory on the company. Uh, when did it start? How's the growth been and, uh, key customers, how you're building, uh, and how you're thinking about, uh, solving AI native ERP?

• 3:11:58Speaker 09

  Yeah. Um, so we've, um, so quick, quick backstory also myself. So deeply, um, accounting and finance, uh, versed, uh, sort of a full background there. Started this company, uh, roughly three and a half or so years ago, very much in stealth for a very long time. As you can imagine, a full-on accounting system or ERP is not a small feat to build. It's a lot of surface area. Um, these are very entrenched systems. Traditionally dominated by NetSuite, Oracle, SAP, these type of names. Um, so we, uh, yeah, we're very fortunate to have had a stellar team of accountants and engineers building and building. Um, and then we came out of stealth, uh, last summer, roughly a year ago, and things have gone vertical, uh, since then. So, uh, it's been an awesome journey.

• 3:12:42Speaker 09

  Uh, raised our Series A here, um, just a couple of months ago, three months ago, 12 weeks back. And yeah, back to back here with a B.

• 3:12:50Jordi Hays?

  What is it, what does it take to get a company to rip out their existing ERP and bet on a new company? Right? Like, that's the real challenge.

• 3:12:58John Coogan?

  I was about to ask, are people ripping out Oracle and SAP and NetSuite? Or is it, I'm upgrading from a spreadsheet?

• 3:13:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, great question. So we are getting 70% of our customers today coming from softwares called QuickBooks and Xero.

• 3:13:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:13:13Speaker 09

  And then 30% of our customers coming from NetSuite and Sage Intact.

• 3:13:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:13:18Speaker 09

  So it's very much a mid-market focused ERP software. Key reasons why people use Rilat or want to buy Rilat despite us being newer to the market over Legacy Player is number one, we have super strong native integrations that really suck in all that key upstream information that you need for AI automation really seamlessly into our platform. And then our automation's on top, produce reporting that's just unmatched in the market. And that would, yeah, leads us eventually to getting customers like Winserve, one of the fastest growing AI companies in recent history is Mind.

• 3:13:54Speaker 09

  And others to trust Rilat over their current systems.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  Rilat now used by Google and Cognition potentially. That's the best part about a zombie acquisition. You get potentially two new customers.

• 3:14:04Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, I want to know about, do you want to put a chat box in your product? Or do you want to use AI behind the scenes and not surface that to the customer? Whenever I, I see tools like this, I think, I love the idea that you're using AI, but I don't want to open it up every day and prompt, hey, clean up my ERP. I want you just to do that. And then when I show up, I want it to look like a nice groomed garden.

• 3:14:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, love it. Hopefully a bit of both, actually. So for, very important for our controllers, accountants and CFOs, having a human in the loop on some of their AI processes is actually really important and a positive. So yes, these are background processes, but always with a human in the loop for the most critical ones there. And then for you as a business owner specifically, or a strategic CFO or investor. You want none of that detail, right? You want to go in in a clean box, ask a question, get the information you need, move on. So we're building to both ends of these spectrums and you really need both to be successful here.

• 3:15:08John Coogan?

  I guess my question is, a lot of people want to go, a lot of CFOs, a lot of investors want to go into the ERP, the accounting suite and get information, but I feel like 99% of the time they're asking for the same thing. They want a really clean balance sheet, a really clean income statement, a really clean cash flow statement. And they don't want to think of a prompt like, oh, I want, let me describe to you what a balance sheet is. Like, I want a balance sheet. I just want it to be accurate and I want everything to be tagged correctly. I, my prompt is don't make mistakes. So talk to me about the trade off there.

• 3:15:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, great question. Um, so definitely there are these pre can reports. You don't want to be teaching an AI to rebuild your income statement every single fucking, sorry, yes, first. Every single time, every single time, the same way. And so 100% agree there. Um, there are a lot of more custom analyses though, that you want. If you're a professional, like specific for your business, maybe track also some non GAAP metrics and, and non accounting metrics on a financial side. That is really handy to just describe it in natural language and get what you need.

• 3:16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then the other question is like, I feel like one shot prompting in this context is even less relevant. Because if I, if I'm, if I'm designing a new non GAAP metric, I probably want to say like, set up a workflow. So we produce this every month and that it's just on.

• 3:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Like vibe adjusted EBITDA?

• 3:16:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. I want to, I want to vibe code and adjusted EBITDA. But then I want it to be the same every month because when I've reported non GAAP metrics in the past, like churn, I mean, even Dow now, that's a non GAAP metric, but like you want it to be accurate and you want it to be classified the same way. Because there's often these times where you change one underlying thing in your, in your product. And then that flows to a complete change in the non GAAP metric. And then you're going, hey, it was a non GAAP the whole time. Don't worry. Don't get mad at me investors. I know you thought that that was never going to change, but the metric changed and, and it's actually not that different for the, we're just looking at the business in a different way now. But talk to me about like how AI can improve the development and ongoing maintenance of non GAAP metrics.

• 3:17:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, great question. So there is definitely an element of like repetitive adjustments, certain things that can even be codified outside of AI in terms of certain customizations of your non-GAAP metrics. ARR is a very prominent one for software AI businesses and recurring revenue businesses, for example.

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:17:35Speaker 09

  And so there, yes, it is definitely something you can do basically in the UI, customize your metrics the way you want it in a repeatable fashion. But there is definitely also an element of certain workflows and I always call it openness to human interpretation. Where you need these more like LLM-driven workflows that help interpret, maybe look at each chart of accounts, look at historical transactions, what happened there and try and make sense of things. And that's where AI today is very powerful. But again, you do need usually a human in the loop to do these repeatedly and reliably, just given the mission criticality of the workflows.

• 3:18:12John Coogan?

  What's next? What's more important for you? You're in the mid-market. Do you want to go downward, upward? Do you want to expand and offer, go multi-product? What's most interesting to you?

• 3:18:23Speaker 09

  Yeah. Yeah. So for us, more of the same. The opportunity that we have in the mid-market is insane. The amount of customer love we're getting and product quality that we have with the reviews that we have, combined with like really entrenched and frankly universally disliked ERP systems, you'll be hard-pressed to find someone that truly enjoys using their accounting system or ERP. It creates a huge influx of just demand on the product and the company. So what we're going to do with the money that we're raising is double down on product, build more of the same additional features, go up-market from here. With the money that we've raised, we have a stronger balance sheet to like capture even bigger names and logos that can work with us.

• 3:19:08Speaker 09

  And then the other piece is just investing heavily into our customer success and onboarding motions. We're just like, we work with very talented accountants in these teams to help onboard, help onboard their platform into their systems. And we're massively expanding these teams to just absorb the demand that we have.

• 3:19:25John Coogan?

  It's awesome. What an opportunity. It's great.

• 3:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:19:29John Coogan?

  Congratulations and good luck.

• 3:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Many people have tried and failed to rebuild the, to build a new ERP, but it feels like...

• 3:19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a gap in the pre-AI era where there were a lot of people that took a run of it and it was a little rough. Finally.

• 3:19:43Speaker 09

  The mine share is there, the opportunity is here. It's really exciting.

• 3:19:46John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to you. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 3:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:19:51Speaker 09

  Thanks for having us. Bye.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  What else should we cover? ERP. I didn't like the way he was talking about NetSuite. I would die for NetSuite. I would die.

• 3:20:01Jordi Hays?

  For Oracle.

• 3:20:02John Coogan?

  I love, I love, I love all ERP systems equally, like my children. I like them all equally. Um, anyway, uh, perplexity, you mentioned it briefly. It's now worth almost 15 times JetBlue. They raised another $200 million.

• 3:20:19Jordi Hays?

  One and a half snaps.

• 3:20:20John Coogan?

  Billion, a little under, yeah. They think snaps at 13, but perplexity is now at $20 billion. It's unreported, but it's been leaked by Arfa Rock. Who knows if it's true, but he usually gets it right. So we're chatting about it here. 138,000 people saw the news. I'm sure Arvind will comment if it's fake news, but, uh, in other news, what else do we have? Um, we wanted to send our regards to the Doge staffer who was assaulted or, or gotten a dust up with someone who was attacked. He stepped in, uh, and, uh, fortunately we saw another picture that he has, uh, been cleaned up and healed and seems like he is on the mend.

• 3:21:03John Coogan?

  And so, um, sending our best to Mr. Balls.

• 3:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Rough, but it sounds like he acted with, uh, as, as this poster would say bravery and courage. So.

• 3:21:14John Coogan?

  Yes. And that's pretty much everything, Jordy. I don't know if there's anything else you want to cover.

• 3:21:21Jordi Hays?

  It's a good place to end it.

• 3:21:22John Coogan?

  Maybe leave us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Maybe, thank you if you've been in the chat today. I like this post from Aiden Beltskies says, timeline not in turmoil. John and Jordy pulled off some S tier handshakes during the Figma IPO livestream. This is what it's all about, boys. Keep it up. Thank you from the chat. That's on the X chat and Mark is there.

• 3:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Live handshakes.

• 3:21:48John Coogan?

  High stakes.

• 3:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Nothing.

• 3:21:50John Coogan?

  High stakes. We've seen some, we've seen some viral botched handshake slash dap ups. You gotta have a shared language. Stick to the default handshake. It's Lindy. It's not going anywhere.

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's better to look at the person's eyes or the hand coming in? Cause I think it might be more about like a, like kind of, you don't actually, you want to keep the.

• 3:22:10John Coogan?

  I think it's kinda, it's kinda like a game of rock, paper, scissors. And so.

• 3:22:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a high stakes game of rock, paper, scissors.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  But, but, but the optimal, the optimal strategy is to just stick with the handshake and never deviate, never, never, never doubt yourself.

• 3:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Hit him with one of these.

• 3:22:26John Coogan?

  Make it very clear from early on, you're coming in with the handshake and you're not blinking. It's a game of chicken. So if you come in with, it doesn't matter if you come in with knocks or you come in with, with the, I'm gonna hit you here, doesn't matter, as long as you stay here forever, they will see that you're not backing down. They'll conform. And you'll assert your dominance.

• 3:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so go out into the world and practice, practice live.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it is, it is tough because I hit people with all sorts of different things. Every time I go to the bathroom, Ben hits me with the knuckles on the way back. It pumps me up, gets me back on the stream.

• 3:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game.

• 3:22:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you to John Exley for moderating the chat. Fantastic work today. Thank you to Gabe for chiming in with hilarious comments all stream. Thank you for Mark for watching and enjoying the stream. And we will see you guys tomorrow.

• 3:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow's gonna be an absolutely insane day. We can't say why, but it's gonna be insane.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Something's gonna happen tomorrow.

• 3:23:16Jordi Hays?

  And I cannot wait.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  I'm pumped. It's stacked lineup. We will announce it soon. See you tomorrow. Bye.

• 3:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.