Meta Poaches Apple's Top AI Executive, Replit Partners with Microsoft, Unilever Goes Viral with AI | Alex Roy, Ryan Petersen, Jonathon Barkl, Jonathan Ross, Craig Piggott, Jacob Glanville

(02:49) - Meta Poaches Apple AI Exec (07:26) - Jane Street Update (11:11) - Shaun Maguire Under Fire (13:21) - Replit Teams Up with Microsoft (15:58) - TSA Drops Shoe Rule (18:18) - Unilever Uses AI For Viral Soap Ads (19:27) - Gemini Nano Ships (21:20) - Alex Roy, a renowned automotive journalist and former Cannonball Run record holder, discusses his transition from illegal cross-country racing to investing in autonomous vehicle technology. He highlights how his experience in planning and executing high-speed, long-distance drives provided valuable insights into mapping, radar detection, and vehicle autonomy, which he later applied as an executive at Argo AI, Ford and VW's self-driving car unit. Roy also reflects on the evolution of the Cannonball Run, noting the impact of technological advancements and the potential for autonomous vehicles to set future records. (46:06) - Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a leading logistics and supply chain management company, discusses the challenges posed by recent U. S. tariffs on global trade. He highlights the complexities businesses face due to rapidly changing tariff policies, making supply chain planning difficult. Petersen also notes that while some companies have shifted production to countries like Vietnam to avoid tariffs, these regions have also been affected, leading to further uncertainty. (01:13:59) - Jonathon Barkl, co-founder and CEO of AirGarage, discusses how his company partners with real estate owners to modernize parking facilities by implementing technology-driven solutions that enhance user experience and increase revenue. He highlights AirGarage's growth to over 300 locations across 38 states, emphasizing their ability to boost net operating income for property owners by 20 to 50% through services like payments, advertising, enforcement, and data analytics. Barkl also addresses the challenges posed by traditional parking systems and competitors, underscoring AirGarage's commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction. (01:30:03) - Timeline Reactions (01:39:16) - Jacob Glanville, PhD, is a computational immunoengineer and serial entrepreneur, known for founding Distributed Bio and Centivax, where he serves as CEO. In the conversation, he discusses Centivax's development of a universal flu vaccine aiming for 80-95% efficacy, supported by nearly $100 million in funding, and a universal antivenom derived from antibodies of Tim Friede, who self-immunized against multiple snake species. (01:51:53) - Craig Piggott, founder and CEO of Halter, discusses how his company is revolutionizing livestock management by replacing traditional fencing with solar-powered collars that guide cattle using sound and vibration cues, allowing farmers to control and monitor their herds remotely via a mobile app. This innovation addresses labor shortages in farming by automating tasks, enabling more precise operations, and freeing up time for farmers to focus on other essential activities. Piggott also highlights Halter's significant growth, with operations in New Zealand, Australia, and the U. S., managing hundreds of thousands of cows across over a thousand farms, and achieving a valuation of $1.65 billion following a recent $165 million Series D funding round. (02:00:19) - Jonathan Ross, CEO and founder of Groq, discusses the company's development of Language Processing Units (LPUs) designed to accelerate AI inference tasks with greater speed and efficiency compared to traditional GPUs. He highlights Groq's unique chip architecture, which eliminates external memory to reduce latency and energy consumption, and emphasizes the importance of software optimization in achieving competitive performance. Ross also shares insights into Groq's rapid deployment of data centers, strategic partnerships, and the company's vision to capture a significant share of the global AI inference market by deploying over a million processors. 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 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?

  We started 11 a.m. sharp with this show. No technical difficulties.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  Never.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  No one can stop us from streaming. No one can stop us from podcasting.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  Bad day if you didn't want us to podcast.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, they said we couldn't do it. They said we couldn't.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  We're still not sure exactly.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  But we did, and we're live, baby.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  We're not sure exactly the cause. Could have been a sophisticated state actor.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Could have been super intelligence.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  Superintelligence.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Gone rogue.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  They know that we're the last thing standing between humanity.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  People say this, the last jobs will be live streamer, AI thumbnail artist.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Thumbnail artist.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  And.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Those are actually the only two things. Eventually, the AI research will just be automated as well.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Anyway, speaking of AI research, we have a ton of stories in the AI, in the AI trade deal world. The biggest one is that Zuckerberg continues to be on a tear. Meta snatches Apple's AI chief. They went and poached from OpenAI. Now Mark is poaching from Apple. 10 million plus pay package is the rumor as superintelligence hires mount. Rumong, Raoming Pang, who led Apple's 100-person foundation models team, is leaving for Meta's superintelligence group amid growing internal turmoil at Apple over its AI strategy. We've talked about this a bunch. Pong or Pang, I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, joins a wave of top-tier hires from Mark Zuckerberg,

• 1:26John Coogan?

  including Alexander Wang, Nat Friedman, ex-Antropic and OpenAI researchers lured by multimillion-dollar compensation and personal recruiting pitches from Zuckerberg himself.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  Phone calls from Zuck.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  And we talked about this with Dworkesh yesterday. He's still, he's still like, they're underpaying them. Like, it's so valuable. And so, yeah, the numbers are staggering, but if you're a multi-trillion-dollar company, how are you, how is the board, how are the shareholders not okay with you, or like, okay with you not offering, like, top dollar to actually get the best talent? Maybe we should pull up the chart of the MAG7, see how the different companies are doing, the big tech companies doing.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, the other thing here, remember.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Second to last, and Zuck is in founder mode. He's, he's acting like he's on top of that chart. He's acting like he wants to be on the top of that chart.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  And so I think that's what he's doing.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  And if you remember, Apple's MLX team, a group of people almost left only

• 2:21John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  a little bit ago, and Apple had to renegotiate their

• 2:25John Coogan?

  I remember that, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  weren't able to retain Pang, Pong.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  But

• 2:32John Coogan?

  And yeah, this team was once central to Apple Intelligence, now faces a major reorg under Zefang Chen as more engineers eye the exits. They got to figure out the comp structure at Apple. I bet that they're thinking about this now. Well, Mark Gurman has a post here. We're back to printing posts, folks. He says, this is one of the most significant AI job changes since the beginning of the generative AI era started a few years ago. Ruming is Apple's most respected AI researcher and engineer, and his departure amid Apple's AI terminal turmoil could have a reverberating impact, breaking Apple's top executive and distinguishing engineer. And of course, there was a jokey post from Gabe, who says, Apple's top executive in charge of AI is leaving for Meta's group.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  And Gabe says bearish for both companies. Very rude. This is, this is obviously

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Very funny.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  a very talented individual. Well, really quickly, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. And then, speaking of OpenAI, Didi Das, friend of the show, has a post. OpenAI paid an average of $733,000 per year across 6,000 employees in stock, nearly three times every single other public company.

• 3:50Jordi Hays?

  That means

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Not bad for a non

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  Stock compensation

• 3:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  was at 119% of revenue.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yes. So this is non-cash compensation, so it's not putting them in, you know, disastrous financial condition, but there is a lot of dilution there, and I'm sure investors are thinking about that. And what's interesting is that the information is an article that comps how the stock-based compensation at OpenAI tracks with other major companies. So At OpenAI, they're making, they spent $4.4 billion on stock-based compensation. That's 119% of total revenue. At Google, before the IPO, Google was spending 16% of revenue on stock-based compensation. Facebook was only spending 6% of revenue.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  So the the delta between how much more R and D they have to do, how much more salaries do they have to pay before their revenue catches up is crazy.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  It's not just stock-based comp, too. It's it's all everything going into training.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  It's very expensive. Yeah, I mean, everyone posts that, like, here are the Google financials, every VC, Ev Randall's posted this before, from Kleiner, saying like, oh, I just want just one Google in my portfolio, because the company was incredibly financially stable, even pre-IPO, like, within the first few years, it was like, everything looked great, like, amazing revenue growth, all the costs were under control, cash flow, like, everything was great.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  The meme was that they were spending on crazy food and perks and massages because they wanted to be, we're like, hey, we don't want people to think we're too much of a monopoly, right? The thing, the thing here that does make sense is, you know, OpenAI is the first real credible threat to Google's search monopoly. And it makes sense that in order to compete with a multi-trillion-dollar company, you're going to have to not necessarily act like a five-year-old company, you're going to have to spend in a bunch of these different, you know, categories, well beyond what a traditional startup.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. It's like, it's a new category, like, LLM chat interface, but every Mag7 company is threatened by you. And so they're all like, I'm going to pay so much to fight. And even if that's, even if the, like, the aggregation theory and the default app of OpenAI and ChatGPT on the home row, like, even if that's not really that much at risk, it's just distorting the hiring market and you got to hire people.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and some people were calling out, too, that that OpenAI, while it it serves as a functional tool for a lot of people, it's also serving as this social product as well, and people are spending many hours in the app on a daily basis, and that becomes a threat to Meta. So purely from, you know, Meta wanting to, they're competing for consumer attention, right? And so.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, the same dynamic plays out in the GPU market. If there's a massive capital war for GPUs, Nvidia's supply constraint, the price goes up, and that's what's driving the cost of all these GPUs way up. OpenAI is forecasted to spend $6 billion this year with compute costs, and talent retention has become expensive. As inference itself, investors now face mounting dilution risks, plus the wild card of potential Elon Musk settlement. So there's a lot going on over there. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  If you're not on Figma already, what are you doing?

• 7:20John Coogan?

  What are you doing?

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  What are you doing?

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Well, you're probably not working at Jane Street. Jane Street is $4.3 billion India options trade triggers market ban and crackdown.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Jane Street was like, you know what? We need another PR crisis.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  We got the apology form here. We got the apology form to Jane Street Capital. Why were you hating on Jane Street? I thought Indian regulators were like, good. I never actually looked at the Indian options market. Look, that South Sudan thing kind of shook me, and I had a moment of weakness. I have a poor understanding of what counts as arbitrage. Wait, what are options again? I just like dunking on prop trading firms. And then at the end, you sign, I hereby respect Jane Street Capital and will not talk down on the future first-ballot Hall of Famer.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Great post from Alice at Just Plan.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Yes, fantastic. And so

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's been a lot of pushback here. Matt Levine broke it down, but also was getting tremendous pushback on his post. People were accusing him of being in the pocket of big Jane Street.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  High-frequency trading, big high-frequency trading. Well, here's the high level on the story. So, a secretive arbitrage strategy that netted Jane Street $4.3 billion in India's booming options market has now led to a trading ban and a $570 million seizure order by India's security regulator, SEBI. The firm allegedly manipulated the Nifty Bank Index by moving thinly traded underlying stocks to profit off of a far larger options positions, trading up Up to more, up to 7.3 times more in derivatives than cash. While SEB frames it as extending, marking the close. Jane Street calls it textbook arbitrage, exploiting a massive price gap between overhyped options and underpriced stocks.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  SEBI launched the probe after Jane Street's lawsuit with Millennium exposed the strategy's existence. The Indian market's imbalance where options trading volume can exceed underlying stocks, cash stocks. 353 to 1 left retail traders vulnerable and regulators on edge.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  I had no idea that options were so popular in India.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  I had no idea. Yeah. So Jane Street did not want anyone to know about this. Basically, what happened was there was a few traders at Jane Street that discovered this strategy.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  They were studying the Indian market. They realized that there was this massive, massive options market relative to the underlying stocks. And so the, there's an opportunity to arbitrage by buying certain, buying the derivatives and selling the stocks or vice versa. And so.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Getting tricky at the close.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so they were.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  What happened, the, the, at least some of that initial group that discovered this trade and were executing it went to Millennium.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Then Jane Street sued Millennium for trade secrets and through the lawsuit, everybody was being very vague about.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  No, no, not everyone. Just, just Jane Street was. Jane Street was like, we were operating a unique strategy, which we won't tell you about in redacted market. They didn't even want to say India. Then Millennium gets in the courtroom and is like, oh, our India strategy where we do exactly this. And, and Millennium lawyers are like, we, this is exactly what we did. And then the Indian regulators are like, wait, both of these firms are trying to do this over here. Like, get out of here.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting that they, the regulators had to discover this through the courts.

• 10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  In America, not their own.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  You wouldn't really notice it because it's just like, oh, okay. The, the, the, these two assets are, you know, pushing closer to alignment in terms of value.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Basically saying, your honor, it's called finesse.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  It's called finesse. Well, speaking of finesse, nothing has more finesse than Vanta. Automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta'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.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  It's time to sock two.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  It's time to sock two. In other news, Sean McGuire, friend of the show, multiple time guest, is in hot water with, I don't know, the left, I guess.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  He is being attacked for attacking Mamdani, the Democrat nominee for mayor of New York City. Pavel Asparuhov, also a friend of the show, has been, has, has a case study here.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the poly market, by the way.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I want to see that. So, people are calling for Sean McGuire to either be disciplined, or step down, or leave Sequoia, but the poly market has it at 17%. It seems unlikely.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  And there is a website.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:50Jordi Hays?

  That is, that people are signing.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  It's like sean McGuire dot XYZ, or something like that.

• 11:55Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, anyways, if you want to kind of.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  So Pavel says, "This is an interesting case study in media being clearly disconnected from the cultural pendulum. This is obviously not going to result in any sort of action from Sequoia, and if you had any pulse on things, you would know that." And so Sean McGuire rides on, and is continuing to fight the fight.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't see anything happening here.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  This happened a few times.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  I think he, he probably regrets the way in which he phrased the initial post.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  Yet, he made a 30-minute video explaining, explaining it. I'm sure way more people saw the original post than saw the video.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, hoping, hoping everybody can resolve their differences. And, yeah, I don't see him, I don't see him going anywhere. I think he, you know, he's.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  There was a similar call to, to push him out of Sequoia during the Trump stuff. Because he was like the first major Sequoia partner to really be vocal about supporting Trump, and there was some backlash to that. There were some questions about whether or not Sequoia would have his back there, and they did. And so, we'll see how it goes, but seems like he's, he's, he's, I, I think he's enjoying the fight online. He likes a good, he likes a good fight online. He enjoys it.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Wrestling, wrestling in the mud.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  He's wrestling in the mud, for sure. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. In other news, Replit and Microsoft are bringing vibe coding to Azure. This is an exciting deal between OnJot.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  Bringing it to the enterprise. Low-code platform Replit will integrate directly with Azure container apps and Neon serverless Postgres, letting enterprise employees build, test, and ship software by simply describing it in natural language. Microsoft customers can soon buy Replit seats through the Azure marketplace and deploy, and deploy to manage Azure infrastructure, marrying Replit's Agentic code generator with Microsoft's compliance and governance stack. Replit already counts 500,000 business owners and says the deal makes anyone in the org a developer.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:58Jordi Hays?

  So Amjad has been on an absolute tear, tons of bottoms up adoption from business owners.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  And I'm excited to see.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  He's also been really good at working with the hyperscalers. Like he had an early Google deal, now he's got a Microsoft deal. Somehow he's made both of those deals work, which is interesting because typically, you know, they're like, if we go with you, we want you to stick with us only. But Microsoft's taken this very agnostic approach to, they serve everything from OpenAI to, to, you know, Grok, and then they'll also serve Llama, and they'll also serve DeepSeek. Microsoft really wants to provide every possible model, every possible endpoint for AI so that you stay on Azure and you can use everything you want. So very excited for Amjad to be teaming up with Microsoft. Very exciting stuff.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Jack Dorsey, back in the mix.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  He is watching a new.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Jack unveiled BitChat, a Bluetooth-only WhatsApp rival. Block CEO and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey spent the holiday weekend coding BitChat, an open-source messenger that passes end-to-end encrypted text over Bluetooth or local Wi-Fi. No SIM card data plan or account required. The test-flight beta and white paper promise off-grid comms at concerts, protests, or disaster zones, and cites Apple's airdrop bans as motivation. Although early, the peer-to-peer architecture taps the same Noster protocol Dorsey champions in its decentralized social vision. So, good to see one of the, one of the all-time greats back, coding on a weekend, shipping.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  People are also, you can, I'm sure you would guess this, but leveraging BitChat's Bitcoin support, sending, sending Bitcoin back and forth.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  So, makes a lot of sense.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, excited to have him back in the game. Well, if you're selling stuff on the internet, you gotta head over to numeralhq.com.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  You got it.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. In other news, TSA has begun letting travelers keep their shoes on. You had a good take on this, Jordy?

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what is the ROI on pre-check now?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  I think it's very low.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  The shoes line?

• 16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  There was the shoe line.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Well, it was. It was you didn't have to take off your shoes, but you waited in a longer line like 80% of the time because so many people had pre-checked that the line would often be longer.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  It felt like that's only been in the last like year and a half.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. But now it's like you pay, you wait in a longer line, and you still take off your you still leave your shoes on just like every other line. So, but it's crazy. It's been 18 years. I remember when they rolled this out. It was not because of 9/11, actually. It was because post 9/11, there was a shoe bomber who tried guy who put explosives in his shoes and tried to light it on a plane. And then everyone got freaked out about shoes. But it was like this freak thing. It didn't actually result. He wasn't successful. But it was still very like visceral and scary and crazy. It was like, oh, if there could be a bomb in your shoe, you have to check the shoes. But throwing the shoes through the x-ray doesn't really detect, I think, like the bomb material. I think that's why they swipe now. So, the residue is actually more important. But they're replacing this with a bunch of CT scanners,

• 17:04John Coogan?

  AI threat detection software. There's a whole bunch of stuff that can screen footwear without unclasping it. So, it's a phased policy. It's already live at airports from LAX to Baltimore. Should reach all standard lines nationwide nationwide by late July.

• 17:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to see TSA's go to market on this. I want to see their efficiency. It's great to see they're already in testing in some markets.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Oh, here is the here is the value prop for pre-check. Pre-check is now pushing a more like Clear experience where it's touchless and you don't need your ID or your boarding pass. So, you just like scan your biometrics, either your fingerprint or your eyes, something like that.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  I'm sure the schizophrenics will love that.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the CEO of Clear is on Invest Like the Best as of, I think, this morning.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  And a cool story. I guess she bought it out of bankruptcy for like $6 million. I was I haven't had a chance to listen to the full episode yet. And turned it into a monster.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Well, 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. You can get started for free. In other news, Unilever partnered with Nvidia to generate a ton of AI. AI ads and actually worked pretty well. They got 3.5 billion social impressions and they did some sort of collab with crumble cookies. And then they generated a ton of images.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Is it crumble flavored soap?

• 18:30John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's scented. But basically they were able to send every influencer that they work with a ton of different variations. Just say like, here's, here's a thousand assets and a thousand taglines. Pick whatever you want. None of these overlap with anyone else.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  And so, and so for someone like Unilever that's just like trying to just like blanket TikTok with stuff. It like worked really, really well.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  I had a funny incident with a portfolio company once where I was, I said they were doing a launch or fundraiser announcement. And I was like, try drafting some texts for your investors so they know how to position the product and things like that, right? Cause oftentimes one of the things that will just hold an investor back from sharing is not knowing, just like the, the work to draft the post that makes sense. And, and they, they, they made like 20 or 30 different lines, but they gave them to everybody.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  So everyone used the same line.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people used the same line.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  So bad. Rookie mistake.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Rookie mistake.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Don't do it.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  And in other news, Swix has a story here that the new version of Chrome, Google Chrome, they're on version 138. You gotta ring the gong for the Chrome team. They are now shipping Gemini Nano for every user. So you'll have a local LLM in the web browser that, that in theory, web apps will be able to interact with. So you'll be able to go to a web app and if they're in Chrome, they will assume that there's an LLM available, which is very cool.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Have you noticed AI mode on Google?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  That's rolling out. Yeah. Well, I haven't used it in the US, but it's going to be the default in India. So Sundar announced that today. Basically, I, I think that's because the, the, the ARPU in India is lower. And so that they can, they can risk, yeah, they can risk losing a little bit of AdSense revenue while they adjust and figure out how they monetize the AI search.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  How to put some ads in that bad boy.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  They're going to put a lot, they already are, but I'm sure that the, I'm sure that the monetization rate is lower. In AI search mode, in AI mode. And so they need to roll it out to a really big audience. India has a billion people, right? Tons of them use Google.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Interesting ad unit. I don't, I don't think this will be something that's permanent, but you can imagine in a free LLM, it takes a little bit longer to inference

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  The, the query. And you could imagine that's an ad, just put an ad basically while, while you're waiting.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  That's a good idea. Yeah.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like, hey, if you want to, if you want it faster or instantly, you can, you can pay effectively. But

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of AI, fin.ai is the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You can start a free trial.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  We said this before, we'll say it again. Don't get, don't even try to get into bake off with it.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Don't do it.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a disaster for you.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Well, our first guest is here. We've been keeping him waiting because of our technical difficulties, but we have Alex Roy, someone that I'm very excited to talk to. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Huge fan of the show.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  I really appreciate it.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  You brought, you brought me howls of delight when you had booked Sohan last week. 24 hours after the story broke, I'm like, you guys are next gen media. It's fantastic.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. For those who don't know you, can you introduce yourself? A little bit of your history, but also I want to talk about what you're up to now. And then I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited for this intro too, because we had another friend of the show last week who said, I had a non-traditional background for venture, venture. And then he goes on to say that he was like a product, product manager in big tech.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Which is fairly traditional.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Certainly more traditional.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  But I feel like you did have a non-traditional background. So, so take us through it.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  20 years ago, I was really into street racing and I was obsessed with the history of the cannonball run, this illegal race cross country within the seventies. And, and so, but as a startup guy, I decided if I was going to break the record, I had to approach like a startup. So I wrote like a business plan as if it was a startup. The competitive landscape was 18,700 law enforcement agencies and the terrain and the, you know, road conditions.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  The SWAT analysis?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  But you're actually worried about SWAT.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  And so I ended up using everything off the shelf one could use in oh five for mapping. So you know, Google Maps didn't exist. Google Earth had just gone public. So I was using Google Earth and its backend tools to figure out, you know, how to plan the drive. Drove cross-country a couple of times in a practice, had a thermal camera I salvaged from from an old Cadillac and, you know, laser jammers, radar detectors, everything one could have. And then created a map of the police locations, dropped it into a Garmin and then inserted it into Google Earth to plan the drive. Cause in Google Earth it's always daytime, but in the practice run, it's two thirds at night. And so plotted latitude, longitude of every

• 23:18Speaker 02

  potential police trap. And spotter plane, triple redundant communications, the whole thing broke the record. Wrote a book about it. And turns out, and I didn't know this, the DARPA challenges were happening at that time. And so I got when, as soon as Wired Magazine did a story about our cannonball drive, I got outreach from all these DARPA teams. And it was all the same thing. It's, oh, Roy, you're using radar, LiDAR jamming, mapping, everything we use. You're just selfish and only not trying to help anyone but yourself. And we're trying to make roads safer. And so I became out of that, an angel investor in like autonomy and mapping. And then launched a podcast about AVs and EVs, cause that's

• 24:00Speaker 02

  the future. And eventually I got recruited to join Argo AI, which was Ford and VW's self-driving car unit, where I was an executive for four years. And so little did I know that everything I was doing to try to drive cross-country as fast as possible was directly relevant to investing in the future of road safety makes no sense. Yeah, that's amazing.

• 24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. For those who might not be super familiar with the Cannonball Run, can you explain Red Ball Garage, Portofino, the history and kind of where it went now and kind of the current status of the, I mean, it's still illegal, but people are doing it. There's these, there's these like delays. I see Vin Wiki videos like, oh yeah, a year ago I did this run. Like, what's the current culture and like status of the Cannonball?

• 24:45Speaker 02

  So, you know, the unknown, forgotten history of the cannonball is that 100 years ago, car companies didn't have a market, you know, internal combustion cars. So they hired this guy named Erwin Baker, who was a motorcycle racer, to drive from New York to California as fast as possible, no gas stations, no highways. And every few months, a car would come out with a slightly larger gas tank, or slightly better fuel economy, and he would go again. And so he went from the record, his first record, I think, was weeks, and eventually cut it down to, you know, I don't even remember it. He did 141 records across country. But that's how you marketed internal combustion back then, to prove that it was more efficient than trains and cleaner than horses. And as the interstate highway system

• 25:28Speaker 02

  was built out, and, you know, speed limits arrived, the cannonball culture just evaporated. But what is largely unknown is that it was Coca-Cola that underwrote the creation of local and eventually regional gas stations, and which unlocked iterations in better speeds for Baker. And so if you go forward 100 years, you could kind of look at electric cars today, as more Tesla superchargers were built, it unlocked electric cannonball records, and in the future will have other records. Today, there are maybe 100 or so people in a Facebook group, the Cannonballers Group, myself, Ed Bolian from VinWiki, who broke my record,

• 26:09Speaker 02

  Arnie Toman, who set it during COVID. And, you know, people go on solo runs, and occasionally there's a multi-car run. But the modern history is almost entirely based on the legacy of Brock Yates. He was a very libertarian editor for Car and Driver. And from 71 to 79, he went, he operated a full-on illegal multi-car race. And when it got covered in Time Magazine in 75 or 76, it got a lot of, a lot of attention, and the last one in 79 then led to the movie. And that was the end of cannonballing in an organized fashion. It lives on today in that Cannonballers Group.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is the, what do you think's next for Cannonball? Do you think people are gonna try and get creative with the EV challenges? Because that feels like almost an entirely new dynamic. But then also, if you could explain kind of the, the idea of like a COVID run and how that might make it kind of impossible to ever reset the record. I don't know what your take is on that, but just giving a little bit of that history, because it is fascinating.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  So, you know, the traditionalist group is, you know, multiple cars, internal combustion as fast as you can.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And I did it in 31 hours in 2006. And then I was, our team was the first team to break it like 25 years.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  And then eight years later, Ed Bolian did it in 2850. And then Arnie Toman arrived during COVID with his team and did it in like 2530-ish.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  So, you know, it is since the COVID record.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what were they driving?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Arnie was in an Audi RS6 disguised as a Ford Taurus police car. Ed Bowling was in a Mercedes CL55, I think. I was in a BMW M5 disguised as a storm chaser tornado research vehicle.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a lot of S63s, E63s, that type of car.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  And there aren't many American cars that could do it today. It would be like a Cadillac, you know, CT5 Blackwing.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's what John drives.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Great, great car, fantastic, perfect. If they could just lift the speed restriction on the.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  Wait, are you in New York right now?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  I'm in Scotts, I'm in Scottsdale.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. Well, I'll see you in like two hours then.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Okay, good. So, the, so, you know, I looked, when I looked at the history of Cannonball, as an investor, I was studying the history of the Cannonball because understanding how gas station networks were financed and built and monetized and eventually made profitable. I was like looking at EV charging network business. I'm like, well, how does that, have they learned anything from 100 years ago? And the answer is no, they didn't. And so, you know, the, the lack of infrastructure and the lack of reliable infrastructure with, you know, uptime, was a huge Achilles heel for the EV industry. And only Tesla figured this out early. And so, I, looking at Cannonball Baker, I'm like, well, why couldn't I be the Cannonball Baker of EVs? And AVs eventually.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  So in 2014, 15, started doing electric records. Tesla was the only vehicle at the time capable of setting these records because of the charging network. And recently, I began looking at Lucids and Porsche Ticons. And those are the only vehicles that could break the Tesla record. And recently, a Porsche Ticon second generation became the first car to break the Tesla electric record in thirty-nine something.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  And what goes into a great EV for breaking a Cannonball record? Is it just total capacity of the battery or ability to sustain high speeds for a long time?

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Or battery swapping?

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Battery swapping seems like logical, but none of the cars have that stock. So I don't know how you do that. Like, a fuel cell is common in a gas car, but is there an equivalent in?

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm also curious, what other tech would you use today? Would you use a network of drones? I can imagine you could, you know, potentially have thousands of drones spread out.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  Well, this is where Cannonball history and record breaking overlaps with investing in defense. Because if you understand the history of like radar detection and laser speed measurement and laser jamming, it's all analogous and they are literally parallel tech in defense. And so the electric records up until recently, because the power density of the batteries is less than, you know, a fuel tank full of gas, your speeds were basically limited to the optimal cruising speed of an EV, which is in the seventies. And then you have the issue of the charging networks. So there's nothing you can really do to a pure EV today. There's not much you can do to increase their efficiency.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  And you certainly can't increase their speed without eating into your battery state of charge. But everything comes down to the charging networks. So when Tesla, you know, when their network was 150 kilowatt across the board, your maximum, your minimum time cross-country was X. When they went to 250, you cut a little time off that. What's so fascinating about the recent Porsche Ticon record is that Ticon's EPA battery, EPA range is less than a Model S long range, which is what I drive. However, the Electrify America network, which was a terrible charging network for years, went through upgrades recently. And if you buy the cheapest Porsche Ticon with a big battery option in its lightest weight configuration, rear-wheel drive only.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  And you can charge at Electrify America at speeds that are faster than any Tesla. The cliff in the Porsche battery will let you go, I think, max charge rate slightly beyond 50%. Whereas a Tesla, their first cliff is at 20%. So that's how the Taycan did it. Less battery range, faster charging, deeper into the battery. That's the trick. Alucid today is the longest range EV you can buy, but it does not, its battery chemistry is not designed for what the Porsche is. And so for the time being, Porsche will hold the record. I think the next generation Tesla or Lucid could take it.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Talk about EV, the state of EV charging networks today, coverage, you know, are networks holding back EVs at all? We live in California, there seems to be plenty of EV chargers around, doesn't seem to be any type of bottleneck, but I'm curious nationally.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think that the non-Tesla charging network, regardless of its ubiquity, has a lot of issues with handshaking and seamless payments and just hook up to your car. Tesla figured this out, you know, out of the gate. Like it has to be frictionless or people are not going to want to do it. And so the American EV charging industry still has a lot of work to do. And even if they do, the non-Teslas on the road, I mean, we have Rivian, Lucid and the Porsche Taycan. Those are all great, great models. But other than that, there aren't, there isn't like an amazing EV product from any other American OEM. I mean, some of the Hyundai, some of the Hyundai's are good. And so you need both half the equation.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  This is where the Chinese are so strong because the vehicle hardware and software and infrastructure is all very good. Dangerously good.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Can you talk about, it's kind of surprising to meet someone who's taken, you know,

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Traditional combustion engine car so seriously to the limit and then be interested in EVs. I feel like a lot of the traditional car guys, I would never. They're purists. So what excites you about EVs broadly? And then what do you think about the current state, the change to the EV incentives that are going on right now? How does the outlook look, you know, with Elon, like the Tesla sales are kind of dropping, but that's for a variety of reasons from everything from like political to exports to China to, you know, they're late in the refresh cycle. There's so many different things going on. So, so what excites you about EVs and where do you see it going?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Well, I'm, you know, I'm, I think I'm very American in that, like, I'm totally agnostic of technology. Like, what is the coolest, best, newest thing? Are we making it? Let's try it. And if someone else is making it, we should make it. Like, that's, that's it. This country became great by innovating and exporting. So I don't care how something works, as long as it's really great product. So, you know, the EV tax credit expiring, what is it? I think it's September. Look, it's gonna, it's not, it's not awesome if you're an American car company selling EVs, and it's gonna certainly slow rate of adoption

• 34:50Speaker 02

  because prices will go up. But the real question is, you know, how do we de-politicize technologies from our internal American discourse such that the United States long-term can compete in export markets? I don't really care like about the political opinions of who developed this technology, because we need to create jobs here and be exporting stuff outside the US. And the Chinese are gonna kill us long-term in the EV market if we don't get on board. So the EV tax credit expiring sucks, but it's a minor piece in the holistic system that we need to be debating and executing on. And, you know, I recently met a woman,

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Elaine Dzinski, from, I think, the Foundation for American Democracy. She said, we need a Pentagon for industrial policy.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  There doesn't need to be a verticalized, monolithic, you know, command economy, but it needs to be a little less chaotic and more focused than we've been. And I think that's really essential, really, really essential.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  How do we solve the depreciation problem with EVs? I think it's for the consumer frustration of like, let's say you buy a Model Y, drive it for nine months and suddenly it's worth half of what you paid.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  I, well, I don't know if there is a solution to that. You know, I, probably the best solution is we need to be investing in EVs and supply chain such that we can bring costs down such that there isn't such a huge delta between the new cost and the depreciation. And it's, I mean, all cars depreciate to some extent, EVs more so. I mean, the great news for a lot of Americans is that used EVs are really cheap and a lot of them are great. I mean, used Teslas are fantastic. I mean, assuming you, well, don't, but don't buy an old Model S, but everything else is fantastic.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you seeing opportunities to invest in or alongside the EV trend? There's so many different parts in the supply chain, there's so many different adjacent products that an EV buyer, if you're not going and funding like the next Rivian or the next Lucid, where do you see opportunities for founders?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I, you know, automotive is a very small part of my fund, new industry venture capital. I mean, a lot of the, the biggest bets mostly had been taken and they're very expensive. You know, the, I think most of the opportunities are in, in manufacturing and in energy. However, there is, I mean, we only do deep tech, but outside deep tech, there are a lot of opportunities adjacent to transportation and EVs and especially AVs. When people talk about job loss, you know, due to driverless vehicles, I think they are missing the big long-term picture. The, there is a universe of startups that don't exist yet, not even barely in conversation over dinner, for providing services for passengers in autonomous vehicles.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  You know, my mother, you know, she's older and she has some issues with shopping. She would love to have an attendant or someone just to go with her on trips to go shopping. Like where, where is the Uber for elder, elder care? That would, it's a startup that's adjacent to Uber and Waymo that figures out how to connect them and has a supply of people who can do that. Most people who are Driving Ubers probably shouldn't be, just from a safety standpoint, but they'd probably be very good at helping people. And there's a much better long-term opportunity, employment opportunity for that role than there was for driving cars. Yeah. Now, I'd also add that the, the, the fear and concern and the politicization of driverless

• 38:29Speaker 02

  tech is, doesn't track with the history of automation and other, other verticals. You know, we used to have 100% penetration of elevator operators in this country. Yeah. And we went from 100% in 1946 to 1% in like about 1970, but the total number of people employed by the elevator industry is bigger today than it was ever. Interesting. Because elevators will always be a business, but there's other roles around the elevator industry. That's true of transportation. So I just don't buy any of the, the panic and doom that, that company's new tech at all.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, what about go-to-markets? The race between Waymo and Tesla, obviously very different, you know, approaches in terms of, you know, fleet development, but I'm curious how you're seeing that race?

• 39:17Speaker 02

  So the race, uh, there is, I mean, I used to like to say there isn't a race in AV because there'll be multiple winners. There's, no one can name an elevator company other than Otis, but there are the big five elevator companies on earth. They're all big. So in AV, um, Waymo and Tesla are both going to have products and the people who claim one will win, those destroyed, it's absurd. Uh, but the real race is, you know, can Waymo develop a business model outside of robotaxis before Tesla can generate a business at scale in robotaxis? Because Waymo's not in the personal ownership business and,

• 39:57Speaker 02

  and Tesla is barely in robotaxi at all. So Waymo needs to get into the licensing business and probably miniaturize their hardware such that it can conform to and become invisible on passenger cars. If Ford or anyone else had Waymo tech inside, if they could do that now, I mean, Tesla's in a, in a tight spot. Uh, but Tesla's got the opposite problem. They've got to deploy a, I would say perceptibly safe system, because no one knows what safety means, um, and get into the robotaxi business at scale. With all the friction unique to their business model before Waymo can invade their space, but ultimately, you're going to have three, four, five companies competing in AV tech. We're just seeing growing pains in both companies executing on different business

• 40:42Speaker 02

  models, and that's going to play out. They'll both have their place.

• 40:46John Coogan?

  Last question for me at least. I'm interested in you compared the Cannonball run to building a startup business plan. What do you think about the actual activity of racing in a Cannonball? That idea of risk-taking, of the stress on your body and founding a company? Have you found any analogies between the two?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when you actually, years of planning going to a Cannonball drive, and then it's over in, you know, sub 30 hours. I don't know of anything in, except maybe like an emergency product deployment that is stressful, physically stressful. But every other component of it is similar. And in that way, the Cannonball is more similar to, say, a deployment of a prototype in a defense scenario for the first time, and you have, you gotta deploy it. It may not be ready. You don't know. You spend years developing it, and it's go time. That's the closest analog. And I spent a lot of time with law enforcement and defense folks today, and I'm constantly amazed that they find what

• 41:55Speaker 02

  I did so interesting, because to me, it's nowhere near as interesting as what they do. But then when you start talking about laser jamming, and communications, and mapping, spoofing, you know, aircraft transponders to mask your location, then I'm like, yes, conceptually, it is all the same thing. I would also remark that there's something profoundly...

• 42:20Speaker 02

  American about the cannonball, which I think points to like the spirit of innovation. It is unique to the United States, but that drives American dynamism, which is that whatever the rules are, how far beyond them can we go successfully without hurting anyone? Let's go, let's find out. And that is the opposite mindset of a lot of founders from other countries and sadly, Europe.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yep. No, that makes no sense.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Last question from me, the CEO of Ford was recently making some comments. One, basically talking about white collar work broadly, which felt more like he was just parroting, you know, maybe Dario or something like that. But on the other side, he's been very outspoken about how innovative, you know, Chinese EV manufacturers have been at multiple different kind of touchpoints. Do you think that American car manufacturers outside of Tesla have the will to start to innovate at the level of some of these Chinese EVs?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Well, I know Farley and, you know, to his credit, after I set my last electric cannonball record in a Tesla, he invited me to dinner. We sat next to me and grilled me on everything about Tesla Model 3. So he's, he's good leader. He's on it. And the Mach-E reflects some of those, those lessons.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Mach-E, the route, I, my buddy, my neighbor has a, has a Mach-E rally and it's a great wild car.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Good. Look, you know, the Chinese

• 43:55Speaker 02

  car market has been there for anyone to see who wanted to go over there and do competitive intelligence for years. And the same thing's happening now as happened in the seventies when the Japanese arrived in the United States. People weren't paying attention because like, oh, they can't, you know, these foreign, they can't innovate. They don't know what they're doing, X, Y, and Z. Well, guess what? They did. And the cars are great. And friends of mine, Kevin Williamson's a journalist who went to China and has driven everything. He's like, the cars are better than anything sold here, even Tesla, because they're built better than Teslas. So we've got a problem. The only companies that are really have an opportunity in the Near to midterm are Lucid and Rivian and Tesla from the United States. The other, the legacy OEMs have individual models that are okay, Mach-E, you know, okay.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  I don't know what's coming, what GM's got, but the real question is what could be exported to any other country to compete with a Chinese car in that market? And the answer right now is, other than Tesla, basically nothing. Lucid stands alone because it's a luxury model and it's really good. And Rivian's are very cool because the products are great, but we are in a tight spot. And, you know, we need to, whatever your politics are, the United States needs to have national champions that are exporting. We shouldn't be talking about Tesla versus Waymo. We should be talking about Tesla and Waymo and exporting the hell out of anything we can that employs Americans here and that are great products that then support the American soft power narrative for the rest of the century.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  Great answer.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  I completely agree. Thank you so much for stopping by. Yeah, we gotta do this again soon. This is super fun.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Anytime, guys. Love you.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Alex.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  Well, if you have an opinion about a public car company, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  I still remember the day when Figure was allegedly getting valued north of Ford Motors.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Well, yeah. If you want to rotate into Ford, you can do it on public. If you want to rotate out of Ford, you can also do that on public. This isn't financial advice here on the show. We're just bringing you the facts. And the next fact is that Ryan Peterson from Flexport is joining the stream in any minute now. Ryan, how you doing?

• 46:08Ryan Petersen?

  You just threw me in here. I'm eating food. I didn't realize I was on.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like a.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  Surprise, surprise. What are you having for lunch?

• 46:14John Coogan?

  We've been under attack today, so the stream's been late.

• 46:18Ryan Petersen?

  Looks like Chinese food, but it's a fancy salad.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Ooh, nice.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Oh, is that Blue Barn?

• 46:22Ryan Petersen?

  Yes.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Oh, Blue Barn's fantastic. Great spot. Anyway, what is new in your world? Can you give us the update? We live through the tariffs. We checked in with you a few times. Give us the temperature check on where we are with tariffs, global trade broadly in your business.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  There's no strategy with the tariffs. They're purely to torture Ryan Peterson.

• 46:44Ryan Petersen?

  Unsolved, all caps. We're learning how to read and write in all caps all over again.

• 46:50Ryan Petersen?

  Someone said the art of letter writing was dead and then Trump just proved us all wrong. You know, he's writing letters to national, to countries with really amazing capitalization standards.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:01Ryan Petersen?

  That he's dictating.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  He would just call you Mr. Flexport.

• 47:04Ryan Petersen?

  The best part is that he's dictating because he doesn't type himself. So he's telling them, no, like capitalize tariff and capitalize country.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:12Ryan Petersen?

  And all caps for trade.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Certainly has a certain aesthetic to it.

• 47:16Ryan Petersen?

  Um, it's, it's a, yeah, whether there's a strategy to it or not is a really good open question because we got new tariffs that are at above, like on our allies, Japan and Japan. And 25% tariff. I don't know. I couldn't tell you what, what the plan is there, but it's a everyday new things, basically.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about, uh, what about just the general mood of customers, the flow of shipments? I mean, initially it was like, you know, the, the boats are sitting at the port, not moving because people are just terrified. We heard about, you know, iPhones going in the bellies of 747s on rush flights to get out of the, get out of the, the airport like minutes before the tariffs went into effect. Has, has there been any more clarity? Are we in some sort of return to normalcy where at least CEOs can feel like they can plan ahead for what's coming or is it just as much uncertainty?

• 48:17Ryan Petersen?

  It's, um, you know, today's the day. So the tariffs are the, the 90 day reciprocal tariffs came out and they were paused for 90 days, 90 days ago today. So they are going, unless something is announced, which he announced like six or eight countries yesterday with their new tariff rate, but everybody else, um, that's happening today. They'll go back to the 90 day, to the original rates from April 2nd that freaked everybody out, uh, tonight at midnight. Um, now then I believe he tweeted earlier today or Truth Social, um, that it'll be on August 1st that those new duties are due. So there probably will be a bit of a race here for the next three weeks to try to get stuff in at the 10% rate instead of the higher rates.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:02Ryan Petersen?

  That's coming back. Um, the thing that freaked everybody out, uh, 90 days ago was more the China rate, which was 145%.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Ryan Petersen?

  And that's come back down to 30 and people are kind of like, okay with it. I don't know, we'll, we'll take the temperature here and we'll see what happens with, with freight bookings. But things seem kind of normal with the customer base. But we haven't got enough data yet. I mean, it's brand new information, the new rates that came out yesterday that are going to go into effect in the next

• 49:30John Coogan?

  Just as a little, just as a little extra data, right now the S and P and NASDAQ are basically flat. Uh, but copper prices have hit all time high on this planned 50% tariff. I am interested in China. I remember when you were explaining the nature of the tariff. There were a few different elements. You were talking about the, the energy prices into China basically being passed through. I believe that was a tariff on oil that then was getting passed through to the cost of goods in some way. How are you thinking about the, you said 35%? Is that all in or is that just a piece of the overall tariff picture? If you're considering doing business in China going forward?

• 50:10Ryan Petersen?

  Um, it'll depend on your product. Tariffs are driven by three things. One is the, the country of origin. And that is a, something that actually Trump is changing the rules around in real time. Uh, with this idea of transshipment. That he said, goods that are trans shipped through Vietnam will pay a higher duty. But like, that is very odd. I mean, those of us in the industry think of transshipments has no effect on duty rate whatsoever because it's still the original country. If you, you ship from goods from China to Vietnam and then from Vietnam to the US. Unless you did what's called substantial transformation, you changed them into a product of Vietnam. They still pay the Chinese duty rate.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:51Ryan Petersen?

  Uh, whereas he's kind of changing those rules in real time and have not yet published something in the code of federal regulations that we can actually understand what he means. So remind everybody that true social is not how laws get and regulations get published. It's, um, we're waiting to see what really comes out.

• 51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:08Ryan Petersen?

  So, okay. So you have the country of origin, you have the classification.

• 51:13Ryan Petersen?

  Which is, okay, what type of goods are they that that drives and do they have the components of steel and aluminum that sets a different duty rate or what is the thing actually classified as? And then the third one is valuation. How are they valued? And those are the three kind of key drivers of what your duty rate is. And right now, and there's just a lot of uncertainty that we're waiting to see what this transshipment thing means. The world will find ways to minimize their duty rate. Hopefully, legal ways. Don't, don't, don't make sure you work with an attorney and don't just go do this. But it'll be very interesting to see, like, can you actually save duty by shipping from China to Vietnam somehow? In this world, like, I don't know. I don't know what the definition of transshipment is going to be.

• 51:58Ryan Petersen?

  The interesting, the other interesting thing here is that from a trade perspective, logistics and customs companies are kind of happy about this stuff. Because it adds complexity, you need leader, you need partnership from experts more, and you're doubling the amount of trade. Because there's going to be, if there's incentive now to move goods from one country to another, transform them and ship them onward, that's two shipments, one from China to Vietnam and one from Vietnam to the US. Or like, you know, one of the sad ones that came about here is we have a customer, longtime customer, that makes bicycles in the United States, and they import components and assemble them in the US and sell them. Well, bicycles got an exemption, they're duty free, but the components did not.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 52:43Ryan Petersen?

  So these guys are actually better off shipping their manufacturing offshore now. And that's what this is going to happen.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  That's very odd. Have there been, yeah, you feel like, it feels like there's a little bit of this, like, game theoretic dynamic where Trump puts these blanket tariffs all over the place, but there's potentially an incentive for some country to just jump headfirst and say, hey, we're playing ball, give us the lowest rate possible, because we want to grab as much manufacturing capacity over here and be as friendly as possible. Have there been any, like, I mean, I know that the, the, the situation with Japan has been more difficult than expected. Have there been any countries that have popped out as like, new favorite trading partners of American companies in your feeling?

• 53:29Ryan Petersen?

  Well, the companies wise is different from the government, probably.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 53:33Ryan Petersen?

  The government, it looks like the UK so far, but the UK's got a 10% duty rate and some nice exemptions that they got on auto. Which I guess is like Land Rovers and Bentleys, Aston Martin.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:48Ryan Petersen?

  Um, they don't make a lot of those, but um. Jaguar, is that, is that how they?

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't think they've been making many cars.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  No, no Jaguar, Jaguar actually took a year off. They skipped a year producing cars. They were like.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  Taking a year off business.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  We're just gonna sell down our inventory.

• 54:05Ryan Petersen?

  Oh, okay. It wasn't just because the commercials were that bad?

• 54:08John Coogan?

  No, no. Then they launched the rebrand after they had announced that, hey, we're, we're not producing any new cars, which was like, your job as a car company is to make cars.

• 54:16Ryan Petersen?

  You belong in a Jaguar commercial. Look at you two. Belong in the north of England.

• 54:21Jordi Hays?

  I actually, I didn't understand that.

• 54:24Ryan Petersen?

  In the convertible.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  I didn't understand the hate on the actual silhouette of the new Jaguar. I thought it was cool.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  It was very cool. I mean, it was one of those prototype cars that didn't have like mirrors or anything. So they clearly needed a lot to do to make it a real one.

• 54:36Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, I mean, a lot of.

• 54:39Ryan Petersen?

  But so, uh, come back to your question. You guys, interesting because, uh, they actually have a trade, we have a trade surplus with the UK and they still got a 10% duty rate. So that told everyone, oh, the best you could possibly do is 10%. Uh, even if you have a trade, even if we maintain a trade surplus. Vietnam is probably the best example of someone that tried to play ball. And they said, hey, we're gonna do everything duty free on American products being imported. Uh, and they ended up with, um, what was it? 25, 20%? And then this weird transshipment thing that I already got to that we don't understand yet. Um, so that's probably, the thing that Trump would like to get is that transshipment, what he would like to have is that these countries put duties on China.

• 55:20Ryan Petersen?

  And Chinese goods coming into Vietnam, they want them to get hit with high duties so that you're not effectively laundering, washing Chinese goods through that country.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:29Ryan Petersen?

  Doing some minimal transformation and then shipping them to the US. They want to make it so like. It's a, you know, like, create this coalition of the willing against China. That's my, that's my read on it.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:40Ryan Petersen?

  It's kind of hard for them to do.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's kind of two narratives. One's like Trump likes tariffs. He wants to throw tariffs all over the place. Make us a high tariff country. On the flip side, there's like, this is about a trade war with a rising near peer competitor. And the entire narrative is really just US versus China and everything else is in service of that. Is that a reasonable narrative that you think people should?

• 56:02Ryan Petersen?

  It's one of those two probably, yeah. Maybe some balance and I'm not sure they know and there might be different factions within the US government that want different ones of those and it's, it's, it's pretty hard to get a read on it. But from a

• 56:19Ryan Petersen?

  company perspective, they're just looking for whoever makes the cheapest stuff that's high quality that they could sell. I mean, I don't think these countries, there's not that many companies, they might on the surface like claim to be patriotic or have some views or something, but that's not, that's not what companies are meant to do. They're meant to make money. And so they're gonna, they're gonna route, you know, they're wait till the rules get set and then they're gonna, water flows downstream, they're gonna downhill, they're gonna go figure out where the best place to make stuff is.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we saw this within Nvidia where there were chip bans and Nvidia is, hey, the speed limit's 65, I'm going 64 miles an hour. And so I'm going to make a specific chip that is as good as possible while not breaking that regulation. That's not the spirit of the law. And it's like, yeah, I'm a $3 trillion company. My job's not to adhere to the spirit of the law. I gotta adhere to the letter of the law. I gotta make as much money as possible. And so that's what.

• 57:09Ryan Petersen?

  That is what companies are supposed to do. Government needs to set the rules and then we all figure out how to make money given those rules. The problem right now is that the rules change, so you can't make any decisions in the next, I, I advise people wait.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Ryan Petersen?

  At least tomorrow. I mean, we'll see what, what new trade deals drop tonight, but I think every few weeks.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  No, no, if, if, if, if history is a guide, as soon as you leave this Zoom, there will be news.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:32Ryan Petersen?

  Hey, someone check Twitter right now.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, what's, what's the, how cooked are Timu and Sheen right now? There had been some reporting last week around, you know, people base, you know, US shoppers ditching them because of the loophole. I didn't know how, how real that was.

• 57:49Ryan Petersen?

  I haven't seen the latest data. I think they're both back live. You can buy stuff on their apps again. So I think they're, they're set up in a way that lets them transact and just pay the customs duties. And I take their, I don't know how the consumer is responding to it all.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  It's already so cheap.

• 58:04Ryan Petersen?

  They had to stop selling for a couple of weeks, so that probably hurts you pretty significantly.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  But if it's a $30 couch and then you're paying $90 or whatever.

• 58:16Ryan Petersen?

  Well, it's only 30% on their wholesale price, not on the price that you pay.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 58:22Ryan Petersen?

  So I think they may be fine. It's all. But I have heard that apparel companies, who is who most directly competes with Shein at least, actually, sales are up quite a bit despite the tariffs and having to raise prices. And that's probably in part because Shein's volumes have come down. And the consumer is shifting their spend on to other brands. So we've seen that a little bit in our customer data and our fulfillment business, where customers are exceeding their forecasts. So the world is not all doom and gloom from an econ perspective, which is a big departure from 90 days ago where I was screaming everyone's going to go bankrupt and companies were screaming that to me. I think that relaxing the Chinese tariffs made a big difference.

• 59:07Ryan Petersen?

  But again, we're going to figure out what happens in the next 24 hours of with these new duties and how people respond to that over the next few weeks.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  It's gonna be exciting. What about some of the smaller players in the market? Like just the broad like drop shipping economy. Jordi and I were talking about this this morning, how it feels like.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  And Sean Frank from Ridge was talking about how like the the default road to entrepreneurship a few years ago was like spin up a Shopify store, like white label some stuff, like, you know, get a business up and running. And then it shifted to like courses and influencer stuff and AI and.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Info products.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Info products. And now it's WAP and Cluley and these other things. They were kind of talking about like the modern, you know, first time entrepreneur track. Is are these like, you know, small lean drop shipping operations still going? Do you think? Do you ever run into any of these people? Do you ever see them kind of like you used to hear about like, oh, someone just found this really interesting niche on on ads and they scaled this like very simple business to like tens of millions of dollars. Are you still seeing that or do you think that's kind of like?

• 1:00:15Ryan Petersen?

  I think you mostly see it in China and Vietnam, but selling into the US.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. So they're entrepreneurs.

• 1:00:23Ryan Petersen?

  Their entrepreneurs have figured out how to do marketing and branding and. The more that that was something I predicted would happen 20 years ago that it would take, but that it would take a generation because

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Ryan Petersen?

  That they have to speak English, they have to know enough about, they have to have enough humility to go, I speak English, but not that well. I should probably hire an American to do the writing. Instead of like, oh, I'll do the writing myself and have it be English, but terrible.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  On, on Sunday, I wanted to get a new hose, not a, not a spigot, but one of those things that you can like control the flow, nozzle or whatever. So going on Amazon, I, I searched hose nozzle and I went five pages without finding a legacy US brand that, that would sell me one. And they're all these names that are basically some common five, six letter combination of English letters that, that doesn't even read well.

• 1:01:16Ryan Petersen?

  I think Amazon has a real problem in that regard.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I would, I would happily, like, I want to check a box that's just only buy from brands that have been around for 50 years. And I would have, I would just happily, like, those are the products that I want to buy. Cause I don't want to buy the $6 product that's going to break in a year and I gotta buy another one. I just want to buy the thing that, that, you know, it's not.

• 1:01:38Ryan Petersen?

  And the thing to watch on this front, those companies don't, 60% of all the sellers on Amazon don't even have a US entity. They're be, they're like, the goods are actually imported from abroad. And there's a, there's a bipartisan movement in DC to block this policy, to block this law, to make it so that you have to have a US entity. You can't just import as a Chinese company or whatever country, country, company, you can't just import stuff into the US, like without someone here who can be held accountable to following the customs law, to whatever other child safety laws, you know, other stuff that's downstream that can happen. Um, and I think Amazon has business exposure there that.

• 1:02:22Ryan Petersen?

  People like you are gonna, at some point, I, I started gravitating towards Shopify and like the shop app where you're like, I don't know, there's something higher quality about people trying to build a brand on Shopify today anyways. And then they have political exposure. I mean, what did Trump call them? Treasiness? I forget what the-

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  It's for passing through the tariffs into-

• 1:02:43Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah, he called them-

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for me, for me as a consumer, it's not like I want my hose nozzle. It's not like I need an American-made hose nozzle. It's just like this, this commitment to, like, this, this relationship that you have when you're buying a product, which is, I want to trust that this company put in a real effort to design a product that is going to be effective and durable. And I'm happy to pay four or five times what the, what the, the entry ticket price is. So-

• 1:03:13Ryan Petersen?

  Lindyism, I like it.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, people are clamoring for this on Pinterest. Like, they want to search Pinterest from like, any image that's posted on Pinterest before 2023. Like, before the AI images came. Because you search for anything and it's just a lot of like, sneaky AI stuff stuck in there. If you're looking for something very specific, you're like, I don't necessarily want an AI image. And there's no real good filter, other than just, like, is it in the Pinterest database with date created before 2023? Like, that is the provenance of that image. And it's kind of the same thing, like, on, on Amazon being able to filter for, did this company exist, you know, 10 years ago?

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what, what was the postmortem on the, on the conflict in the Middle East from a trade standpoint? I remember there was one night-

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Straight to the Hormuz.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it looked like two tankers had been blown up and I, and I was seeing that, like, open source intel on it being like, oh, like, I just was feeling bad for you. I didn't send you a message or anything, but I was like, oh, this is the last, last thing that, that the, that global trade needs right now. But we seem to get out of it.

• 1:04:21Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah, it's, um, the Strait of Hormuz is incorrect, much more important for the wider economy than just for, certainly not for containerized trade, it's pretty small. Like, only about 2% of containers go in and out of the, um, Strait of Hormuz. And that's basically going to Dubai, Jiblali Port, it's called. It's a top 10 port in the world, but- It's mostly a transshipment port, meaning cargo comes in there, gets unloaded, think of it like a packet switcher, the cargo comes on and gets rerouted. It's not that important of a port in the wider scheme of things. The big, the big thing obviously is oil. It's like 20 something, 5% of the oil in the world flows out of there. And it's fascinating, if you look, if you look at the oil prices, look at the price of diesel, there's no sign that anything ever happened in the Middle East at all. Like, you don't even see a blip upward.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:06Ryan Petersen?

  And when Iran threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the oil price went down 6%. Instead of spiking.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, weird. Why?

• 1:05:16Ryan Petersen?

  My read is like, no one thinks that's a credible threat. Because if they close it, China gets all their oil out of there.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Ryan Petersen?

  And China is like, kinda necessary to keep, if Iran stops, you know, if Iran screws with China, like, what's left? Like, you gonna be against China and the US? Like, this is probably bad strategy.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Ryan Petersen?

  I thought that would maybe, if, when I saw that they might do that, I was like, this is kinda some 4D chess by Trump. If he gets Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, we don't need it in the United States. We got, we produce our own oil, basically. It's an overstatement, but.

• 1:05:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:48Ryan Petersen?

  When the oil price goes up, America does better now, right? We produce, we're the number one oil producer in the world. Like, that might be good for us as a country.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  That is a crazy story. Like, there's the idea of us, I mean, I grew up with the idea of like, energy independence and the idea of America needs oil and we gotta go to these wars to get the oil. And oil drives everything and now, you know, we're a net exporter.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  I think there is, it's not like purely that we produce it, we can just keep it here and be self-sufficient, right? Isn't it, we're producing it, like, it has to be.

• 1:06:19Ryan Petersen?

  There's different grades of oil and our refinery capacity is like, different. Yeah, sure, there's some of that, but that's. Nonetheless, a higher price of oil would benefit American companies. Now, yeah, like, normal people, you and me, you know, our, our energy bills will go up and it'll be bad, but. On that for this, for the country, it probably income inequality goes up or something, but we, high price of oil is good for the number one oil producer in the world.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  How do you think retails broadly are thinking about interest rates in the next 12 months? You know, there's certainly pressure on that front on Powell. It would be, you know, retailers have had to get used to high rates. And if you're financing inventory and things like that, it is meaningful cost. I've heard rumors of aggregators, you know, shutting down that were heavily debt fueled, probably can't sustain in this type of environment. So.

• 1:07:19Ryan Petersen?

  I assume like everybody else, I don't think that that's, I don't think we're that sophisticated in our business, like, but cheaper interest rates would definitely help consumers buy more stuff and drive a lot of growth. And I think most of us would realize, okay, we, we kind of took it for granted for too long. We probably should have borrowed more money when it was 2% and bought more stuff and done capital investments. And the next time around, I think it'll be a massive spending splurge or investment splurge if they drop interest rates back down. People won't take it for granted.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  You're up in SF. There's been a bunch of massive trade deals in SF AI engineers going to Meta. What's been the mood on the ground? Do you have any advice for the folks picking up nine-figure checks?

• 1:08:08Ryan Petersen?

  I just, well, I love, first of all, I love asking people because if you didn't get an offer, what's wrong with you?

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  No, and if you're not, if people aren't, if there's not like whispers that, that people from your company are being proposed, you probably not at the right lab.

• 1:08:25Ryan Petersen?

  Oh, man, maybe I should make some posts about this, getting angry at Zach for taking my best people.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, the psyops need to continue.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  The rumors are true. He's been personally dialing the entire engineering team.

• 1:08:41Ryan Petersen?

  The advice would be it's.

• 1:08:47Ryan Petersen?

  You should go read the most important business book ever written. It's called The Prince by Machiavelli.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:08:55Ryan Petersen?

  And Machiavelli's rule number one is never hire mercenaries. He says it over and over again. It's the whole theme of the book. Mercenaries are useless. They will run away when the time they'll they'll take your money and then run away when it comes when it actually comes to fight. Uh, and that is it really dangerous out here in this world of AI coaching, people paying this much money, you know, I I'd be I'd be very worried if I was, how do you build a culture out of that? It's gonna be challenging. They should all go read the book and figure out what are they gonna do about that?

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  How do you think about the sports analogy? A lot of people are kind of comparing the current trade deals to sports. No one thinks about Otani as a mercenary, you know?

• 1:09:39Ryan Petersen?

  Yeah, it's interesting question. Um, sports, you have a fixed size of your team, so you can only have so many players. So maybe there's something to be said for that of like, okay, you've got therefore it bids up the price of the

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Also, if you look at if you look at the, the, you know, we know nothing about sports, but I growing up in the Bay Area, watching the Warriors go on this very dominant run. I'm sure at any point, many of those players could have increased their

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  Well, not at any point because they have contracts that are multiple years. And so it's like

• 1:10:10Ryan Petersen?

  It's a good point. You know, the ultimate is Tom Brady because Tom Brady, his secret was marrying a supermodel wife who made so much money that he could work below market price and they could build out a great team. So maybe you need to hire engineers who have rich spouses.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Take. Yeah. Yeah, that's gonna be the next, the next bull signal.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't I don't do it for the money.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Wait, who'd you bring to the holiday party? Okay, you're getting poached. You're going to the top team. The holiday party was popping.

• 1:10:41Ryan Petersen?

  But it's, uh, yeah, it's, I don't know. I'm fascinated by seeing how this plays out. And it is, um, you know, at the end of the day, you gotta hire the best talent and Zuck's kinda smart. He's got the war chest and OpenAI did this before. I mean, they hired, they were hiring everybody. I love seeing them whine about it because all my friends have had their engineers poached by OpenAI. They were overpaying by 2X. So.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:02Ryan Petersen?

  A front end engineer was making 350K just to, you know, HTML and CSS.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:08Ryan Petersen?

  And that was, it's, uh, it's kinda crazy.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 350 and then, you know, 10s of millions of dollars and probably stock options.

• 1:11:16Ryan Petersen?

  Hopefully not for the front end engineers. This isn't even people who are doing anything to say, ah.

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  No slander for front end engineers.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  It depends on when they got in, right? If they got in a couple of years ago, it could have 10xed in terms of, you know, net value now.

• 1:11:29Ryan Petersen?

  You know, it's, uh, one of those, it's like trying to be the toughest fighter or something. At some point, you know, you can beat up everyone on your block, but you eventually run into Mike Tyson and you're gonna lose. So.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  That's exactly what's happened. Yeah. I mean, it's.

• 1:11:41Ryan Petersen?

  It's maybe better not to try to fight.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's so interesting because like the last, the last like big, like the, I mean, we've had, we've had a few like big hyperscale, like really fast growing, super hot, like ordained as like winner companies like SpaceX, Tesla, Uber. And those companies were not seen as a direct threat to Google or Microsoft or Apple. And so it's not like there was ever, I mean, my, Google was kinda thinking about Waymo as a counter to Uber, but it was never like, our core business might disappear. So we have to spend, you know, unlimited money to protect that, you know, what we have.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  People are starting to talk about how the competitive dynamic between Meta and OpenAI, being that if you're spending three hours a day talking with chat, that's three hours a day that you're not just putting comments on your friend's Instagram posts or hitting reels or things like that. So there's, you know, we all have 24 hours of the day. We're making more humans, but you know.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, especially.

• 1:12:43Ryan Petersen?

  I, I, I wanna see what ideas they have because, you know, the way to compete with Google.

• 1:12:48Speaker 04

  Was not make a better search engine like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. You know, it would that a lot of people tried that you couldn't do it. So I don't know that the way to compete with open AI is to make a better chatbot.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Like they gotta come up with some new ideas here and I don't know what they are. I don't know what they have in mind. Maybe they, maybe.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  I want a new, I want a new thing at the bottom of the Instagram app. That's just dopamine and it's just a perpetual loop. You don't even have to scroll.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  The whole app might be that eventually.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Just surfacing content you want to see would be a win.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, this has been fantastic, Ryan. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  And send us a note when, when, when, when, uh, new, new truths hit the timeline. We would love your reaction.

• 1:13:35Speaker 04

  I don't think you guys can handle the, the speed it was this gonna happen every day.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  You back on the show tomorrow. Who knows?

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't think you need that.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  We'll go.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  All right, take care guys.

• 1:13:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  See you, Ryan. Cheers.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about 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 ad buying across the globe.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  It's billboard time.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  And we have our next guest in the studio already. Jonathan from Air Garage talking about parking. How you doing, Jonathan?

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  It's time to talk about parking.

• 1:14:10Speaker 04

  Everybody's favorite topic, parking. I'm just glad I finished my lunch before I, I got let in on my run. So I'm a little more, more prepared than he is.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a bit of a random stream today.

• 1:14:21Jordi Hays?

  Great hearth.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  But love the hearth.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Is that a TV? That looks like a TV.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I wish it was a real hearth. I, you know, it's San Francisco, it's June or it's July now, I guess, but it's, uh, pretty much always cold. So we've got to try to stay warm however you can.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  I think the real hearth comes after the next round.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Once there's some major liquidity in the business, maybe then you can upgrade. Uh, but give us the news. What's the latest from you?

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, very exciting news today. We just announced that we raised our series B from, and it was led by headline growth and participation from some of our existing investors and customers and all that jazz. So very exciting $23 million series B and hit that gong.

• 1:14:58Speaker 04

  Great contact, great contact. Great contact. Sounded very, very full from this end.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Yes, it was fantastic. So, give us, give us an update on where the business is today. Kind of introduce the business and yourself and then we'll kind of dig into some questions.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. So, Air Garage, for people that haven't heard of us before, basically, we work with real estate owners that own parking lots and parking garages and we help them manage and monetize their parking assets. So, you know, if you've ever parked your car in the United States or really just anywhere, you know that it's a pretty terrible experience. There's signs that are confusing. It's like a five paragraph essay on a sign. The machines are broken. They eat your credit card. They eat your ticket. All that sort of stuff. And, you know, I think a lot of people, when they first experience that, or if they've thought about it at all, it's kind of like one of those schlep blindness problems that most people, you experience it, but you just kind of ignore it when it happens in your daily life. If you've thought about it, you're kind of like thinking, okay, maybe it's like this because, you know, that's how real estate owners like it. They want to scam me. They want to like rob me blind. A lot of people, you know, they have it

• 1:15:57Speaker 04

  out for real estate owners. But it's not that way at all. Real estate owners hate it too. And so, we work with those real estate owners. We've built this basically vertically-integrated operating system for parking real estate. It combines everything involved in taking it from being a piece of asphalt with stripes on it to a full-fledged parking operation that generates income using technology. So, it's the technology you would expect in any other industry, but it's just completely new to the parking industry. So, we do payments. We do advertising enforcement. We build hardware. We build software. Basically, what we're trying to do is bring as much data and visibility to these assets as possible to generate more income for real estate owners, to create a better experience for drivers at the same time. And so, you know, the net result is we can increase net operating income by 20 to 50% for real estate owners. And for a

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  real estate owner, that's huge because your asset is valued on NOI and you want to make as much as, as much as possible. So, that is how we've managed to grow as much as we have. So, we've grown 10x since we raised our Series A. We're actually cash flow positive as a business, which is awesome. And, you know, just trying to get as many locations across the country as possible. So, now we have 300-plus locations in 38 states across the United States.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I have two funny stories about parking. One, uh, once was I, I started, I stopped carrying a wallet because I was like, Apple Pay is so good. I'm fine. I don't need a wallet and I got locked in a parking garage that didn't take Apple Pay once. Uh, and I had to talk my way out of it and, and hit the, hit the security guard and be like, sorry, I literally have no money of any kind. I, I, uh, I can't do anything. And then the other time I was parking in a, in a garage, going to a restaurant. Um, and, and like, it's very confusing how to pay for this garage. Cause there's no like, there's no like, uh, gate. So you just go in and there's a ticket attendant and the guy comes up to me in like a jack, in like a, like a, you know, security vest or whatever.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  And, uh, says like, here, yeah, you pay me and I pay him and I go into the restaurant and the restaurant owner is like, yeah, that guy doesn't work there. And it was just like an enterprising homeless man, I think. And so, you know, good on him, but, uh, not, not the best user experience. So yeah, I, I have a ton of questions. Um, I, I want to know, I mean, so hardware, like that seems actually pretty hard to solve. I mean, taking cash, credit cards, Apple Pay, like the demands are pretty wild. Um, do you, do you white label stuff? Do you actually develop everything? Do you have manufacturers for this stuff? Is it commoditized? Um, like, uh, what is that? What is the shape of that side of your business?

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the hardware that we do is, is all basically cameras and sensors. So it's mostly license plate reading cameras that sit at the entrance and exit of the garage. And they track every vehicle that goes in and goes out. It gives us real time occupancy data, gives us enforcement data. But then it also can actually enable these magical experiences where I park in our, down near our headquarters in downtown San Francisco. We have a garage right near there. My account, because I'm already registered with Air Garage, when I drive into that garage, it automatically starts a session for me. When I drive out, it automatically ends my session. I never have to touch my phone. So to your point, you wouldn't have to carry a wallet anymore. And it bills me for exactly the time I use, right? And it's like, that's, when you think about it, like, that's just how parking should be.

• 1:19:04Speaker 04

  But it's not that way, right? It's like so old school. And that's because basically real estate owners, they hire a parking operator, which is basically a property manager to run their property. Those parking operators, they're 50 to 100. Years old, they've been doing things the same way since the 1980s. They use cash and machines and attendants. And yeah, they all use basically parking machines in their locations. And it turns out the parking machines are just kind of the wrong way to run a parking facility. You have those gate arms, people more often than you would think. People drive through those gate arms, a lot of owners when they're switching to air garage, they're telling us about. You know, 15 times a month, somebody breaks their gate arm and it's like $4,000 to fix it every single time. And that's on top of you spent a hundred, $200,000 to buy the gate arm in the first place. And then you just need an attendant to sit there and like babysit it.

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  So one of the things we do differently at air garage is we're in entirely a gateless system, which means you remove that entire huge. Sort of headache and expense of maintaining and and keeping these gate arms in your facility. And so when you're a driver, that's also a better experience. You drive in, you drive out, the license plate and cameras track your car. We get real time data, you get a better experience and you have a lot less expense and sort of, uh, you know, maintenance issues to deal with with the gate arm. Because I think a lot of people can relate to the experience as well of like, especially after a big, you know, sporting event or event that you've been to. You're trying to get out of a parking garage, you're sitting there for an hour because people are taking so long to go through that gate one at a time. You get rid of those, you entirely get rid of the bottleneck and it's a way better driver experience.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  So our hardware, the way we build hardware, we build it all actually in-house, which is very unique for any parking company. Most parking companies, they don't even build their software in-house. We build software and hardware in-house to give us the best control and visibility. But the critical thing is you don't make the hardware a dependency, right? If if a camera goes down for some reason, people can still drive in, still still drive out, they can still pay. We still have a functioning system through the software. So you remove that dependency and it makes it a way better experience. And also you just get a better experience as a driver and as an owner.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I gotta ask two VC coded questions.

• 1:21:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Sure you got in the raise, but I'm curious. So, uh, we had the CEO of Metropolis on.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you guys were competing in a maybe at some point in a more intense way. They've taken the more roll up approach in terms of. Asset heavy? At very asset heavy, they raised 1.7 billion to buy.

• 1:21:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not and not technically asset heavy because they're not like purchasing the assets themselves, but they did.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:21:30Speaker 04

  Basically just go acquire operators. So they just took, yeah, to your point, they took a inorganic growth strategy, which yeah, I certainly have lots of thoughts on, but finish your question, sorry.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, and I'm just curious, like, I'm sure every. You know, investor meeting leading to this B, people were like, have you thought about raising a billion and doing this strategy? And you did not. So I'm curious, kind of the how you evaluate those two approaches?

• 1:21:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that there's a lot of different ways to build a company. And, you know, basically, the thesis that they're working on is actually the same thesis that there's another company called Reef Parking. I don't know if you've heard of them, but they took the same approach. And what they did is they raised about a billion dollars from SoftBank in 2018, 2019. That was right as we were raising our seed round. So a lot of people were looking at that saying like, oh, they beat you to it. Sorry, you're out of luck. But the thesis is basically, okay, we have this technology. We have this platform. We're going to raise a bunch of money. We're going to acquire this old school operator that has all of these locations and contracts already. And of course, we're going to, you know, it's going to look beautiful in a spreadsheet. We're going to replace all of this G and A, or this overhead, or this cost of goods sold of human labor. We're going to replace it with this technology and our margins are going to look great.

• 1:22:43Speaker 04

  And there's going to be a bunch of upside. It's kind of like classic private equity playbook. You know, it's a very like investor obsessed spreadsheet driven way of building a business. And the critical ingredient that has to be true in that is like, we have the technology. And that's what wasn't true really for Reef Parking. And that's why that whole thing sort of went sideways. And they're no longer really a business. I mean, they're working through restructuring. Mubadala has like taken over that business and is trying to sell it last I heard. And, you know, that's the question for Metropolis is like, do they have that technology? And we're taking a very, at Air Garage from day one, we started by taking over one parking lot, working from first principles, figuring out how do you run this parking lot using the technology that we have available to us?

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  We didn't know what a parking company was. We didn't know what a parking operator was. We knew nothing. We were just completely making it up from scratch, which is a huge advantage compared to doing things the way they've always been done. And so we've built the platform as we've gone along to actually truly do what we say it does, right? And that's the question for them is as they're going through their portfolio and trying to transition people, are those people actually going to transition to the platform? Does the platform actually work? And the thing is, real estate owners have been burned so many times in the last 20, 30 years by Vaporware software and people saying like, oh, we have technology and you real estate people are so old school and you don't get it and like, we're going to change your life and make things, everything great with this technology and it hasn't played out many times. And so it's very hard to earn that trust with real estate owners. And so if

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  you start taking over locations and you don't have that technology and it doesn't work out, then you sort of quickly fall out of favor. And so they're making that bet. And that's the question is, do they have it? Remains to be seen. I, you know, I have an opinion on that, of course, I won't comment directly on that. But yeah, it's just a different vision for how to build that end state. And then, you know, do we go and do rollups in the future as well? Potentially, because we do actually have the technology.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Great. Second VC coded question. We had Alex Roy on, famous Cannonball driver, wrote the driver. And we were talking a lot about autonomous vehicles. I'm curious how you think AVs will impact the parking industry.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:49Jordi Hays?

  People have had this sense of, oh, there's so much parking in cities and when we have AVs, we won't need them. That's never fully tracked for me because

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  Got to charge the AVs.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Got to charge them. You have to maintain them. You have to store them. There's, there's way more demand during rush hour than there is, you know, during, you know, and I don't want to send my, my AV, you know, if I have an AV that I personally own, I don't want to put a bunch of miles on it, driving it way out of the city to then circle back. So it's never fully tracked to me that

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Some people just like parking lots more than parks, like public parks, you can't really do a lot of car spotting in them.

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Walk around hunting for the Lamborghini.

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  Can't do cars and coffees in a public park. You got to have a parking lot.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  That would be fun though.

• 1:25:35Speaker 04

  On the grass. You know what's funny is, is this was a question I got all the time in our series, like our seed race. And that was like at the peak of the autonomous vehicle hype wave, like the classic hype wave that autonomous vehicles has followed. And this was every VC in the seed round was of course, asking about this. And

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  You're saying I'm six years behind.

• 1:25:55Speaker 04

  What'd you say? You're saying I'm six years behind. You're six years behind. Well, and yeah, the funny thing to me was that during this most recent fundraise, basically, nobody asked us about that. And that's while, at the same time, I'm in San Francisco, riding in Waymos and cruise cars constantly. And so it's like actually real now versus six years ago, it wasn't actually real. You know, I think I have a lot of thoughts on this. One of the, one of the reasons we chose Floodgate actually to lead our seed round at the time was because they saw without us, they independently came to the same conclusion that we did, that, you know, basically, parking is going to be this really interesting asset class over the next 10 to 15 years. At the time, based on what they were seeing, because Anne, the partner at Floodgate, is on the board of Lyft, or was on the board of Lyft at the time. And so she was seeing the changes even

• 1:26:40Speaker 04

  before autonomous vehicles with just the Uber and Lyft trend over the last 10 years. And so what they saw was somebody's going to need to basically figure out what to do with all this space in our cities. Like 26% of the median urban core, buy land area, median urban core, over 500,000 people, 26% buy land area is dedicated to parking. So that doesn't even account for garages under a building. That is dedicated surface area in the urban core of our cities, not looking at the suburbs, which is even more parking. That's a massive amount of space in our cities. There's eight parking spaces for every car in the United States. I think the stat is there's enough parking surface area in the United States, and eight is the low end. The estimate is actually eight to 11 parking spaces for every car. There's, I think, one stat that I saw that basically there's enough

• 1:27:24Speaker 04

  parking space in the United States to cover the entire state of West Virginia with asphalt. And so regardless of how you look at it, there's going to be some repurposing that needs to happen. And in order to do that over time, you first need to like, understand how that space is being used today. And that's the thing, is like, that just doesn't exist. Like, the parking operators that are in, running these facilities right now, they're so old school, they're doing things manually with paper. And like, they don't have any real time visibility about like, how many spaces are actually filled right now? And like, what's our busiest day of the week? These like, basic insights that, you know, if you were a real estate owner, and you called your hotel general manager and said, hey, what's our busiest day this month? And your hotel general manager couldn't tell you the answer to that question, like, you would fire them on the spot. Because that's like, basic. Information you need to run an asset, but that's the state of the parking industry is like,

• 1:28:09Speaker 04

  literally, we took over an asset actually last week, massive garage, very large asset in in a sort of tier two market. But you know, the way they were tracking validations is literally a paper spreadsheet in a binder, you know, tracking who gets a validation for going to the retail shops on site. That's the state of the parking industry. And so our mindset has always been, you know, if someone's going to bring this online, we're going to bring it online and be able to more flexibly use this space in our cities. Maybe that's autonomous vehicles in the future where they're parking in our facilities and they need to be able to pay for their parking in an API driven way. That doesn't exist right now. There is no default online way to purchase parking or no operating system or no sort of system of record for where the space is used in our cities.

• 1:28:50Speaker 04

  And then the other thing that's really interesting from our perspective too, is we've taken a lot of things in the parking industry that traditionally were fixed cost parts of your business and turned them into variable costs because we're a software company, we're a technology company instead of a basically a staffing company, which is what these traditional companies are. So if like parking revenue starts to trend downward, that actually squeezes all of our competitors in a really helpful way for us. Where like our cost to goods sold is entirely marginal instead of being this fixed cost, which then means that we can survive and thrive in an environment where parking supply continues to decrease because parking demand is decreasing and actually parking supply being constrained is great for our business because that's the time when you actually can charge for parking.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I can, I can see how this becomes a major catalyst for you guys. If I drive into a city center and an autonomous vehicle, it drops me off and that and then I want my vehicle to park nearby. Imagine imagining the the interaction right now between the average city center parking garage and a autonomous vehicle. Just not gonna work. Yeah. Anyway, so great, great.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Congratulations again. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to the next 10x.

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, get on it.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Get on it.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  Thank you both.

• 1:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Uh, next up, we have Jonathan from Grok.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  We actually are going to reschedule that one. So we can jump into some timeline.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Um, yeah. Okay, okay. We're pushing him to 155. Great. Um, cool. Yeah, let's do some timeline. Well, Aliano over at Palantir received an airdrop of Mati Mataina. Our favorite energy drink that I drink for of every show, basically.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Delicious. Congratulations to Eliana.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  That is 480mg of caffeine.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  It's an adult amount.

• 1:30:36Jordi Hays?

  It's an adult amount. It's a horse amount.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  I love to see it.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Shout out to Rob for dropping those off at Palantir. Wonderful. And I think he's enjoying them. Let's tell you about Wander.

• 1:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And you can go to wander.com to go check out.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Everybody thought our ad was AI, and I think that's a great compliment to Wander. It, the, the property that we were at, the Wander property we were at in Malibu, it looked almost too good to be true, but it's very real and you can go stay there today.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's see here. Ahmad had the post that I was referencing earlier. He said, why is Meta scared of OpenAI? This graph says ChatGPT is not just a productivity app. People are spending hours on it to talk to AI, write poetry, et cetera. Meta needs attention to drive ads. If this trend line continues, AI will eat social app time. So.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  So this is mobile minutes per daily active users per day, and ChatGPT is at 29 minutes. Now, the question is like, we're not seeing a drop off from any of the other apps. So it might be that ChatGPT is cannibalizing something else in people's life, maybe like talking to other people. But, but it could also be books. It could be, you know, time spent reading the newspaper, researching, or doing anything else. It, it's not exactly showing up in the Instagram data there. That would be really, really, if you, like, when you see, you know, ChatGPT going up and Instagram going down, then you get really worried. But still, ChatGPT is on a generational run, pretty crazy,

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  going from five minutes, what, a year ago to 29 minutes today. So 6X growth in a year. People, people love it. I spend a lot of time on it. I'm always doing stuff. It's fun. You know, it's just like super interactive. Just dictate something, get the response, read it out. It's just like so much more efficient way to learn for so many different things.

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I would love to see what, what these other, like, actual proper AI companion apps, like Replica, what their usage. Per DAU looks like, because I would expect that

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Probably really high.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  For paid users, it's significantly higher than that.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  Well, let's tell you about getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go check them out. We love.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Missed opportunity to ask Alex Roy about the right watch for the Cannonball.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  He'd probably say an Apple Watch today.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's very technology-pilled.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Disappointing answer. We have a

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Trade deal?

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal, Summer Yu. She says, "Today is my first day at Meta Superintelligence Labs. I'll be focusing on alignment and safety, building on my time at Scale Research and SEAL. Grateful to keep working with Alexander Wang. No one more committed, clear-eyed, or mission-driven. Excited for what's ahead." Congratulations to Summer. I would imagine this was a maxed-out contract.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Good to keep the team together.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  It's interesting, because Alex was moved over to Meta, but Scale is still an independent entity. But it seems like some folks from Scale are now moving over to Meta. And Meta's probably looking through, seeing who makes sense where, and the businesses will kind of diverge. It feels like the true, like, superintelligence research and the hardcore AI research of training new models, that Llama V5, I guess, is happening, going to be happening over at Meta. But Scale obviously still has a business in data generation. And so if you were kind of on the research side at Scale, you're probably going to be moving over at some point, but this is probably the first of a few of announcements we'll see.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Totally. So she was the VP of Research at Scale AI. Prior to that was in research at Google DeepMind for almost six years, so.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  An absolute killer.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Who do we have? We have a few people in the waiting room.

• 1:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Fun.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Jacob? I don't know Jacob. I'll have to figure that out.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  People might just be joining. The link might have leaked.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  The link is leaked. This is the thing we use. We shouldn't leak this.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  We can highlight, so WAP announced

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:54Jordi Hays?

  They had an ad yesterday.

• 1:34:55John Coogan?

  Can we pull this ad up? Is that possible?

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull it up. Let's play it.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  The WAP ad? It's in the bangers tab.

• 1:34:59Jordi Hays?

  Riley@LAMXNT says, "First off, banger. Second off, this video means as soon as VO3/insert-new-AI-video-generation-model-drop, WAP immediately assigned hands to diving headfirst into it, seeing what they can do. This is the biggest bull signal for new companies, having the human resources capital to be able to actively chase staying on the bleeding edge." Of new tech, the innovations, the second it drops, massive, massive, massive. You simply cannot beat a team that is hell bent on being first. So I thought this ad was very cool.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should watch it. It's really, it's really crazy because it's they like the heart, they're really doing a great job of solving all the key problems with generative AI, which is like character consistency. It's not fully photo real. And so very clearly in the prompt, they said, make it look like Grand Theft Auto. And, and then all of a sudden it's, it's like a Ghibli moment. And I feel like this is kind of the first video that we've seen that's really dominated like a new style that I think you'll see a lot more people be making them.

• 1:36:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's perfect too, because WAP can make a GTA themed ad, whereas like very few.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Brands could.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Can do that.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Yep. But yeah, I mean, I imagine that this will be as simple as giblify this image pretty soon. Just, hey, take the trailer for F1 and make it GTA style and it'll look amazing. And people will do that for all sorts of videos. It'll be very slow and expensive first, but then it'll be very cool. Let's play the WAP ads.

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  Our parents told us to get real jobs, get off our phones, go to college.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  A completely different route.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  There's something different about kids who make money online. They don't give a fuck.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  They're taking a foot.

• 1:36:46Speaker 06

  Sounds like heaven, bro. There's a huge influx in kids dropping out of school.

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  Shot, emergency.

• 1:36:52Speaker 02

  I studied, bro.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  Dude, we gotta grow faster. Just use WAP, bro.

• 1:36:56John Coogan?

  Yo, we're printing the super trim here in my garage. College enrollment numbers are on the decline.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Roy Lee, see that?

• 1:37:04Speaker 05

  We're starting to make money online.

• 1:37:06Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of great cameos in here.

• 1:37:07Speaker 05

  And once you taste that freedom, there's no going back.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Was that Blake Anderson there?

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  No, I think that's another guy, but it does look like Blake.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  How much of that do you think was AI?

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  I think it felt close to 100%.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  I think some of it might have been actual game footage. I'm not exactly sure, but

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Some of that could have been just generated in GTA V.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's possible.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's possible just to actually go shoot some of those.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the interesting thing here is it feels like WAP is, you know, 10 years ago, we talked about this earlier with Ryan. 10 years ago, the like online entrepreneur meta was dropshipping and Shopify had kind of a crazy flywheel of different types of influencers online, promising mostly young men that they could make millions of dollars selling products online. And that, that by the time people, I think, were making a bunch of courses about it, I think it had become incredibly difficult to actually arb and like buy a product from a traditional, you know,

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  US brand and sell it on Amazon and make any kind of money. And so that whole industry like effectively has shifted over the last, over the last, I want to call it five years into what are now like info products. And so WAP has this effectively an economy of people selling info products and then armies of young people that that basically do like bounty style work for them. So clipping for a musician or clipping for a live streamer, things like that. It is a cool way for somebody in high school to make their first money online. And I think that is like a formative moment to have real dollars hit your Stripe account.

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, this, this, you know, that kind of meta is constantly evolving. I think they have over a billion dollars in transaction volume. So we got to have the founder on again. He was, had some interesting takes. Are we ready for our next guest or should we keep doing?

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Extremely tapped in. We have Jake, who's at, we're flipping the schedule a little bit. Let's bring in Jake and then we'll go to Craig. Nice to meet you, Jake. How are you doing?

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  Jake, welcome.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  Thanks for having us on, lads.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  We're dealing with a bunch of different scheduling stuff today. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and your company?

• 1:39:34Speaker 05

  Sure, yeah. So my name's Jacob Glanville. I'm the founder and CEO of Synovax.

• 1:39:40Speaker 05

  Previously at Pfizer, I also founded a company called Distributed Bio. At Synovax, we focus on universal immunity technologies. That's a universal flu shot that we recently closed a Series A to be in humans in eight months. And then some of you may also have seen some of the news around our universal antivenom program. That's a single antivenom that can treat all snakes.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  That's amazing. I hate snakes. I actually am like, it's the one thing I'm terrified of.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  John always checks his boots for snakes.

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  I do. Indiana Jones is my hero growing up.

• 1:40:11Jordi Hays?

  You raised a Series A and you're gonna have a drug in market in eight months. Is that, how much, how much did you have to raise prior to get to that point? You know, usually we hear about bio companies having to raise, pharma companies having to raise a billion dollars to even have a shot at getting something in market.

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  FDA trials.

• 1:40:30Speaker 05

  We're gonna be in humans in eight months. So that's the first human trial. So there'll be more to spend. We've raised, prior to the Series A, we brought in about $50 million. Half of that was non-dilutive from like the Gates Foundation, SEPI, the Navy, the Army, the Naval Medical Research Command and RARE, and a number of other places. Because what we work on is a bio threats problem. It's also a global collective goods problem. If you think about how much money's been spent on, you know, $90 billion of productivity loss just on flu alone in this country every year. And so in addition to that, we had NFX and the Global Health Investment Corporation that were our backers. And then now we're raising, we've just raised another 45 million. So nearly 100 million raised gets us into humans, which is a really big deal.

• 1:41:15Speaker 05

  Cause we, we show it's safe, but then we also show it's effective. And so we have, we can establish the first universal vaccine and a platform technology that we can make more universal vaccines out of.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  I definitely feel the productivity loss every time, every time I feel myself getting sick. I'm like, this time I'm going to power through it. I'm going to be just as effective. I'm not going to let it like, let my email pile up because I just feel terrible. And it's very difficult to.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  How, how different is, is this path from the traditional biotech path? I feel like a lot of biotech companies, they go public really early. It's just a completely different path from like what we typically see in venture. Are you taking more of like a Silicon Valley venture path? Or, or do you see yourself as the same kind of strategy as the biotech companies that we've seen? Like, um, like the other companies that have just kind of gone through the normal like IPO early. Then the stocks trading based on the, you know, the FDA, uh, results and that type of stuff.

• 1:42:10Speaker 05

  I, I historically have always tried to ignore the normal path and go, what's the best path for this company? So my last company, I actually never raised any venture capital. I built a series of profitable verticals and we, um, exited to Charles River Laboratories without taking venture. Here I need venture because we're going to go through these very expensive phase trials. And even there, we have accelerated approval and some other tactics that make it much less expensive than some of the ones you described. So what's going to happen for us is, uh, human trials. After that, there are sources of, uh, potential non-dilutive funding that could give us right, really big checks. Once you're in phase one to potentially cover the phase two and phase three. Or we do a series B and then maybe a series C to, to get the first product out. And the whole idea is to prime the pump.

• 1:42:55Speaker 05

  Once you're profitable, then it's a rounding error to run your other programs, which is like so torturously expensive for the first product. Like, once you, once you've got something commercialized, then you can go build the other ones. You know, it's also possible that we get kind of some FOMO going because the current $7 billion flu market, there's four companies that are all competing over that and all of their vaccines are like. 10 to 60% effective, like 1 in 3 people got a flu shot last, last season actually benefited from it. And so I'm imagining those groups are going to be like, I want to work with these guys, otherwise I might lose market share. And so there might be an opportunity there for an acquisition or partnership earlier.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, on the non-dilutive funding side, what has been your take on the NIH discussion publicly? We had Andrew Huberman on the show and he was talking about some of the risks of cutting some of that early-stage funding. The number that was being thrown around was around 40% cuts. I don't know if that affects you directly because you're kind of already running the company, but what's your take on, on the NIH situation?

• 1:43:54Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I'm in biotech in general. I think we've benefited and we're able to bring this technology forward because of non-dilutive sources out there. So more is better. We, our antivenom program has been supported by an NIH award. That said, you know, there, I'm working on a fundamentally new technology and sometimes we've had a hard time convincing grant agencies to go and, at the NIH in particular, I think some people just didn't get it because it was too different and new. That changes as we have more data, but also I think a little shakeup sometimes is helpful to be able to have them invest and try new things rather than just reinvesting in the past because the past technologies just weren't working. I think we need new stuff. So obviously, I think, I think the United States needs to maintain its prominence in biotechnology.

• 1:44:37Speaker 05

  It's one of the 21st century sectors where we have dominance and you don't want to lose that because, you know, there's China and other organizations out there that are countries that are very happy to try to fill those shoes. And once you lose that, the brain drain goes the opposite direction. And that's part of the reason why we maintain the preeminence is that we have the institutions that are propped up partially by government money to be able to go make all these breakthroughs and have your Genentechs and so forth. So I, I think for those reasons, I think the United States should remain the, the global epicenter of biotechnology because of macroeconomic reasons.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Genentech, the original VC, what, 100-bagger or something like that? Fantastic return. What, what, what kind, what are your kind of goals on the efficacy side? Obviously, the goal would be 100%, but if this typical flu vaccine is 10 to 60% effective.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  What are you aiming for?

• 1:45:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're looking at, like, we'd like to see somewhere between eighty and ninety-five percent. It's hard to get that last five percent for any vaccine because you have people that have significant, you know, immunosuppression or some sort of deficiency. But what we're seeing in the animals and all the work so far, I think probably eighty-five, ninety percent, maybe ninety-five is sort of what we're aiming for. And that's a big deal, right? That's, that suddenly changes the, not just like, you get a, you get a shot and that Pavlovian thing. I mean, that's a big problem with vaccine skepticism is people like, I got the shot and I still got sick, right? And so you can solve that. People, I took the shot, I didn't get sick for two years. That's a, that's a better outcome. But the more profound thing that happens is that when you start distributing a vaccine like this around the world,

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  the pandemic era is over because you don't go, oh, God, there's an H5N1. It's getting in cows, it's getting in people. There's just like, hey, guys, there's a reminder, we're seeing some H5N1 in people. If you haven't had your senti flu shot in the last two years, go get a booster. And then you don't have a pandemic anymore. And so that's a crazy transition compared to how humanity's been operating since the beginning of time.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  What, what is the key unlock for the universal antivenom?

• 1:46:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's, it's the same biology. It's the idea that there are these little Achilles heels on these proteins that the, like the viruses, they can change just about anywhere, but they can't mutate a couple of key sites. Snake venoms, there's six hundred and fifty species of venomous snakes around the world. And they all have different venom, but they share certain toxins and those toxins have conserved sites. The origins of this antivenom was I found a guy named Tim Friedy, who had, for eighteen years, he'd injected himself with escalating.

• 1:47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was about to, I was about to ask, we covered, we covered that story and it was just all like, it's such an example of dudes rock.

• 1:47:17Jordi Hays?

  This guy, what a hero.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us the full story because it's like, it's an incredible story.

• 1:47:22Speaker 05

  This guy just, he decided he was gonna make himself immune to snake venom, but like all of them. And so he started collecting a menagerie of snakes in his basement, like all the gnarliest snakes around the world. And he started off with tiny little doses. I don't know if you guys saw Princess Bride, but it was like the iocane powder of Princess Bride. Starts with tiny little doses and he would slowly increase the dose until he was, he'd be able to tolerate. A full dose. Normally it would kill a person easily. And then he started letting the snakes bite him. And so he had 202 bites and 654 immunizations over 18 years of 16 of the most deadly species from around the world. And so I heard about him and I'm working on universal flu vaccines. And I was like, if anybody has the beating through their veins right now, a universal antivenom, it's going to be this guy.

• 1:48:07Speaker 05

  And so I contacted him. We started doing a research project together and it was phenomenally successful. So it just speaks again to the power of universal immunity to be able to completely change the face of 21st century medicine.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what is the distribution of that antivenom going to look like? I imagine we should put it everywhere, right? Should be in like every first aid kit or something. Growing up, I mean, growing up in California, like being in the country a lot. I, it was always in the back of my mind as a kid of this like fear because I'd come across snakes all the time. You know, this fear of, you know, you don't necessarily know what bit you. And then you don't necessarily, you know, first of all, is it, is it venomous or not? Uh, hopefully you're not getting bit by snakes a lot, but then, you know, uh, you know, if a person's getting treatment, are they even going to have the right, you know? So I'm curious what that kind of go to market looks like. How do you get this distributed as widely as possible?

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  So, I mean, the way you described it, that's, that's right. It's worse in the developing world. So there's a lot more people who die and get permanently messed up by snakes than you might think. It's 140,000 people who die every year and another 300 to 400,000 that lose a limb, which really sucks if you're in a village because then your, your family's having to take care of an invalid when really they need everybody to be able bodied. Um, and so, yeah, right now there's 650 venomous species of snake and they make one antivenom for each snake. Or sometimes a couple of snakes in one bottle. But, so you get bit and first off, they have to bring you probably multiple hours sometimes to get to a hospital that has IVs. And then they go, oh, I'm sorry, bro. Were you bit by like a super venomous snake?

• 1:49:42Speaker 05

  Did you happen to have the presence of mind while you were being bit to ruffle through the grass and grab the snake and bring it in a doggy bag? So we can take a look at it so we can check.

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Did you bring the killer snake that just bit you? Did you bring it with you?

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  Because otherwise, we don't know if, if they, we stock the antivenom, if it even exists. And we don't want to give it to you because it's made out of horse antibodies and it can cause a whole bunch of like gnarly side, side effects. And so that's, that's the world that we're trying to replace. What this is now is a single, uh, but we're halfway through. We've got half the 300 species of neurotoxic snakes and we're working on the other half. That was what the cell paper was, but the idea is to have a single product. Um, it's fully human antibodies, so they don't have all the side effects of the horse antibodies. Um, you can lyophilize them, freeze dry them. And so the idea is like an EpiPen for snake antivenom. You have some solution and you have some dry powder. You just, you get bit, you turn a little crank, shuki, shuki. And then you stab it into your leg and you get the antivenom immediately. And that means it can be in backpacks. It can be out in villages outside of, um, refrigeration.

• 1:50:38Speaker 05

  There's no multiple hours of waiting and they don't need to know what kind of snake bit you. And, and that, that will change, uh, change a lot of people's lives.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. I'm glad you guys found each other.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. Thank you so much for stopping by. We, we have a slam schedule today, but, uh, this is fantastic. And, uh, I thank you for fighting the good fight against snakes. I, there's nothing I truly hate more. So, so I really appreciate it. Making the world.

• 1:51:05Jordi Hays?

  One man, one man versus 600 snakes.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  My, my literal only phobia. So thank you. I, I have no problem with spiders, no problem with anything else. I hate snakes. So thank you so much for doing what you do.

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  There's a part of your brain that actually is, um, networked so that if you're shown a bunch of pictures, you'll spot the snake picture first. So there's something deep in our brains that has taught us recognize and fear snakes from primordial times. And so what you're experiencing is not unusual. We've been built to, to tell these things. And I'll, I'll tell, uh, I'll pass on your thanks to Tim because he's the one who really just created for this.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm, I'm also Irish. So there's probably something about the Pied Piper and wanting to rid the world of snakes. It's in my blood, but, uh, we'll, we'll get to that, the snake eradication project second. Uh, thank you for making the world safer.

• 1:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats on the raise.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Uh, and congrats on the raise. Good luck. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, next up, we have Craig Piggott from Halter. I was very excited for this company. They raised money.

• 1:52:01Jordi Hays?

  This is the most excited you've ever been about a startup.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  Well, it's an extremely bullish story and we'll hear it from him.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  It's about running your ranch the way you've always wanted.

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  Yes. Thank you so much for joining, Craig. How are you doing?

• 1:52:13Speaker 07

  I'm doing good. How are you guys doing?

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  You're overseas, correct?

• 1:52:17Speaker 07

  I'm in New Zealand, yes.

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Awesome. Thank you. I think it's early your time, I guess. Is that right?

• 1:52:23Speaker 07

  Oh, it's like 8:30.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Okay, not too bad. Well, thank you so much for joining. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

• 1:52:31Speaker 07

  Cool. Yeah, Craig, I'm founder and CEO of a company called Holter, originally from a farm, engineered by training. I did a stint at Rocket Lab, working for Peter Beck, which was kind of my intro to startups. And then, yeah, founded Holter. We effectively are an operating system for ag or for farmers and ranchers. We built a collar that goes on a cow. That collar's solar powered and runs a bunch of email on the edge to train the animal to respond to cues so we can then virtually fence and shift these animals from a phone, or from the farmer's phone, which means we can run more productive farms. Ag covers about half the planet's habitable landmass, so that's like the the goal, I guess, is to lift the productivity of that land.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. So, yeah, what was the state of the art beforehand?

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Fences.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Just cowboys?

• 1:53:26Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  Barbed wire?

• 1:53:29Speaker 07

  Literally barbed wire. Fences for hundreds of years have lifted the productivity of land, but obviously they're pretty expensive and hard to move and a lot of shortcomings.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  And so how do you actually steer animals with just a collar?

• 1:53:43Speaker 07

  They, the collar has cues on it, like sound cues out of each side. If you imagine maybe like parking your car and as you like back into a wall, it beeps and so it gives you like feedback on how close you are to a virtual fence. So we use sound and vibration and then we train the animals with a low energy pulse. It's like 100 times less than an electric fence that. Say most cows in New Zealand would be used to.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:08Speaker 07

  Um, and yeah, the collar does all of that training and, and kind of animal guidance.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  What has been the story around cowboy employment in the context of adoption of tech? I imagine this is the kind of thing where I'm using cowboy sort of as a joke, but, but I imagine by introducing this technology, you can free up, you know, ranch workers to do more important things like, for example, taking care of a sick cow or something like that. Has that been the case?

• 1:54:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, like, um, there's been massive labor shortages on farms and ranches for a long, long time. It's obviously not glamorous work. And so I think a tool like Holter does automate a bunch of work. But really it also enables you to just be more precise, kind of run a, like a more productive operation. And then you can, any extra time you do have, you spend on the never ending kind of to do list of running a ranch or a farm.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Can you give us the state of the business? I mean.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to know about scale. I imagine, how many, how many cows are we tracking at this point?

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  I, I, I think people don't understand the scale of your business, so I just want to hear from you.

• 1:55:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're live in New Zealand, which is where we started, Australia and the US. I think we're across like 18ish states in the US. Um, we're on over a thousand farms.

• 1:55:30Speaker 07

  Hundreds of thousands of cows, uh, which we dance and shift and track and monitor their health every day. And growing, uh, over like two X year on year at the moment. So.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:55:44Speaker 07

  It is like, and there's.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, you got a lot of room to run. I looked it up. There's one and a half billion cows in the world, uh, according to some survey. And I'm sure some percentage of that are just relatively wild and not.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  Billion cows? Wait, cows are expensive. I feel like that's like a trillion dollar market then. It must be. Yeah. No idea.

• 1:56:06Speaker 07

  The, um, the, the funny thing about the TAM is it's like, it's very different to most businesses. It's kind of a function of landmass, not like population. So you do end up with, um, like a very distributed TAM through South America and Europe, like everywhere. Um, so, but the market is, is huge. So we're trying to remain focused on, yeah, NZ, Australia and the US. Like even within that is just a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us. So.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Would you guys, would you guys ever do, uh, health tracking for the animals? Is that something that you already do? I imagine farmers would, would love to understand like metrics around stuff like heart rate, HRV, things like that, steps, et cetera.

• 1:56:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, to do the guidance well, you need to understand each cow's like behavior. Um, and how they respond to the cues and how best to train them. And so kind of a, a byproducts may be underselling it, but as a function of that, you then can also do health and fertility and things like that very well as well. So, um, we already, that's already part of the product. Um, whether a cow's, yeah, sick or, um, not healthy for any reason, or if they're fertile. Um, which is important for breeding and things like that. So, yeah, if you've got the hardware there, you know, that is just a, over there, yeah, update to a, to the collar. Um, and then we kind of turn that on as like a additional SaaS product.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  So, I mean, uh, is the, is the, is the business model mostly, uh, like subscription SaaS, uh, structured? Or is there a hardware component and a fixed cost as well to kind of onboard?

• 1:57:44Speaker 07

  It is, uh, the hardware is bundled in the software. So it's purely a perk. It is like very SaaS, like there is tiers. You can start on core and upgrade to pro or unlimited. And, um, there's a small kind of upfront installation fee. Um, we have to put up towers on these farms to like run the network to talk to the collars. So, um, but predominantly it's just a ongoing subscription. You don't buy the collars or anything like that.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through the raise and kind of what the plan is going forward.

• 1:58:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we just closed a 100 mil series D from led by Bond.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:58:27Speaker 07

  Awesome, awesome firm. And probably two things really, like more expansion in terms of new markets and even just pushing harder into the markets that we're currently in. And then huge amount of product and R and D work. Like we've kind of for the first time taken a very analog operation and converted it into this like digital farm. Like farmers spend two hours a day on the product and they're doing everything from animal health to the fencing and shifting to like measuring their grass and all that. So, and there's just so much kind of room to run on new product and shipping your product. So that's the other kind of half of the of the raise is just doing more kind of building our product and engineering teams and doing more R and D on that side.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Will we see, will we see cow BCI's in the next 20 years?

• 1:59:19Speaker 07

  BCI's? Good, good question.

• 1:59:25Speaker 07

  Don't know.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Don't know. Yeah, maybe, maybe unnecessary. It's, but you know, if you can do something, you know, a collar is potentially more elegant solution than than.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  Probably costly to implant the brain chip, but who knows? Anything's possible.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  If anybody's gonna do it, it'd be you guys.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thanks so much for stopping by.

• 1:59:48Speaker 07

  There's definitely some benefits to being on the, on the outside.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. It's a little bit easier to change it out and clean it off if you need to.

• 1:59:56Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congrats on the raise and yeah, come back on when you have more news.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for stopping on.

• 2:00:02Speaker 07

  Cheers.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Jonathan from Grok coming into the studio, talking about chips. Hopefully we can get him in. We've been juggling things. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy? Go to 8sleep.com.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely terribly. My 8Sleep couldn't, couldn't save me.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  You can get a pod five at 8sleep.com/tbnn.

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  One of the ish, one of the ish, we got somebody?

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have Jonathan here. It's good. How are you? Thanks so much for stopping by. Sorry about the little mix up with the scheduling. Glad you could make it though. Great to meet you.

• 2:00:37Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Would you mind introducing the company and the, and the current state of the products that you sell? Just for anyone that might not be familiar.

• 2:00:46Speaker 08

  Sure. So the company is Groq, G R O Q, and we sell tokens as a service. So very much like you use OpenAI's API or Anthropic's API, except we serve mostly open source models. And we've built our own AI chips that allow us to do this much faster than anyone else.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember the initial demos. I believe it was on an early version of Llama, and the inference rate was just so much, so much higher. What were the key decisions that you made to enable faster inference?

• 2:01:18Speaker 08

  One of the key ones was we don't use any external memory. Every time you read from memory, the chip just has to wait for it, and it's very slow, and it's like drinking a drink through a martini straw. And so what we've uniquely been able to do is keep the cost down while also being very fast. You can actually get speed off of a GPU, but then it just becomes completely uneconomical to use because you have one user using that at a time.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  So what are the trade-offs of not having off-chip memory? I imagine, you know, there's a big discussion over how important are large context windows? Is that an important factor to, to kind of how LLMs are scaling? And ultimately, you're somewhat beholden to the decisions that are made by AI researchers at big labs, right?

• 2:02:08Speaker 08

  Well, interestingly, we actually support very often the largest context or the largest context that's practically offered by anyone else. And this is a little counterintuitive to most people. The trade-off we have is memory capacity, but GPUs have a memory bandwidth issue. So what the researchers do to improve the memory bandwidth issues always improve the memory capacity issues for us, so we can run all the same models with the same context length. The trade-off is actually something else. You could think of us a little more as a nuclear reactor instead of thinking of us as a diesel generator. Whereas GPUs, you can take just eight GPUs and use them for a model. We need a lot more of our LPUs, but when we're running that model, very much like a nuclear reactor, we get much better

• 2:02:53Speaker 08

  cost and it's better for the environment because we, in our case, we use less energy.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Interesting. What does the shifting landscape around different custom silicon look like right now? I feel like every hyperscaler is taking it more seriously. We've heard stories of Microsoft wanting to pull back from Nvidia chips. It seems like Amazon's kind of doing the same thing with Tranium and Inferentia. What is, are we going to be just be in a world where every hyperscaler has their own chip? Or do you think that the market will fragment in kind of a different way?

• 2:03:26Speaker 08

  My background, I'm actually the person who came up with Google's TPU chip. So I started at 20%.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  No way, wait, it actually started as 20% project?

• 2:03:35Speaker 08

  It did, it was unfunded.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:03:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, so there are 20%, that's a real thing. But what most people don't realize is that there were actually three different AI chip efforts at Google, and that was the only one that actually survived and was competitive with GPUs. The other two ended up getting canceled. And so when you start looking at the broader and broader world of chips being built, a very small number of them are actually going to be competitive with GPUs. So most of those are going to be canceled. But I think where people get really confused is they keep talking about the chips. And so it's not about the chips, it's about the software. There are all these little features like prefix caching, speculative decode, and all sorts of things like that.

• 2:04:21Speaker 08

  If you didn't have one of those features, you wouldn't actually be able to be competitive with the latest GPU, no matter how good your chip was.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:30Speaker 08

  So the thing is, you have to first catch up in software. And only then do you get to compete on the chip. And so one of the things that we did that was very unusual is we spent the first six months working on a compiler, which makes our software work very easily. So we can actually compete on the software level with Nvidia. We have the same models running. And only then do we get to compete on the chip.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  So are you talking about at Google that was like the the push to break out of like the CUDA ecosystem essentially?

• 2:05:00Speaker 08

  Well, actually, this was at Grok. So at Google, we had these handwritten kernels, which are these sort of assembly routines. And it's the same as with GPUs.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:12Speaker 08

  GPUs are actually more similar than what we've built here at Grok.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. How how do you think about the the current AI paradigm and how long like the current algorithmic machine regime will last or where how it will change? Because I feel like the the narrative around companies that bet on a particular, you know, okay, we're going really long on the transformer or something like that. Then there's always this question of like, will the transformer stick around? Well, it's been around for a long time. It seems really good. Maybe it'll be around forever. Maybe it won't. How do you think about those? Is that is that the right question to be asking?

• 2:05:48Speaker 08

  Yeah. I remember when we were at Google, we hired this really senior person right before we were done designing the TPU. And he came in and he said, you cannot build a generally programmable chip that will out compete GPUs. It's impossible. Instead, we need to stop what we're doing and just create a chip for a particular model.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:09Speaker 08

  And we had to walk him through the whiteboard and show him. But we actually ended up proving to him, we made a faster chip by making it general. And the the counterintuitive part was, if you're actually able to optimize some of the circuitry in the chip to be reused for many different things, but you're only designing a couple of those circuits, you can make them much better than if you have a whole bunch of different stuff that's, you know, not as optimized. And when you look at one of these models, you can't fit one of these models on a single chip anyway. You have to use multiple chips. So are you going to design a different chip for each part of the model? And it starts to become ridiculous and doesn't make any sense. There's actually been people recently who've been trying to revive that idea.

• 2:06:53Speaker 08

  But in the time when they started, since they started, MOEs became a thing, mixture of experts. So if they had already started designing their chip, the chip would be obsolete. And then now we're seeing other sorts of things emerge that are very interesting. And if any of those win, those chips will be obsolete. So we always focus on as general of a programmable chip as we can.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears a little bit, I believe you're in Europe right now. It looks dark outside and it looks like you're

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Thank you for staying up.

• 2:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for staying up to hang with us. Talk about the decision to put the first European data center in Helsinki and kind of everything that went into that.

• 2:07:32Speaker 08

  So we were at an event here, an AI event, and about a month ago, we decided it would probably be great if we unveiled a European data center while at this event. And literally a month later, we now have it up and running, actually running models. So I think that's a record for time to decide to deploy and getting it up and running. We actually

• 2:07:58Speaker 08

  Well, we actually weren't expecting to have it until the end of this week, which would have been insane in and of itself, but it's actually up and running now. So kudos to the team.

• 2:08:05Jordi Hays?

  The team is probably sweating because they're like, okay, this is the bar now. We actually have to be faster than this to

• 2:08:12Speaker 08

  The previous bar was 51 days. When we deployed about 20,000 chips in Saudi Arabia, it was 51 days from signing before we set it up.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Oh, I remember that deal, yeah.

• 2:08:21Speaker 08

  Now it's like a month and three days or something.

• 2:08:24Jordi Hays?

  So what makes that possible? Is it just the, is it the energy efficiency? Is that a huge part of it?

• 2:08:29John Coogan?

  Best friends with Morris Chang.

• 2:08:32Speaker 08

  We use TSMC to make our chips.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:35Speaker 08

  Yeah. In our case, we've actually simplified the architecture pretty significantly. We don't use any external switches as part of our core interconnect, only to move data in and out from the system. It's pretty simple cabling. Air cooled still, we're not liquid cooled. We like to stay a generation behind on all of the technology and just compete on the architecture and the software. And so that allows us to use these highly proven technologies where everyone's already debugged them and we're not debugging them as we deploy, but also because we don't use that external memory. So that external memory tends to lead to a lot of chips that fail in field. And so as you're bringing them up, a lot of them fail,

• 2:09:19Speaker 08

  you have to fix them. And there was a recent model that we ran that required 4,000 chips. The first time we ran that model on the 4,000 chips, it worked. And we would have never been able to do that if it was 4,000 GPUs. The first time you run something at 4,000 GPUs, you have to replace a bunch of them.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  There's been, there's been some rumors that you've operated the, like, the token business, the API at a loss. That feels like a completely rational strategy in many ways. Nothing wrong with that, but can you comment on that as a, as a strategy? Is that just a misconception? Is that deliberate? How do you think about just investing for adoption broadly? Because there's like, it's really important as a business to grow. And there's a whole bunch of different strategies and tools in the tool chest. What do you think is valuable? What's, what's been the strategy to date? And how's it evolving?

• 2:10:16Speaker 08

  Let's get even more specific than at a loss. Because when you're running a service, you can claim you're not at a loss because you have an infinite amortization time on your CapEx and your chips. And that's what a lot of the Neo clouds are doing. So we actually agree, uh, uh, aim for a more aggressive payback period than anyone does with GPUs. And part of the way we can get away with this is, first of all, our electricity cost is about one-third per token versus a GPU. So our OpEx is already lower. And that's sort of the flat, you have to beat your OpEx, otherwise you are losing money, period. There's no accounting tricks you can do. And then on top of that, the question is, how quickly can you pay back? For us, everything we run is above our OpEx costs.

• 2:11:00Speaker 08

  So we're not losing money, but different models have different payback periods. Some of them as quick as two years on our V1 silicon. Some take, you know, four years and it's a blend, right? And that overall blend is what we're happy with.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Yeah. On that note, there's one world where, you know, the models are getting better. Everyone just wants the best model for every single task. And they're just willing to pay for the latest and greatest constantly. There's this other interesting model where I feel like we get a new capability, whether it's just the ability to convert, you know, CSV to JSON or something really, or like raw text to JSON or data extraction or, you know, censoring, you know, bad words and a whole huge transcript. And like, the problem- Is completely solved by the LLM and you don't need to throw a more advanced model at it in the future. Even if one comes down the pipe, you just need speed and reliability and eventually cost.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  And so do you see, is there an important part of your business where you can be the like baseline provider for a current capability that will continue for decades potentially even as a newer model comes online? Or do you want to try and shift the business towards the being constantly on the most aggressive side of the frontier? And is there actually a trade off there? Can you just do both?

• 2:12:24Speaker 08

  So a very common usage pattern we see is that people will develop their systems on the latest and greatest model.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:33Speaker 08

  And then they will optimize it for two things. One is they'll optimize it for speed and the other is they'll optimize it for cost.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:41Speaker 08

  Very often, the most successful AI startups are spending almost as much per month on token as a service as their total revenue. Right? And they'll lose money on paying employees and things like that, but they're trying to keep those balanced.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:55Speaker 08

  We can bring the the cost per token down. Interestingly enough, the general inclination is that they want to spend the same amount. They just want more tokens because those tokens can actually turn into more quality. If you can iterate, if you can do more in parallel. The speed thing is super important because that's engagement. So if you think about it, every time you increase the performance of a model by about or any service by about 100 milliseconds, your engagement rate or your conversion rate tends to improve about by 8%. That's on desktop. On mobile, it's over 30%. And so no patience on mobile whatsoever. And so what we see is people get stuff working.

• 2:13:38Speaker 08

  They prove that it's possible on the most capable model. And then they'll try and find one of the models that we run, all the open source models. And then when they're able to find one that works for them, because they have to try a couple, then they're very happy. And then they don't change things. And so there are a couple of models which are actually quite old, quite terrible that we would love to deprecate. But there's a bunch of users because their system works and they don't want to touch it. The other thing is, and this one's interesting. So we had one of our engineers try solving a bunch of math theorems. And they were using this thing called Lean, which is a formal theorem prover. And while, and they would use different LLMs in the background to solve, and then they would use Lean to test.

• 2:14:23Speaker 08

  Every single time Claude Opus would actually solve it in the fewest iterations. However, Quen 332B running on our chips, because they're so fast, always solved the theorems faster. It may be more iterations, but it was able to go through them faster. And so you actually got the result faster with the less expensive model running on Grok.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  It's been a crazy year so far. We're about halfway through. What are you excited about in the next six months on the Grok side? And then what are you excited about in the broader open source ecosystem?

• 2:15:00Speaker 08

  Well, on the Grok side, we're continuing to scale up. We're going to add a bunch of new data centers and new continents. After this, I'm going somewhere else in the world. I'm not going to tell you where, where we're working on getting another data center deal done.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:15:15Speaker 08

  But also, there are some rumors that we might have some new improved systems or chips or something coming later this year. And there's

• 2:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Allegations, allegations of massive advancements.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  He denies rumors of breakthrough, a major breakthrough. Yeah, I love that. Can you give me your retrospective, but also your current take on just Moore's Law broadly?

• 2:15:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think Moore's Law is true, but I don't think it's the most important part. And people miss this. So Moore's Law, for those who don't know, every 18 to 24 months, the number of transistors on a chip doubles. That translates to the economics get better. That translates to the chips get faster and you can trade that off.

• 2:16:02Speaker 08

  What's really been happening in the last five to 10 years, and I don't know what to call this law, but like when I left to start Grok, one of the observations was every 18 to 24 months, not only did the transistors double, but the number of chips doubled. The transistors doubled and the number of chips doubled. And so when we started, we actually asked ourselves the question, what would happen if we assume there were an infinite number of chips? How would you design the system differently? And that's one of the reasons we decided to get rid of the memory altogether, because the memory just holds bits that are doing nothing, waiting for an active chip to do something with them. We're like, let's just make everything active and do everything all at once. And so that was a very important observation for us.

• 2:16:45Speaker 08

  And I think people are going to focus more on the number of chips doubling over the next couple of years than how much each chip improved.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Can you, I know, we'll let you go. This is my last question, unless Jordi has something. But can you tell us a little bit about broadly what international leaders in other countries generally are thinking or what's driving their motivation to spin up token factories, these AI factories, new data centers, the sovereign AI efforts? And because I'm thinking back to, you know, the development of the original cloud computing revolution, and it felt like there wasn't as much of an incentive or narrative around,

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  well, we can't possibly just let AWS come over here and set up shop. This feels different. What are the motivations? Is it economic? Is it freedom of speech? Like, what are the shape of the conversations that you're having that get an international leader excited about setting up an AI factory, a token factory, a data center?

• 2:17:56Speaker 08

  So it's a little bit less about fear and control, and it's actually more about they're not getting enough compute. So think of it this way. GPUs are expensive and there's only a finite number of them being built. Not because they wouldn't build more GPUs, but because they rely on that external memory, which is a real bottleneck in the supply chain. And so Nvidia is going to build every single GPU that they can physically build this year. AMD is going to build every single GPU that they can physically build this year, and then they're going to sell every single one of them. If they could build more, they would sell more. That means that there's an allocation problem. Countries aren't getting all of the chips they need for what they're doing internally.

• 2:18:41Speaker 08

  So for example, when we built that data center in Saudi Arabia, there were a bunch of people who'd been waiting over a year to get GPU orders filled, and they had no idea when it was going to happen. And so they switched over to us because they could immediately get access to compute. So what you're seeing is a lot of these sovereign plays are more about making sure they get the compute. It's as if we're entering the industrial age, and all of a sudden, everyone realizes if I plug something into an electric socket, I make all of my workers more efficient. Well, if everyone else in the world is getting that, or it feels like that's the case, and you're not getting that, you're not getting the efficiency, you're not getting the compute to augment your workforce and make them more capable, you're at risk of falling behind. And so for them, it's as if all the power companies are focusing on some other really

• 2:19:26Speaker 08

  rich regions of the world, and they want to get that power as well so that they can start running their AI models.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  So is that more like the 5G rollout? The idea of just bringing mobile to your country versus Google search, I suppose? Is that the more accurate analogy, maybe?

• 2:19:45Speaker 08

  That would be fair.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Jordan, do you have anything else?

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Any expectations around OpenAI's alleged new open source model? Is that something that you guys are going to be integrating heavily with?

• 2:20:01Speaker 08

  If OpenAI open sources their model, we will immediately launch it.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:20:08John Coogan?

  Well, that's great news. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I appreciate you staying up late.

• 2:20:12Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  And congrats on the new data center, new record. Cheers.

• 2:20:16Speaker 08

  All right.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Have a good day. Bye. And let's tell you about graphite.dev. Graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  The best teams in the world, including TVPN, of course. Use Graphite.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  What else?

• 2:20:40Jordi Hays?

  We have some timeline.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  We have some timeline we can go through. We got to get out of here soon. Yanni, Yoni Rickman says he wants to get long mold. Did you see this?

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I threw this in here. Request for startups. I want to get long mold. Basically, he says mold is super hot right now. It's like the protein of environmental contaminants. It's in everything with no signs of going away. It's in the air. And this stood out to me because I once rented a house that ended up having mold in it. It was a huge disaster, took a lot of time, was making me sick. And I think a lot of people suffer from mold exposure or mold related illnesses and don't realize it at all. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can solve this. I don't necessarily know what they all look like. I mean, one of the biggest.

• 2:21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He mold testing, eight sleep of mold, smart air purifiers and testing. That makes a lot of sense. Then he says mold insurance. Maybe that's genius. I don't know. That's not what I would have thought of, but yeah. And then mold resistant building materials. That's kind of cool.

• 2:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there's a bunch of different categories. So I wanted to throw this in here. If you are long mold yourself and your business, go reach out to Yoni. I would love to see more solutions here.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  In other news, tomorrow night, there will be a Grok 4 release livestream Wednesday, 8:00 PM Pacific. They're staying up late.

• 2:21:59Jordi Hays?

  I love how they always do their streams after, after everyone else has left the office and gone home. They're like, we're still here. We're going to go into our tents, you know, come out of our tents and do a stream. So I'm excited for this. I mean, this is going to say a lot about, about, you know, the new Memphis data center.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Since Grok 3. So yeah, there, there will be a big question about where this hits. Also, you know, we hit this like pre-training wall. It feels like, you know, a lot of people are saying we need new algorithms. We need new ideas. Ideas and and I'm sure they'll be able to the question is not like can Grok can XAI build a big data center and and and get to the frontier. The question now is like, can they push past the frontier with some actual like completely unthought of innovation? So that'll be interesting to track, but either way, I'm there's a ton of product improvements.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  To see what they're doing on the image side, video side.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  The video side would be very interesting. I mean, X has a lot of video data because you know, X has been uploading video. You know, certainly not as much as YouTube, but a lot of YouTube videos get uploaded to X in full.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine if you can tag Grok under like a meme and say like animate this.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Make this into GTA. Twenty second GTA video.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Probably be very expensive on the different side, but you know, maybe worth it. We have a lot of GPUs. Should we close with this Audi ad? Beautiful.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Advantage Audi, beautiful ad.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't tell if this was a real ad.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  Ten out of ten, no notes.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't tell if this was actually live. If it is, it's fantastic. If it's not.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  In the shape of the Audi logo. Fantastic.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for tuning in today.

• 2:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's day was a little bit.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, a little bit chaotic, but that's the nature of building a startup and.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  They didn't want us to podcast, but they couldn't stop us.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  They couldn't stop us.

• 2:23:49Jordi Hays?

  They'll never stop us.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  So we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Have a great afternoon.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  Wednesday.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Evening. See you soon.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  See you soon.

• 2:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Bye.