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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. Okay, cool. Yeah, Peter, I'll talk to you later. Thanks. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we're saying thanks to a small brand called Enchilada Surfboards. They sent us some stickers, some merch. Go give them a follow. We've reacted to their tweets before. A lot of cool inside jokes for the Defense Tech crew. I still don't understand basically any of them. But I do believe I know the story behind this picture. This was someone who was on, and I think on an Anduril test site or something. It was just kind of like a friendly dude. And just had a great vibe. And so they, they got a picture of him and they, and they put it on a T-shirt and they're, it's become part of their brand.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Anduril to surf apparel brand pipeline is sort of beginning clearly.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  And we're excited about it.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  I just like the, yeah, I mean, we'll talk about the merch, I'm sure, but it's great that there, that there's like, you know, more stuff going on and like the creative merch.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Southern California has two, two histories, aerospace and defense.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  And merch.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  And surfing.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Surfing, yeah.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  And so if you can figure out a way to combine those, there's a lot of alpha in that.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of Defense Tech, did you read, we got to enter the truth zone. We're doing some fact checking. We're keeping the information accountable. A lot of people online call it the misinformation. I think that goes too far. I think we got to be nice to the information. It's a great outlet. As we discussed earlier, they just brought on Taylor Lorenz to write an article. I talked to her about that. I'm excited for that to drop. And I got a lot of news from the information. I have the app on my phone. I read it all the time. It's great.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  I get the push notifications. They're a fantastic publication. And somebody needs to stand up for the journalists besides journalists, right? They get a, they're doing super important work. They get a lot of hate online.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  They're in the arena.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  They're in the arena, just like all of us. And so this new segment is really meant to help, you know, cultivate journalistic integrity of the information, but more broadly. And yeah, we're excited to dive in. Today, we got an article from Corey Weinberg talking about Trump's win and the impact on the Defense Tech space. Bulls, yeah.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Despite talk of a bubble. So obviously, a lot of people are focused on, you know, what does the Trump administration mean for defense tech? It's, and it's, it is, it is genuinely confusing because defense tech is very right-wing coded, right? It's like American flags and like lifting and very like masculine and very Joe Rogan. But there's been this big wave where it's like, well, actually, they're all talking about how they're no longer neo-cons, they actually want to pull out of all the wars.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Dick, the funny thing is Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  So how does that, how do you sort of make sense of that?

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's odd. I mean, I, I, my hope is that the, the new administration is obsessed with deterrence over conflict.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  And so, this is the Joe Lonsdale take, where he said, "You have to build defense technology that is so asymmetric in its impact, that the thought of conflict is, is unfathomable."

• 3:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  And so you just don't go to war. And Palmer said this too, where Palmer said, "People, wars start when people miscalculate their abilities to attack." And they think, "That's a weak, that's a weak target, I can go after it." And so, in general, it's, it's this odd, it's this odd, um, kind of contra, uh, it's a little, um, it's a little bit of a paradox, like you might see more defense spending with less war, which would be great, because there's a lot of dividends from that.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, defense spending has been at historical lows over the last five, 10 years. And so, yeah, it actually dipped down substantially, and so the renewed investment in the space is positive for a lot of reasons.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  I mean, right away, I think we got to start at the headline.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, here's what I highlighted. Uh, "Trump's Wind Stokes Defense Tech Bowls Despite Talk of a Bubble." So right away, um, you know, there is talks of there being a bubble in defense tech, but, um, our point of view is, I think, the information, you know, that obviously they're going to put their own spin on it, if I was writing this article. I would say bubbles are awesome, right?

• 4:25John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  And so Trump's win, Stokes Defense Tech Bulls, bubbles are awesome would be how I would write that.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  I just got a copy of the new book. But I'm not a journalist, right? I just got a copy of the new book by Stripe Press by Bern Hobart and Tobias called Bubbles.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  And I haven't read it yet, but I've heard his talk and I've been on calls with him. And it's very interesting. He has a bunch of really good points about how bubbles are what allow people to start really ambitious companies. And there's a lot of dividends from those and that in fact, like the average Joe doesn't usually get hurt by a bubble because they invest more regularly and the people that get the most hurt when bubbles pop.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Are the kaput.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Are the risk on folks. So you don't need to be, like the argument of like, what about Main Street? Doesn't actually apply to like bubbles popping. But let's go through some of this article. So they talk about Sironic startup that is trying to build and sell a fleet of autonomous military boats to the US Navy. They raised $175 million at a $1 billion valuation despite having secured only $17 million in government contracts, according to Investor Materials.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Right away, I had to highlight trying to.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  This implies that they're not already selling to the US government, or at least that's kind of the angle that they're taking.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  They have a contract, so they are successfully doing that.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so they're selling.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  So yeah, when you're in the truth zone, we're not going to let that fly.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  They expect to generate 12.5 million in revenue, but next year they're hoping to hit 150. So yeah, I mean, if you're growing 10x revenue, and it makes sense with any, I mean, this is a young company. It makes sense that if you're going to, you know, be building something as complicated as a boat for the military, like there's going to be some lead up to actually getting a large contract.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  I think Andreessen stole those shares at a billion.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  If they can land this, if they can land this 150 million with the Navy.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  They're getting that, they're getting in at less than a 10x revenue multiple for a company that, you know, if they stay on this trajectory, should be doing billions by 2030.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  The whole tone here, still, the Sironic fundraising was the kind of deal that has set off alarm bells that the money flowing into young firms, building rockets, drones and autonomous warships has far outpaced the government contracts.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  The only alarm bells, you know, within our networks that it was setting off is that. Other defense tech CEOs were like, wow, I'm getting, I gotta get in on this.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, uh, and the size gong.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the size gong. That was the real, it wasn't actually an alarm bell. It was the size gong.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Boom. Yeah, exactly. We gotta get a gong on here. Um, so there's, there's quotes from a bunch of different investors. Matt at CrossFit Capital says, uh, the sector has become a little hypey, which I think everyone agrees with. This is true. Uh, there are a lot of companies that need to grow into their valuations, probably also true. But again, it's a good time, it's a good time to need to grow into a valuation.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  You have, like, you have low interest rates, you have more money flowing in, like, this is the time when you have, like, the worst time to try and grow into a valuation was 2022, 2023, when everything was down. Now, it's like, it's okay, you can breathe, you can raise some more money.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  The, the bubble narrative here is dependent on this idea that, uh, government con, uh, investment is outpacing government contracts, right? Which is the entire nature of venture, which is like, let's deploy a lot of money into big ideas that don't have a lot of revenue now, but might have a ton of revenue in 2034, right? And so I think the whole premise, uh, of this entire paragraph here, uh, is sort of, uh, incorrect and, and just sort of a little bit, uh, disingenuous, given that that's the entire venture model, right?

• 8:01John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the thing with the defense tech bubble is like, you could say that it's the same bubble as, you know, like, compared to the crypto bubble or like the NFT bubble that happened, like, I just think about the, sure, that's like a, what? It's gonna be a 10x forward revenue multiple in that company. That's not that crazy compared to what we were seeing in some of the crypto companies where it was like 100 or 1,000x, even in just B2B software. But what, what I really.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Or even Truth Social, obviously, has commanded pretty meaningful multiples.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Like 1,000x, yeah. Uh, actually more like 10,000x.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  But, uh, but, but the, the, the thing that I genuinely believe is, is, is a reason to not fear a defense tech bubble is that A.

• 8:44Jordi Hays?

  It's good for our team.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  It, well, it's good, it's good for our team, it's good for our country and the skills that you learn working at a defense tech company are super valuable. Like you're learning how to build things and.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  That matter.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  Work on machines and stuff. And it's like, A, there's a million jobs, like all the primes, not just like the big companies like Andorol and stuff, but like even the primes, they, they, they, like the defense industry supports like hundreds of thousands of jobs. So if you learn some new skills, you can go into that and then have an impact there, even if your company doesn't work. And, uh, but, but, but no one was saying, oh yeah, like an NFT guy is gonna go and work on Wall Street. Or like, or if this, if this NFT bubble pops, we're definitely gonna be hiring the NFT traders at Jane Street. Like, no, that wasn't gonna happen. And so, uh, there was definitely like a, like a, okay, what do you do with those skills of just like hyping shit coins?

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only, the only, the only thing I'd push back on that is that I have, you know, there's a buddy of mine in Malibu who, um, you know, has been operating like a smaller crypto fund for the last few years and he's got opportunities within the Trump administration now to help, uh, you know, potentially, uh, shepherd the new administration in terms of how do we even think about this new industry?

• 9:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, now.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall, overall, I look at this as I, I, I think, one, bubbles are awesome. Two, this bubble, um, you know, that it's, it's obvious that some really big, important companies have already been built in the space, Palantir, Andorol, the big breakouts. But, um, if, if all these billions of dollars of investment end up, you know, creating another one or two Palantirs or Andorols, and that's all that happens, that's good for America, that's good for our team, that's good for Corey, who wrote this article.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I think everybody, uh, everybody's gonna win. Um, and the overall return profile.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Should be similar to that of, could be, could be very similar to climate tech, right? Where if you looked at the core climate tech investments, they actually didn't do that well, but if you included Tesla

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  in that group, it actually ended up being a really good place to invest overall.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  So there's a whole section on bearish signs, very doom pilled here, the information.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would position this, if I was going to rewrite this, and maybe we could start getting early versions of this for Cory, but I would position this as just, you know, potential challenges, right? None of these, every defense tech founder I know knows that what they're doing is not easy, right? It's not like, we built this cute app and we shipped it and we got our first 10 users and now it's,

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  you know, we're going to try to get to 10,000 by next month and a million by the end of the year, whatever.

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  It's obviously very hard and not easy to navigate, you know, the federal government, but certainly worth doing, it's worth taking on that challenge.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so he writes, "Underpinning the optimism is the push from executives at defense tech firms like Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX for reforms in how federal agencies buy weapons and technology. They argue that instead of buying from a small handful of large firms such as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, government buyers should reward younger firms the executives say can build rockets, missiles, and tanks more cheaply. This argument so far hasn't helped many startups. Among, among more than 125 venture-backed startups focused on defense, aerospace, and robotics, analyzed by Howie Wang, a deep tech analyst, just 10 firms accounted for 70% of the government contracts awarded for this year."

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a power law, baby.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, of course, there's going to be some power law here, but the power law here is so much weaker than in, like, you know, online advertising or something where, or search, you know, Google, one firm, Google, owns like 90% of the search market.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, to me, to me, 125,

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  actually doesn't sound like that much at all, like historically, that, like, over the past few decades, there's been massive consolidation in, in government contracting broadly, but especially in defense tech.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  And I don't think that's generally good for competition. I think that, you know, if historically there were thousands of independent firms that were helping sort of like deliver the products that our federal government and the DOD needs.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  That's actually better. And I think one of the things about defense tech that people don't really realize is the government wants vendor diversity, right? They don't want to be reliant on just Lockheed and Raytheon for, you know, ground-based tactical missile systems, which is why Aon is doing what they're doing, right? They want multiple providers for a lot of these products. So I don't think it's the winner-take-all market because the government actually, there ends up being natural sort of monopolies, but the government's goal is not to have certain products effectively be monopolies.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  And it hurts taxpayers.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I was in Vegas on Monday night at the Rockbridge Conference, Rockbridge Network Conference, which was started by J.D. Vance and brought together a bunch of technologists. Palmer Lucky spoke and Marc Andreessen spoke. And a lot of the focus was on this, like, bridging the gap between Silicon Valley and Washington, like the hill and the valley. There's a couple of those organizations, but Marc was talking a lot about, I mean, he's really good at telling the story of how, you know, we need to go beyond just the products into the supply chain. Who's making the drone motors? Who's making the batteries? He actually called out Skydio, which is one of his portfolio companies, who got their batteries embargoed by China. Now they're hunting around for new batteries.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And so, but it's interesting because a lot of what he was saying, a lot of what Marc was saying on stage, I was just kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know all this. I know all this. I've listened to your podcast. I've seen your tweets. Like, I'm very familiar with all this. Like, this is kind of old news. But you look around and like, the political people in the, are like, yeah, mind blown. And they're like, that was like, one of the greatest presentations of all time. And it was, if you hadn't heard those. And so, it's really good that he's, like, he's playing the hits, essentially. And he understands the importance of like, repeating the message in new territories and in new audiences. So, so I really appreciated hearing that. It was good.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Another note here, average 12-month employee headcount expansion slowed 37% to 22% between May and November, according to Wang. So to me, that implies... You know, to the average reader that's maybe skimming it and spending a split second on this paragraph, they might think that hiring is like contracting, but they're just maybe not hiring as aggressively, but they're still growing headcount, right?

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:26Jordi Hays?

  I think that's important for readers to know. So maybe, maybe they could add some type of annotation there that says like, to be clear, these companies are still growing rapidly and you should go work for them.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. They write, "It's not certain that Republicans election, that the Republicans election wins will make much of a difference to defense startups, as it will to other sectors like cryptocurrency, which face tougher rules from Democrats." Definitely true. "Defense spending is generally bipartisan and defense tech firms like SpaceX, Palantir, Shield AI and Anduril have made inroads with government contracts during the Biden administration." Yeah, I mean, it's been a good time for, for defense tech generally, and it seems to continue. This is less like, like there's a mega bull case or bear case. It's more just like,

• 16:11John Coogan?

  everyone is kind of on board, which I think is good. And they call out the Silicon Valley Defense Group. Have you heard of this nonprofit? They run that like defense tech, SecDef 100, like the top 100 companies, kind of like a networking organization.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Musk posted on X in response to Anduril co-founder Palmer, "Lucky last week after Trump's win, that it was very important to open the Defense Department and intelligence agencies to companies like yours. Pay for outcomes, not requirements documents." That is true. I was learning a lot about this at that, that nuclear summit where apparently the, like there are all these rules. Like first off, when you, when you, when you apply to, for a new like nuclear reactor design, which is probably like the most complicated piece of, you know, essentially defense tech or like government technology that you can get approved. The, the NRC, the National Regulatory Commission is, is paid per page that you submit or something like that. So this massive incentive, I don't know if it's like literally per page.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  It might be just like there's more work, there's more jobs and more people get paid. But there's this massive incentive to increase the requirements and have more and more, more and more like, you know, laborious documentation.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, the cost plus model of a lot of, a lot of products that the DOD buys, which is basically that. These contractors like Lockheed, when they sell a missile, they're getting, their revenue is a percentage of the final cost.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  And so the incentive structure is so flawed and that the more the product costs, the more money they actually make. So if it's a $500,000 missile system and it's like a 10%, you know, cost plus contract, they're, they're making 50 grand a missile.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Right?

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And so a lot of these defense tech companies are going to be really impactful because they're sort of changing their approach. And they're saying like, no, we're just going to sell you the missile itself. And because of that, we're incentivized to make sure that our margins are healthy.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately can, can start to get really competitive on, on price. One of their line in here, you know, they call out and they actually highlight that profits are likely years away.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  I saw this.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  For Andorol and.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Like $14 billion, investors have valued Andorol between 18 and 19 times this year's expected sales, even though profits are likely years away. It's like, how can you write for the information and write that line? Like, this is the story of every startup you write about.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's painful. I think everyone sort of understands that Andorol is focused on building a bunch of really critical, important product lines. And profitability is maybe like number 12 on their list of priorities. So if Palmer cared about profits right now and the, and the team more broadly cared, then I'm, I'm sure they would be able to produce those. But it's just not at all the priority. And it's not in America's best interest for them to pursue, you know, actually driving profitability for a very long time. So.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  So I'm glad that Christian Garrett got a shout out, a partner at 137 Ventures, which invests in SpaceX and Andorol. Said he was hopeful that the Trump administration would change procurement processes to help more upstarts. But he believes most of the spoils would go to top firms. I think there will be opportunities for more, but this won't look like enterprise software with a large number of winners. He said, it's a cap market in the number of opportunities, but definitely not in the scope. Yeah, that's interesting. I, I, I, I think it's like hard tech could look like enterprise software or, or a deep tech broadly. Include, and then it's like, you know, and like Palmer said, he was a consumer of nuclear. He's not necessarily building a nuclear power plant.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so here's what Anduril has really built and why I think they're valued in the way that they are among a number of reasons. Besides the talent density and traction and growth and all that stuff is they have built the best possible distribution engine into the DOD. Right? So if you're any of these 125 new defense tech companies, you can build a really great product and not necessarily like crack distribution or crack these contracts. And so a lot of those companies are effectively like off balance sheet R and D for Anduril. And Anduril can then say, hey, we're going to sort of, um, you know, buy up this company and kind of put them through our distribution engine. So I think that Anduril in one way could be seen as a distributor for a lot of these products.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's a few different models. So Palantir has their AIP program, uh, which is going on this week that hopefully we can talk more about soon. Where if you're a software defense startup, you can build on top of Anduril's API or Palantir's APIs. And and then Palantir acts as the distribution arm for you, kind of like the app store for the government. And with and Palantir hasn't done many acquisitions, but Anduril is starting to do more acquisitions and it's kind of a similar model. I talked to one founder who sold his company to Anduril and he said like, the number one reason was their DC office and Chris Bros out there. And so they just have like a phenomenal distribution.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  A number of their new products have been acquisitions. Uh, I know the submarine, autonomous submarine that they did. Ghost was an Australian company.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  It was it was called Dive Technologies before. Yeah. And and yeah, that's why.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  And that's actually the fact that Anduril can be a soft landing for these companies that don't crack the contracts.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  I mean, pretty soon it's not going to be a soft landing. Pretty soon it's going to be a banger outcome.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Not necessarily soft, but like, the thing is like, yeah, shoot for the moon, shoot to be the next Anduril. Even if you miss, you'll land among Palmer's stars.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. And yeah, what a great

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  And the conversation on the information seems to be pretty lively. I think Mohammed here is chiming in. He thinks spending will reduce significantly. I just don't think that's true, primarily because defense spending has already been at historical lows. And I think that with increased global instability and proof that we do need deterrence, I think it will actually continue to go up no matter who the administration is.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  And I mean, the first Trump administration was so noisy and chaotic that people miss, like, you could hate everything about the Trump administration, but the 2016 one, but if you just believe that China, like, reorienting around China was important. That was like a groundbreaking moment for the United States. It was very, very important. It comes from the Hundred Year Marathon, that book that was kind of popularized. And then there was like an, almost an instant pivot to like, okay, let's renegotiate the tariffs, let's do the CHIPS Act, let's do all these different initiatives. And you know that it's, even though like, you know, most, you know, we never talk about

• 22:41John Coogan?

  politics and, and, and most people are, you know, pretty firmly in one camp or another, that, the, the reorientation on China was really bipartisan because when Biden came in, he didn't change anything there. He actually kind of doubled down, did the CHIPS Act and stuff. And so I, I think that like, no matter what happens, we're going to be in a new era of like, great power competitions back on the menu. And it's not the end of history. And we need to do something about Russia and Iran and China and like, kind of the new axis of evil, so.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, overall, solid article from Corey. Clearly did his research. And we're here, Corey, if you ever kind of want a more positive view on, on, on all things venture.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's move to Beth Jezos. He writes, folks, Y Combinator has gone fully based and EAC pilled with their recent request for startups. And we have their, the YC request for startups in 2024. At the top of the list, government software, highly related to what we were just talking about. So AI software to automate government administrative tasks, target large scale operations like form processing, application reviews, building solutions for citizen facing services, DMV permits, licenses. Oh, man, DMV, that'd be fantastic.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  I want, I want iOS level software to interact with the DMV, right? I want digital ID that, that like, you know, looks like a ramp card when it's in your Apple Wallet, right? That's what we need.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  We need to make America more beautiful in every way, including our, our software products.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  And then public safety technology. This is like, you know, in the flock safety world, but, and also growing Daniel is working on this. Law enforcement, efficiency tools, US manufacturing, stable coins 2.0, LLMs for chip design.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think Daniel's like a little bit?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  He went through YC, right?

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  No, I know. He went through YC. He's got to be a little bit frustrated with them doing a RFP or a request for startup for basically exactly what he's, he's doing with his product, reducing paperwork for law enforcement. But, um, uh, no, I think, I think, uh, the, this is something I talk to with, with founders quite a bit when they're building something is, and just something I think about is, how is this founder and this company going to perform when YC puts out a request for startups to thousands of super talented people?

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  And suddenly you have three or four other people building in your product category. And with Daniel, like, he's going to continue to thrive, right? He has a phenomenal poster. He clearly knows how to get attention. Uh, good, uh, good sort of product guy.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, but a lot of, you know, a lot of times I talk to founders and when I'm kind of like analyzing in my head, do I think this person's going to be able to compete with three or four YC companies in the same category? Usually I'm like, okay, like this guy's going to get smoked, right?

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Just because I think YC's like high level methodology is the most battle tested approach to company building.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  And I, I've never been through YC, interviewed there for Party Round back in the day with Michael Siebel and got a quick rejection. I don't think I fit, even with like, we were already backed by Gradient, one of Google's funds.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  I just didn't fit the YC mold, being non-technical myself. But their, their high-level advice of like, launch now, build something people want, do things that don't scale, talk to users, all startups are badly broken at some point.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Find 10 customers who love your product, avoid long negotiated deals with big customers.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Oh, that's hard on the government.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  That's gonna, that one's gonna have to need a provision maybe.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Founder relationships matter more than you think. All of this stuff is just the closest that you can get to the truth.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  In terms of company building.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's why, it is part of why the average VC fund has partners and associates and principals and platform teams that all have different opinions.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  And oftentimes even GPs at the same fund will disagree on, you know, the, the right approach for a company.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  YC gives the most like generalized advice, but it ultimately, clearly, undeniably works.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, if you go down this list, it's like government software, that's Palantir, public safety technology, that's Flock, US manufacturing, that's Hadrian, Atomic, right? And, and so there are like, there are like, kind of leading companies in these categories already, but I think there's still something really valuable about going and, A, finding like a smaller niche and building something unique, or just putting yourself in a really interesting and fast-moving environment and then maybe you wind up pivoting, doing something else, or discovering like an entirely new category that we didn't really know and couldn't be put down into or, or requests for startups. But it's like, it's a signal. And I think that's what Beth is getting at, is that like, you know, they are signaling that they are on board with like the next generation of builders and the stuff that's interesting and, and cutting-edge right now.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, a lot of these categories have really, really talented teams that are already building and pursuing many of these opportunities. I think honestly, category nine, one million jobs, 2.0, like they've always had this idea of like, kind of trying to create, get people to start thinking about ideas of like, how are you going to build a company that creates a million jobs, right? Like something like DoorDash, Uber, things of that nature. In the AI era, I don't know what that looks like, right? Like there's so much, so much uncertainty. We've joked and people have joked online that like the last two jobs are like HVAC and capital allocation, right? Like you're basically going to be like, like deploying money or just like doing

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Manual labor.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Manual labor.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's also something about this where it's like, the, like when you look at like the power law of YC winners, like Coinbase or Airbnb, like those would never have fit into requests for startups at the time. They were too frontier, but they still chose to go to YC because YC was a place where cool stuff was happening. And so I wouldn't be surprised if, if putting out this message and waving the flag of like government software, public safety technology, US manufacturing, like, you know, brings in someone like bio isn't on here, but you could see some like crazy bio company coming. And you could see them wanting to jump in here just because like, oh, this is where like interesting people will be. Yeah, I'm building in something that's really contrarian and really like undervalued right now. But I'm still going to go to YC because there's going to be cool stuff there.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  And they're not just, they're not just fighting the last war.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think the, a lot of, like, when I look down this list, the, the founders that I know that are building in the space, like somebody like, when you look at US manufacturing and Aaron with, with Atomic, he's not like, going to be at, at any point, like he's been pounding the table being like, we need more manufacturing startups. So I think that these categories and opportunities are so massive that it, I think YC is doing a massive, YC has been getting memed and getting a lot of hate because their founders have really low testosterone, which is an issue. But they're doing a, they're doing a huge public good by saying, hey, we want to invite 50 teams into each of these categories.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  I know they've reduced their batch sizes, so maybe it's less than that now. But we want to invite 30 teams into each of these categories and capitalize them and allow them to take like a meaningful shot on goal to do something. Important and it's funny that the funny thing. People in crypto love to track like Y C like. Two batches ago, Y C like did not have a single crypto company in the batch and everybody was like, wow, this is super bullish for crypto. Because usually like you want to be like building when there's zero hype.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting that um.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  It's back in the menu.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Crypto didn't make the list.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Well, it did stablecoins 2.0.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, okay, but that's almost more like traditional finance.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Blending.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Almost. But uh. But yeah, again, stablecoins 2.0, Bridge acquisition was a really meaningful win for the for the crypto world and. I've got a really exciting company, Mintel in Latin America that's doing basically what what Bridge is doing for.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Stablecoins.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Latin market. Yeah, stablecoin infrastructure.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, God bless Y C, Godspeed to all the founders.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  All the builders.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  The new batch and I'm sure some of them will post and we will cover them.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Welcome back. We're doing some Q and A. We got a DM from a founder and I'll read it. They say, hey, John and Jordy, I run a unicorn tech company and I'm looking to buy a new car. I've done quite well for myself, but I hate the idea of looking flashy or flexing on my employees. I was looking at a Macan from Porsche or a G Wagon from Mercedes, but what do you think? For extra context, I live in Manhattan and I don't have kids yet. So what would you what would you recommend to the the unicorn founder? Probably pretty wealthy, but you know, is it? How do you not look flashy? How do you not flex too hard? And then what's practical in Manhattan? Give me your analysis.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  I have strong opinions. You have strong opinions. This has been, if we've ever had a rift in our relationship, it's due to.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  Arguments over automotive.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  Luxury cars and sports cars.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sports cars.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Hypercars, supercars.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  You lean one way, I lean the other and at the end of the day, as long as there are combustion engines, we're both. But we would never drive in the same car together. I think Lindy Man talks about this. It's just kind of, it's a bit strange. Two guys driving in a car together, just avoid at all costs. But uh, but look.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  I can think of five or six or seven or eight cars that would that would fit the bill here. I think that I think you mentioned a G-Wagon. I don't think that's super low profile, except you're in Los Angeles when it's every other car.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  Every other car.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  The issue, so the issue with

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  G-Wagons in Manhattan and LA is that there are still like 20% of parking garages you actually can't get under them.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Oh, really? They're too tall. Because the benefit of the G-Wagon is kind of short, even though it's an SUV. So you can parallel park it.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I recently pulled into one of the many equinoxes around LA and I was driving into the tunnel and I hit the little I didn't I didn't scrape like a concrete, but it was like

• 33:27John Coogan?

  It was hanging bars.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  The the bars that like tell you and I was like, whoa, I had to like do like a 20-point turn to get out. So I don't recommend that for the city. You can make it work in LA. I think that if you want something performant but low profile, the Cayenne Turbo GT is a phenomenal car.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  It's basically Porsche's version of the Urus. It's it's fast, it's it's loud, but not in like a

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Overpowering way.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Not in overpowering like kind of douchey way. Like it's it's sort of got this low rumble. It's nice. It's fun in a canyon.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  The Macan's going EV now.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Macan I would I would

• 34:07John Coogan?

  And I've been in a Macan. I mean, it's it's not the most comfortable. It's pretty tight.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Macan is a great car when your daughter turns 16.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Get her a Macan, right? It allows her to feel maybe used to the luxury other luxuries that she has in her life, but it's not, you know, flashy or, you know, it's not over the top. It's not a Ben-Take, right? But but yeah, if you want to go sort of under the radar, fast, fun, performant, I'm going Cayenne Turbo GT.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Cayenne Turbo GT.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Sleeper sleeper SUV supercar.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  If you want something, my opinion on if you want something that's like G-Wagon-esque, but a little bit more unique, Ineos Grenadier. Have you seen the Ineos Grenadier?

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Very cool. Very small company. So there's a little bit of risk that they like go out of business and you think it's

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Aerospace, right?

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  It's a billionaire funder of Neos.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  He's got a $25 billion chemical company. That he's just plowing the profits into building like a vintage Land Rover.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  And yeah, it looks like a vintage Land Rover. It had, you can kid it out with all this off-road gear. It looks really cool. Good for Manhattan roads, which are often broken.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Truck Gladiator.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Oh, they do? Okay, cool. That's cool, yeah, something like that would be good.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  But the, the only other thing, something a little bit more low-key, but luxurious. Still driving a very nice car is the Bentley Bentayga.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  Those are great.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you buy, the thing about Bentleys is they lose about half their value in the first two years.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  So if you want to buy, you could buy a 2022.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Basically a new car, 5,000 miles.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  And you're paying less than you'd pay for a new Range Rover, but you're getting to drive a Bentley.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the Range Rover depreciation's brutal. The Defender's pretty cool, though. That might be a good option.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  The new Octa, the new Octa.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Oh, I know that one, yeah.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Their new top-of-the-line Defender.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Very cool-looking car, they made it slightly more wide-body.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Okay, cool, yeah, that'd be a good one.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  But really, I mean, you don't have kids, I think, sports car. I, I would say, if you're worried about the roads in Manhattan, Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato. It's got the off-road tires.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  That's a safe bet.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  That's a safe bet. But then, you know, you might be flexing on your employees, but at least they'll know you have taste. You bought a limited edition, it's the last V12 or V10 Huracan.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  And if you don't, you're around Manhattan, you're not going to put a lot of miles on it. It's actually somewhat practical.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  You're going to be able to sell that car in a few years, somewhere near what you paid for it.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you think the Dakar is also a good option?

• 36:27John Coogan?

  The Dakar's a great option.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Lean more, uh, German.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's phenomenal, you know, phenomenal car, it's got the, the bigger sort of like lifts.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Dealing with snow.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  If you need to throw.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Skid plate.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  If you need to throw anything on the roof.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  It's great, too.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can still go grocery shopping.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  If you have like a new Apple Pro monitor, like, it's not going to fit in, uh, the trunk.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in the, in the hood, uh, but it will fit on the roof.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  The car is like functional, Sterrato, functional, Bentayga, uh, you're sort of cruising, um, but, uh.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  I think those are some good recommendations.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Like a ZR1 or something like that.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, uh, Corvette ZR1, fastest American-made car, 240 miles an hour.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Faster than faster than the Penn and Farina Batista electric car.

• 37:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, wild.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  Wild.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Um, 1,200 horsepower, something like that.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  Because you got being more of like a track toy.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah. Daily, daily, that's gonna be rough.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  In Manhattan.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  A little loud, a little high profile.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  Kind of looks.

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Looks closer to a Lamborghini.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Kind of a lot of looks.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  You want that in Connecticut or upstate where you can kind of take it on the roads, backroads.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you're just, you're not gonna get respect. You know, it sounds like this company probably wants to go public soon. CEO is driving a ZR1 to a meeting with a major capital allocator is gonna throw off some huge red flags, in my opinion.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  I disagree. I think that the ZR1 and the American made cars, they're coming back.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  I think it's big in the American dynamics.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  I think it's just, I think it's just countercultural, but it signals something special. It signals that you appreciate American manufacturing and you're willing to forego some of the Nürburgring time to

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  To, to, to stick with an American made company and, and the only way.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Straight line speed, too.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, straight line speed. And the only way that the American manufacturers are gonna get better is if we actually support them.

• 38:14Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  You have to put your money where your mouth is. If you say, oh yeah, American needs better innovation and manufacturing, like, go buy something that's made in America.

• 38:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  And great culture.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, the 911 is actually what it is because the Cayenne sold so well. Porsche was in kind of a bad spot

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  in the early 2000s and they released the Cayenne, became one of the best selling luxury SUVs in the world. They were, they were able to take all of that uh, R and D that they were spending on the Cayenne, not only benefit the 911, but also have the kind of balance sheet that allowed them to, you know, continuously innovate on the 911 platform and make it um, undeniably the greatest sports car of all time. But uh, that's gonna start another argument.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  We'll probably get on for the rest of the show.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  I'm sure we'll come back to sports cars at some point.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  We always do.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Let's go to some posts. We got Ryan Peterson. He says, "Someone should domesticate grizzly bears to replace canines in the military. North America would never have to worry about invasion again." It's hilarious because like, are we worried about invasion? Like, not at all.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the benefit of being American is being able to grow up, never worried about invasion.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, Red Dawn.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Won the geographic lottery.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 39:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think, I think we need to see more people combining American dynamism with biotech.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, we need to be, we need to like, bring Wuhan here.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Accelerated, accelerated genetic engineering. Because I think domestication takes like a thousand years and a lot of generations. But if you shorten that up in vitro.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  LLMs could kind of accelerate some of that.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  You know, run thousands and thousands of simulations every minute.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Simulations on the genes, yeah.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  To understand, yeah.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, if you're building in, at the intersection of biotech, American dynamism, and, you know, large language models.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, let us know. But you gotta, I gotta call Ryan out. I mean, he's a good friend, but domesticating bears is my thing. I got a tweet here from 2023, "Domesticate bears, I'm no longer asking." I got another one from 2022, "It's time to domesticate bears." I have another one here from 2021, "Yes, and we should also domesticate bears. Totally doable with enough time in genetic engineering." I got another one here from 2020. This is pre-COVID. "It might take decades, but we need to domesticate bears. It could easily be our generation's moon landing." And so.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  You've actually done a poor job branding yourself as a bear guy.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  I know, I know. I should have written like the long post or, you know, some article.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  There could be a team out there that's already domesticating bears. And you didn't, you only posted four times. And if you had posted the fifth time, they would have hit you up.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  I would have gotten the deal. I would have gotten allocation.

• 40:50Jordi Hays?

  Led the first like two rounds.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  So, Ryan, give me some credit. I got to the domestication of bears thing earlier, but it's a, it's a big tent. Everyone's welcome in the bear domestication movement. Happy to have you on board. Let's go to Sophie Netcap Girl. She says, "Bro got sent to the minor leagues of posting." And it's a screenshot of Mark Cuban on bluesky.social saying, "Hello, less hateful world." And. Unfortunately, I didn't think we were gonna have to do this, but on a previous episode, we gave Mark Cuban the Brother of the Week and we have to rescind that award. He left X and went to the minor leagues of hosting and so you will not be getting your Brother of the Week award mailed to you. I'm sorry, Mark.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had it all packed up, the plaque and everything.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  So that was a little bit of a mistake by us. We will do better. I don't think he'll be in the running unless he gets back on and has a redemption arc.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and as a podcast, we're not afraid to kind of admit when we made a mistake. We talked about NetJets on an early episode. We got a lot of pushback from our audience and said, "This isn't relevant to me. My family has multiple Jets. We do not use NetJets. Please do not talk about them or promote them. It's just a waste of all of our time." So, we admitted that mistake. We shouldn't have given Cuban Brother of the Week and fortunately, the plaque wasn't in the mail yet.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yep. So yeah, we're deeply sorry to the audience for that mistake, but this week's Brother of the Week will be much better, trust me. Let's stay on apologies and go to Marquez Brownlee, MKBHD. He was apologizing for driving too fast. Let's read it. "Last video, I did something pretty stupid. You might have already seen it, but maybe not, so I'll address it here. There was a clip with the action cam of me test-driving a car and going way too fast. Absolutely inexcusable and dangerous. I've since cut it out of the video. There's no reason to leave that clip in. All I can do is apologize and promise never to do anything close to that stupid again. That's a terrible example to set and I'm sorry."

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  Great. Good apology.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, good apology and like getting out very quickly. There was a tweet calling him out that was kind of going viral and he just jumped on it really quick and with a long post. And I think that there's something about if he had just like quote tweeted and been like, "I'm sorry," like that's not enough, but he actually like broke down everything that he did, everything that he would do next. Like, "I'm well aware of the Streisand effect and I know everything on the internet lives for other, but I think this is the best decision for now." And like, he like broke down his whole thought process and I thought this was very, very good, but... I don't think he should have apologized because I think, and I'm on record saying that we need to ban speed limits in America. I think we need an American auto bond.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Slowing the entire economy down.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's so many times when, you know, you're going to a meeting and if you could just drive twice as fast, you'd be there twice as fast.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  You could do more meetings.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  You could do more meetings. You could increase more shareholder value. Exactly. I was actually thinking about this because my friend has a house in Mammoth and I was driving there and the speed limit's like sixty-five, seventy-five. It's like a four-hour drive, but it could be two.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  And cars are getting safer. This was posted as like kind of a joke, but it is serious. Like, the self-driving technology is getting a lot better. The cars are getting way safer. Seat belts and airbags are in every car now. And so like the possibility of just driving fast, like that might be the solution. Like, do we need high-speed rail or do we just need an auto bond?

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  That needs to be a core tenet of American dynamism is just, yeah, removing speed limits.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Because think about some of these deep tech founders that have, you know, a facility out here, office over here, and they're spending a lot of time on the road. Yes, you can use it for phone calls, but if they could spend more time in front of their, whether, you know, their engineer that's needing to code or a capital allocator that's behind a Bloomberg terminal,

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  the more time they can spend in front of those, you know, desks, the better for the country.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  It's also just like a lot of things with the government. It's hard to do new things and create new projects, but it is a lot easier to just stop doing something. So if you, if you're the government, you just say, "Hey, we're just going to take down the speed limit signs." Like, that's a pretty easy job as opposed to, "We're going to build a new high-speed rail."

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  It also could be a community-grown effort, right? Like, there could be kind of a grassroots movement of, "Hey, we're going to take down speed limits, right? We're going to just do this, you know, an axe, right? Just chop like a tree."

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, even, even one less speed limit in your local economy could actually provide some pretty tremendous benefits.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  So even though, you know, I do disagree with MKBHD on respecting speed limits, you know, we got to support him because he's a fellow Turbo S owner.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, he has Turbo S.

• 45:28Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. He was driving a Plaid and switched to the Turbo S. And he loves it. He's a big fan.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  It is a great car.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  Huge fan.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  He watched every single possible video about it and made the decision that that's the best possible car.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  Sports car.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  And for someone who's reviewed so many products, like, I think he made a good decision.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Gotta trust him on that one.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  Even though I'd love to see him in a GT350R Mustang. But let's stay on the topic of, you know, government efficiency and government deregulation. Delian, my colleague at Founders Fund, says, "Hell yeah, Doge is real and Elon and Vivek are running it. What a time to be alive." And there's a statement from President Donald Trump saying that Elon Musk and, in conjunction with American patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency together. What do you think?

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, very cool, very cool. I mean, it feels like we're in, somebody said this, but it feels like we actually are in the best possible timeline.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  Where it's the most entertaining and actually seems to be the most America-positive timeline.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Since 1776.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  There's been this, yeah, there's been this question of like, you know, okay, even if someone gets in that people like, like, is there energy to like actually go and work in the government? And as silly as the Doge meme is, it's something where you could see a smart, hard-working person say, "Yeah, I want to go work with Elon on government stuff. Sure, I'll go to the Doge. That sounds great."

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  That's the big, that's the big change here, right?

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  Is smart, young people are going to want to work in the government for the first time just so that they can work under that sort of Elon religion, right?

• 47:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yeah.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  And somebody else was saying, like, you know, the US economy is basically just like steady state, growing a couple of points a year. And if we can double that growth, it kind of fixes so many of the core issues in our society, right? So it can't be understated that this is, while it's...

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  Immediately being politicized. I don't think it's political at all. We want our government to run the country like they'd run a business, right?

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Bring in more revenue.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  Then you spend. It's pretty simple math. It's napkin math. We need to run the federal government. The federal government should be able to run on a napkin, right?

• 47:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Social Security, Defense.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Healthcare.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  Healthcare, etc. Like, you should not need more than a small napkin to run this country. Except if you want to drill down into the details, you can get on ramp.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that sounds good. And then Andre relatedly says, "In America, the Department of Efficiency has two bosses pouring a little bit of cold water on this idea that, okay, you know, hey, is it really efficient if you have two, if you have two people there?" But I think it makes sense because Elon's running so many different companies. He can come in.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  No, isn't he running it exactly how he runs all of his company?

• 48:23John Coogan?

  SpaceX, he has Gwyneth Paltrow.

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  He's setting the pace and the energy and like the focus.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  But then he needs his lieutenant to actually get the job done.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  If that can come in as like the operator alongside him, like that, that seems really good. But it is a funny meme. And, you know.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like that they're treating it like a product launch.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, the Trump admin over the last, like, week has been almost having a major, major story every single day that at least within the tech community is like getting the right attention, generally getting positive attention.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:56Jordi Hays?

  And this is the advice I give to startups is like, even if you have something that feels relatively minor that you already announced previously, announce it again.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  Make it a big moment, right?

• 49:04John Coogan?

  I heard this thing, I don't know if, I haven't checked it, but I heard that if you've seen these like Trump videos, there's like all these policy videos that are going out, him talking about like his ideas, and they've all been like going viral. Apparently those are from like a few years ago.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Rumble.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  They're from Rumble. Is this true?

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so they're from Rumble, and he put them out, and they just didn't get any lift because Rumble's really small. But now that they're like, you know, he's unblocked on X, they can go viral. And so everyone's like, wait, where was this guy all along? It's kind of funny.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to his credit, I think he still believes 80% of the same things.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, they're still part of his platform.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Which.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  You know, historically, the critique of Trump has been he's constantly sort of like changing his mind and going back on things that he said before. So I'm happy to see that what he thought in 2022 is also what he wants to get done.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Visikaan Virasamy, who I found out about through Patrick O'Shaughnessy, saying that he has some really good like frameworks and posts and long posts and writing, writes, "Tech bro pod, please discuss this." And it's one of the most indecipherable posts, but we'll try and get through it. He writes, "Culture wars are partially downstream of the media tech nation dropping paratrooper brain worms inside the OODA loops of those with fragile self sense and people sense and recruiting them as cannon fodder moocs into profitable but destructive psychofana Titan battles." So I think I kind of understand what he's saying here. And it's a little bit of a twist

• 50:38John Coogan?

  on, have you heard the term or the phrase like, "Politics is downstream from culture"? Have you heard of this? Andrew Breitbart said it. And it's this idea that like, the government is just a reflection of the culture in a country and that it's not that you can, you don't necessarily need like, pronatalist regulation to create a pronatalist movement.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  If the culture is pronatalist.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  And then it just happens. Exactly. And I've always been fascinated with that in conjunction with "the medium is the message," that quote by Marshall McLuhan. And I've always thought about the interaction of those two terms. So if you believe both of them are well argued, and I do, well, if the medium is the message, then the design of our communications platforms informs our culture. And so, "the medium is the message" means that when you design, what is a TV show? What is a movie? What is, even on formerly Twitter, now X, like, the idea of a retweet or a quote tweet, that became very, that became more adversarial because it invented the dunk.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  And so our culture got more aggressive, which you could say is good or bad.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like it created a mechanism to bring a ton of negative energy from your community to one person who's not necessarily in your community.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Which creates this cycle of fear.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the other, the other quote that stands out, I'll butcher it, but we create our tools and from there our tools like

• 52:13John Coogan?

  Shape us.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  Shape us, reshape our tools and our tools shape us.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Chisel us, yeah. Yeah, it's a, and, and so this is something that I've always pushed back on. There's this debate, like the, the media would always say like, oh, like tech is, is like inherently political. And then the technologists would say like, no, like our tech is like politically agnostic, but I don't buy that at all. I think that if you're a product designer at a big tech company and you're designing a communication tool, the decision that you make to include quote tweets or to make likes private, for example, that shapes the culture and culture shapes politics. And so if you are designing a product that's used by hundreds of, hundreds of millions of Americans, you do have an impact on politics.

• 52:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  And yeah, and you do have a responsibility. And so I think that's somewhat of what he's saying here, but you could probably dive into this whole thread and spend another hour deciphering every single word there.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  But thanks for writing in and let us know how we did. Let us know if we, if we nailed it. I think we did. Let's go to Will Monitis. He says, building in public is over. The future is a cult companies of unknowable size and influence hidden beneath a sea of LLCs so deep divine light can't even get through. Cap tables so arcane, it's impossible to know if truth exists at all. No one knowing what really is going on here.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  So imagine explaining the build in public movement to the Koch brothers.

• 53:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  Koch Industries. They're like, wait.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  What?

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  You tell everyone daily what your revenue is. You screenshot your internal metrics and share them with the world. You invite massive competition. You allow others to get an understanding of your profits so that they can eat away at them slowly.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  I think the build in public movement is very, you know.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  It's good to share what you're working on. It's good to talk about what you're working on. It's good to make people feel like a part, that they're a part of your movement and kind of along for the ride. But the entire, and I think Will, Will did a good job of this with his last company, right? He, you know, would share the right things that positioned him as the, the thought leader within AI and healthcare. Right? He did that very well. Never once had to share Stripe dashboard, right? Or, or, and I think that there's the right way to do it and the wrong way to do it. And you've talked about this a lot. The, you know, what we're seeing with the building public movement now is a lot of founders that are talking about what they're doing, but not sharing metrics publicly,

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  but making sure that their competitors can, can clock their, their revenue and earnings by their car and watch collection.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  Exactly. People should still know that you're successful.

• 54:50Jordi Hays?

  It's just got to be a little bit more subtle, right? So instead of a Stripe dashboard showing a, you know, 200K day, we want to see like a, you know, one of one Patek.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  So it's just evolving.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And yeah, thanks, Will. Let's go to Offscaler. Says, hmm, and it's a screenshot of what looks like a TikTok saying, you can tell if he makes money, whether he says Q4 or winter.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I think we're in a.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  This is like one of us, one of us, one of us.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, but I think we're in a.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  We're having a banger Q4.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we're, I mean, obviously we're having a phenomenal Q4.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  That said, I think we're at maybe the intersection of people that are saying, I'm starting my winter arc.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  Because Q, we're halfway through Q4 and I need to lock in even harder, right? So we're, there is this intersection and the kind of founders that I want to invest in are starting their winter arc, but very well aware that we're almost halfway through Q4. And they need to make stuff happen.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, but in the same way that we advocated for adopting gamer lingo into everyday life, also you gotta adopt the finance bro lingo.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we don't need to reinvent, we don't need to speedrun reinventing finance. There's a lot that venture can learn from our predecessors.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing for everybody to remember, your Q4 metrics are forever, right? When this quarter ends, you will have to live with those results.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:21Jordi Hays?

  You know, January, February, March, and then 2030, 2040, people are gonna be looking back at this quarter saying, what the fuck were you doing?

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  Or giving you, still patting you on the back from the work that you do now, so lock in, whether you're having a winter arc, whether you're in the tropics.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  It's still winter.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, those metrics will be immortalized in your 10K forever. So, good luck, get out there. Augustus says, have you ever had nine Coors banquet beers with your customer? And I love this because he ats Coors banquet.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Hopefully they gave him a retweet, that's, that's really, that's good marketing for them.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  They really should, this is amazing marketing for him.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cuz that's kinda the whole point, that's like the idea of Coors banquet, right? It's a celebratory beer, that's, that's an everyday product, that's accessible. I can imagine that this is not unusual for Augustus, right?

• 57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Somebody that, his, his, his, his edge is being able to speak the language of Silicon Valley and be immersed in this amazing subculture.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  Hanging out with bazers and bedates and Saudi princes.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  And then simultaneously going and hanging at the farm for 48 hours.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Farmers to sell them rainfall.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  He's serving, he's serving customers in places that Starlink has never touched, right?

• 57:38John Coogan?

  I don't actually think that's true. But, but yeah, fantastic, I mean, meeting your customer where you, where you are.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna correct this.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Seriously, there are a lot of companies that, they, you know, wind up in YC and they're like, well, we're building SaaS for farms and then they like. Can't relate to the customer at all.

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  It's really hard.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I told the story about.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  People want to buy products from other people like them.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're not like your customer, you better have a head of sales who is or, you know, learn from finance, right?

• 58:07John Coogan?

  I mean, I told you that story about doing a deal with like a tobacco distributor and I walk in and everyone's smoking inside. It was like one of the craziest experiences. And, and yeah, it's like, it's like.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  How did you handle that situation?

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Oh, of course, rip one.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  Rip one.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you know, you, you, you gotta.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  But you're bridging the gap between.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  Big tobacco.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  But then I forced them to use the strongest product I make and see if they can really handle it.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  Vittorio. There's actually a good story from last night. I was at a dinner hosted by a venture capitalist and the guy next to me who, he actually, I asked him what he'd want to be referred to on the pod. He said, the Jewish cowboy.

• 58:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  He was taking a four milligram Lucy pouch in between every course of the meal and then taking it out because he didn't like to reuse them. And so in a 90 minutes of sitting next to him, he plowed through like seven or eight pouches. I was like, dude, you're an absolute animal. And he's like, I don't, he's like, I don't actually, I don't actually feel the buzz anymore. I just avoid the withdrawals.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, shout out to the Jewish cowboy.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, friend of the show. Let's go to Vittorio. He says, what's the book that changed your life the most? And this is just a good question. What's your answer? Do you have something in mind?

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Art of the Deal.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Art of the Deal.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  I like Zero to One. I mean, that's classic, but.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Classic.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, like it's, it's kind of crazy to say, but I remember in high school, a friend who was a really, really smart guy. Just kind of clocked that I was going to be an entrepreneur, I think, and kind of on that track. And he got me four hour work week.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  And like now in Silicon Valley, that's not part of the canon in the way that Zero to One is. But it was a phenomenal book, just in terms of exposing like what. Does it mean to be an entrepreneur?

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  At any scale?

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  And it's a very you can just do things book.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Like, there's a story about him-

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Tools of Titans was also a really great book.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that happened a little bit later, but yeah.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  So, so I would say the media product that's been most impactful on me over the last two years is Founder's Podcast.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  And part of that is, is David digesting-

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  All the best biographies and autobiographies ever in entrepreneurship and just like tying them all together. But, um, but Tools of Titans was very impactful for me, um, during college because that was my first exposure to, um, not my first exposure, but like the first kind of Senna-esque attempt at kind of capturing what made these people who they were and how they ticked.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. It's a good prompt. Let's go to Jesse. Jesse says, "As a young CEO, the worst advice I ever took seriously was that each manager should have standing one-on-ones with each direct report. Utter stranglehold on calendars throughout an organization. Direct reports should have something to report or decide to call a meeting, especially with the CEO." And it's a quote tweet of, uh, Brian Chesky talking about how he doesn't believe in one-on-ones and almost no great CEOs in history have ever done one-on-ones. And there's a lot of this stuff that's happening right now where big public company CEOs are coming out and saying like, "I actually do things very differently." Uh, Jensen Wong, um, noted, uh, "Watch Disrespector," uh, claims that he doesn't have any, like,

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  meetings or direct reports. What, what is it? He has, he has some, some, something to the same effect. Um, but it is true. Like the, like, your calendar should be like as default empty as possible and you should have as few standing meetings as possible.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think the big issue with one-on-ones is if you have a standing Wednesday one-on-one and you have a direct report that's having an issue Monday, if they're waiting to talk about it until Wednesday-

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  That's 48 hours of wasted time.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:57Jordi Hays?

  And that could have been the most important thing-

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Of the week that you just needed to handle-

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  And fix. And so I think that, uh, yeah, this trend towards- CEOs being like Jensen's big thing is like we have no long-term plan, right? He's like, we don't plan, like we, we think about what do we need to do today to make the company, you know, win today and for the long run and eliminating meetings, eliminating long-term planning. Shopify has been big, eliminating OKRs, things like that. So anyways, I think it's, I think, what's the old joke that like Google invented OKRs to just like stifle like innovation?

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Competing competition.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  In competition?

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of that. I mean, all of the, all of the work-life balance stuff is 100% game theoretic.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, hey, by the way, if you're the best business in history, you can have amazing work-life balance and offer all these perks to your employees.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then create that as the competitive playing field that everyone has to compete with.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Brilliant, brilliant.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Brilliant. But yeah, I mean, it gets to the idea of like the phone CEO, which we've talked about before, but just this idea that like you can be much more effective if you're just constantly on iMessage with people that are important in your organization. And then just picking up the phone and calling randomly and just playing phone tag with people.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only, the only time that I genuinely need my-

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Very little email, very little calendar.

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only time I need my computer, video meetings and if I'm doing anything-

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Many of which could be phone calls just happening randomly, usually.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  But, and then doing design, anything design related I want to monitor, but other than that, I can run everything off my phone.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Cryptox Zero, I think that's how you say that, Crypto ZX or Zero X?

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, one more thing. I, a V C I was talking to last night was like, I've been, I was golfing a ton while I was raising my fund. And now I'm doing it like once every couple of weeks, but before he was golfing four days a week while raising the fund. Cause he's like, it's the best way to get to know people, have four hours to talk about what you're doing, how the other person ticks, things like that. So that's another example of the, you know, the capital allocator. Phone only.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, phone and in person, honestly, like.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Some of the best ways to get to know someone, if it's, if you're seriously gonna do a deal is go and spend a full day. I've done that with a few people, not just golfing, like, I, I, I, I, I went and met with somebody ve- ve- very powerful and spent, got to his house in the morning, we go for a big, long hike, we have lunch, we sit down and like, you know, talk about some books on his shelf, we have dinner together, drinks, and it's just like, we spent like this, the full day together and like, even though it was like a million times more impactful than like a weekly call for like three months.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  It was, it was so much better just to actually get to know, and to this day, I'm like, that's a solid person that I would do business with.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Let's go to Cryptox Zero. Bro, it's crazy how one follower here is worth a hundred followers on Instagram.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  This is a good way to get a lot of engagement because everybody on X tends to have more followers here than.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. But it's true, it's true. Like, like, like, it, it, like, you're not gonna accrue the same caliber of founders on Instagram than X, like.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  The, the, like.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  There's no, there's almost no more negative signal to me than a founder that more frequently posts about their company on Instagram.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Than X or even LinkedIn.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Unless it's a consumer product company.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  And even then.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  They need to be like the celebrity face of it, essentially. And that's the only case it works. LinkedIn makes sense if you're selling, you know, B2B software and you need to be like an influencer there to like pull in companies. That makes total sense, but you should still have a presence on X.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  People have been begging us to, to move some of our posting over to LinkedIn.

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll make it happen.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  It'll be a, it'll be a seven-figure deal with, with LinkedIn if, if it's gonna happen at all.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Let's go to Daniel. He says, they should have Uber Eats Black. What if I want my burrito delivered in a Cadillac Escalade? And I, when, when I heard Uber Eats Black, I thought it was just gonna be like caviar champagne, like the top-tier foods that like you guarantee are good, but it's more just the vehicle.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Energetic, energetically, the idea of having, knowing that your burrito.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Is being placed, like, I want it to be, I, I'd almost like the Brinks version.

• 1:06:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Where like, you know, it has like armed guards that like carry the burrito from the restaurant.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, that's what Turner says. Turner says, I want a SWAT team to deliver my McDonald's in a Blackhawk helicopter.

• 1:06:11Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There's a bunch of different, you know, modalities that people would happily pay for.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, that's like Uber's the dominant player. They now have the ability to like layer on these sort of value add sort of niche products that make their power users happy, right?

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  I honestly would pay for, uh, for an Uber Eats Black that guaranteed that the food was going to be like properly stored because I swear sometimes they just sometimes they just throw it in the trunk and then they're drifting around and you get somewhere and everything's just totally destroyed. And it's just like such a mess. Uh, yeah.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think also a, if you could get a Blackhawk from JFK to Manhattan, that would be cool.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  That would be big.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  And have like armed.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Like Blade, but even more up tier.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Blackhawk version of Blade.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  I love it. Hopefully coming soon. Uh, Brian Halligan says, get ready for the IPO market to roar in 2025. I think it's legit.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it's happening.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I do think that there's a little bit of a countervailing force where a lot of the, a lot of the really big companies are still seeing what's possible in the private markets and just don't want the overhead of IPOing.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  But.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  But there's this huge pressure, even, even Databricks announced this last week that they're raising $2 billion just to provide liquidity for early employees. That's a company that like, I don't see why they don't go public at this point, but again, again, like the overhead is, is real.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:39Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that, uh, we, we've talked about SPACs coming back in a big way. I think.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Especially for, for companies and categories where, uh, VCs aren't necessarily paying attention right now or aren't set up for that. Like there are enough funds now.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  It is not a bad financial innovation.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  It was just used improperly.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree. I agree. There, there are a lot of companies where like, if you're an AI company right now, you don't necessarily need to go public because there are multiple multi-billion dollar funds that are ready to write a $4 billion round for you in the private markets. But if you're in something a little bit more niche where maybe public market investors might be interested in it. But, but private markets aren't really

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and retail. There's a ton of products that retail's

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, generally excited about.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  Yep. But you gotta be a going concern. That's the, that's the main thing.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  I just hope it doesn't end up being, yeah.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  You shouldn't be raising money anymore. You need to be profitable.

• 1:08:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just hope it doesn't end up being, again, what happened last time, which is the companies that didn't have any

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:38Jordi Hays?

  additional, you know, private capital sources. But

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Guys, girls out there, if you don't have four to five friends that are spinning up, uh, new, um, special purpose acquisition vehicles, like, it's time to elevate your circle.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  I mean, I was looking at the list. There's a website where you can go and look at all the SPACs.

• 1:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Stack tracker.

• 1:08:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, 350 that are actively searching right now in all sorts of different fields.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Good for competition, right?

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, I, I honestly think like, yeah, if you're raising a $50 million round, like, why not talk to at least a few of the SPACs and just see what their pitch is? See how it would work out, um, and see if you can, see if you can pull it off. Uh, let's go to Jack Rains. He writes, "Folks love their fast casual Mediterranean cuisine and Kava is up 440% in the past year." Wow.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  I wish that we actually could see their market cap because they have to be trading at like two, three hundred.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  Way down.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  They have to be trading at like 300 times earnings.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  I need to actually look it up right now.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  People love fast casual. I mean, the, the

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  It was always

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Chipotle story was so solid that it makes sense that people would kind of ape into the next thing.

• 1:09:40Jordi Hays?

  I always

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  They've actually never eaten a Kava, have you? Is it good?

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their, their PE ratio is 300.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's go.

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, yeah, great, great for Kava. They're gonna be able to get a low cost of capital and

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  expand, sell more, more, uh, Mediterranean grain bowls. But it's funny, I remember, like, seeing pitches for people being like, "We're the Mediterranean Kava. Why doesn't this exist?" Meanwhile, Kava was just building a behemoth and they did, they did something pretty interesting, which I forget the name of the Kava actually acquired a restaurant group or a restaurant brand, I'm blanking on the name, that had like 200 locations. And they were able to like really quickly rebrand all the locations and so they were able to like double their footprint.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, super, super fast, it would have taken them. But yeah, one thing, you know, I think we, there's a lot of optimism right now, but one or two years ago, there was a lot of fear in the market. And I always tell entrepreneurs, go look at Starbucks. Like if you think the world's bad and it's going to be like a worse place in five years, go look at Starbucks and Chipotle and all these big fast casual and just like retail concepts. They're like, we want to add 300 stores a year, like every single year. And it's like, they, these are like really smart teams that are smart capital allocators. And yes, the world's an sort of unforgiving, unpredictable place, but just look at how many locations these businesses want to add.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  And I guarantee you, your business is going to be able to thrive in a world where they can add 200 new Starbucks every single year, right?

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  That's great, that's great. Let's go to Jacob Andrew, he says, Jacob Andreu, he says, the hardest part of building AGI is naming the models.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like, I feel like this is an industry where we went kind of like weird quickly, right? So it's like we have llama and so now you have like defense llama. How do you, how do you, how do you get like, get more attention than defense llama?

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Strawberry, I thought that was a cool name.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because like OpenAI, great name, even though like the openness is kind of pivoted, but I mean, it's just like, it's just like, it's just a nice name and it's, it's very like welcoming and it speaks to like what they do. Chat.com phenomenal, like one word domain, great. But then, but then like GPT 401 preview mini is like so bad. And I mean, huge lift when you don't have to select anymore.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  I do think that part of that is somewhat intentional of being, what matters right now is being loved by developers because developers are the bottleneck to actually get your product to tens of millions of users.

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  Not the bottleneck, they have their own consumer products, but I think it's kind of like almost an inside joke of let's release a product with the worst name ever that developers are going to meme and like talk about and being like, wait, are you using this version or this version?

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I bet most of the chat GPT consumers that just go to chat.com like are blissfully unaware of the fact that there's a difference between four, four oh, oh one preview, oh one mini, they just type their question in and they get an answer.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  But very quickly, they're going to be able to put a router in front of that and dynamically decide. Oh, this is a, this is a question that needs to go to oh one. This is a question that needs to go to four, four oh or whatever. And and all of that will become abstracted.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  The real question is where we at with the iPhone. Nobody knows which iPhone they have anymore. If you ask them, what iPhone do you have? They go, I don't know. It's like, I got it like a year ago.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Nineteen, I think.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. But Zach says, money doesn't excite me. My ideas excite me. It's a quote from Walt Disney. I think, I think money should excite you, Walt Disney. He was lying when he said this.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, that was pure marketing.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think that there is a very common addiction, which is the addiction of wanting to see your ideas in the in the real world manifested. And I think that there's a equal amount of, from those people, there's an equal amount of excitement around the market potential of that idea, right? Because if, if one of the best ways to make it big in America is to build, credit to Y C, a product that people just really love and sell a lot of them, right? And so this goes back to, you know, people talk about, don't think about how to get rich. Think about how to help a million people and you can do that with a product. You can do that with an idea.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I've seen a lot of people get, get very wealthy off of ideas that they don't really, aren't that excited about, just for, you know.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  It's interesting. Walt Disney is famous for that like circular graph. Have you seen that? It's like a napkin drawing of like how all the different Disney enterprises interface with each other, whether it's consumer products, films, parks, all these different things. And it's like, that is an idea, but it's a very financial idea.

• 1:14:37Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  But you could see that being like a beautiful interaction and it would allow you to do more ideas and that's, that's the nature of the virtuous cycle of capitalism.

• 1:14:45Jordi Hays?

  To me. A good idea is the greatest drug on earth.

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Like, can you, can you remember like multiple times where you just like had a phenomenal idea and you know it's a hit? Like when we first, when we talked about Excel.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  We knew from the very first conversation, which was not even a planned conversation. We just started riffing on it. We were like, yeah, this is like so obvious. Like this is gonna be a hit and you launch it and it's a hit.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, it was great.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  And that feeling is the best feeling in the world. No amount of ayahuasca can get you that.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Impossible. Impossible. Uh, let's go to High Yield Harry. Uh, he posts a screenshot of a text interaction that says, do you want to join my religion? And then the question's, what's your religion? And it's just a picture of a dude at Bloom, in a, on a Bloomberg terminal, uh, with a bunch of TVs in the background. And then the, the, the, the other person says, I'm interested. I love this. I sent this to a dude who, uh, works at a hedge fund and this is his entire life. And he was like, yes, this speaks to me.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, if you think about, I think, uh, the venture community spent all of 20, late 2022 and early 2023 praying for the next bubble, right? Like I remember calling friends. They wouldn't pick up and they said like, hey, I'm at church right now. I'm praying for the next bubble, right? So it is a, it is absolutely a religion. Returns, um, are just kind of a.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  I mean, there is, there is something to the fact like when you, when you pray at the altar of Bloomberg and CNBC, you ideally discover alpha that can allow you to uncover the next bubble. And I, I genuinely do find that, um, like, like a lot of the best, really, really amazing VCs are on Bloomberg regularly. Actually understanding what's happening in the public markets and they're tracking that almost as much as what's happening in the venture portfolio.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  It's all down, downstream.

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. And, and seeing those interactions is really, really important. Like what, what are, what are the FAANG companies or the hyperscalers doing? Does have an impact on your venture strategy.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  No, every. Every GP at big venture funds right now is looking at their portfolio now that the markets are ripping.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Being like, let's, let's.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's actually capture some of this returns.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Time to print.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Time to print. So now the real edge is going buying Montana and Aspen real estate.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Now.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  Now.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Things are gonna get.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  And installing those amazing like air pressure systems.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  You can effectively.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Sea level.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Live at sea level. Yeah, that's great. Ryan Peterson apparently was on a flight and was trying to get Starlink working on his Delta flight. He says, my first attempt to get Starlink working on this Delta flight, a failure thus far.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay, this is amazing marketing because he's clearly sitting in economy.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:28Jordi Hays?

  And while he's trying to show his company, like this is how we're gonna run lean. We're all running lean.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  And if you have a guy running the biggest freight brokerage in the world, or one of the biggest startups, he's flying economy. I think everybody should be flying economy.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  But it is.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Cause you're wearing a suit.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  But yeah, if you're, if you're in a suit, you can sit in first class, but.

• 1:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Business class.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Business class.

• 1:17:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, I mean, the Starlink rollout should happen soon-ish. They're doing deals, but it's taking forever.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it something that like boingo wifi or whatever the plane wifi service.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Blocking? Are they blocking it?

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  No, they have these like multi-year contracts with the airlines that the airlines would have to buy. Like it works.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Pay out.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  They'd have to pay it out massively.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's bad.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And so I think we're all, we're just kind of like.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  You're in like the press release cycle for all this where like United will be like, we're proudly partnering with Starlink in 2029.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  When we can retrofit all our planes.

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Has Starlink.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's amazing.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  Maybe I should fly J S X more. It's not, it's not that much more expensive than just normal.

• 1:18:31Jordi Hays?

  It's really not.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  And just for the Starlink, probably worth it. Let's go to Ryan's brother.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  David Peterson types faster, writes, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. I actually, I actually had them confused.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was thinking, I was thinking that was Ryan.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  No, no. Yeah, that was Ryan. This is David.

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, got it.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  And so David says, I'm told a vigilante is roaming San Francisco, offering homeless people $1,000 cash and a plane ticket to Dallas. Someone I know recently sat beside one of these homeless guys on a flight and he confirmed the story. Has anyone heard about this? Is this why SF has gotten so much cleaner? Also, why would any homeless person leave SF and give up the $600 a month cash benefit? That no SF politician, public figure dares to say anything about. Interesting. I haven't heard anything about this. This is the first I'm reading of this.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  I think we need, here's the solution. We need Taylor Lorenz to go undercover as a homeless person in San Francisco.

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  See if somebody tries to buy her out.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  And let's see if somebody tries to buy her a first-class flight to Dallas.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  That's the kind of hard-hitting journalism we need from our tech journalists.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  There's, I mean, there's stories about this, right? Didn't New York do this? Isn't like Giuliani famous? There was like a South Park episode about how they like paid, but it wasn't, it wasn't quite just like, go to Dallas. It was like, we will pay for your flight to your family.

• 1:19:46Jordi Hays?

  This has been a thing forever of like, hey, let's give homeless people like a Greyhound ticket and just send them out in the ether.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  I think that one of the solutions, talked about this, is just creating like a permanent Burning Man style encampment in the desert.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  That's the George Hots plan, the Wirehead City. You get a phone, you can chill out, you can do whatever you want, but then there's like a two-mile walkout, so you have to be kind of sober to leave.

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Committed, yeah.

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  Essentially, but you can leave at any time. You can get like UBI essentially.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Somewhat dystopian, but I appreciate George for picking outside the box.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Is it that much more dystopian than a homeless shelter?

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, yeah. That's a good point. Nicole Wiskoff says, just use Granola AI for the first time to take notes for me. Totally insane product. Highly recommend. Not an investor sadly. Have you used Granola AI?

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  I haven't, but from what I understand, it's basically like an AI agent for secretaries, where it's, you know, really good memory, good at taking notes, kind of knows what's going on in your life, kind of proactively sort of expecting your needs, things like that. So I'm interested to see how this space plays out. There's been a, I think that there's more venture-backed meeting note-taking apps than I've had meetings this year. I've had a lot of meetings. So I'm interested to see who.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I have seen some weird like fallout from some of the AI note-taking stuff where it's kind of awkward if you get on a call and someone has their, like, I was on a call with a bunch of people once and someone sent their AI note-taker and they couldn't make the call. And so then they just read the AI notes afterwards.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  I never let, I never, if somebody's joining a call and...

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  They try and add their AI note taker, block it.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But I want you to lock it. I did, it was Granola or one of these other, one of their competitors that was a portfolio founder of mine, like had an important meeting with a big customer. He recorded it, like it was, you know, with permission and he sent me a summary afterward and it was like perfectly done. Now it's bullet points, sections, next steps. And I was able to get the full benefit of being on the meeting.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, without actually attending.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  With like 20 seconds.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's probably good. Like you don't want to be like completely zoned out during the meeting. But if it's taking notes for some reason, you can't make it, that makes sense.

• 1:22:04Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the funny thing is like, these apps can actually turn what would have been a 20 person meeting into a meeting of two people. Where even if you don't know exactly what the next steps are with a project, two people can just talk it out. They come to a conclusion. The note taking app doesn't just write exactly what was talked about. It takes like the entire meeting, breaks it down into next steps and the reasons why. And then lets anybody benefit from that. So I think, I think it's actually fantastic. I think it's going to save a lot of time. I don't know how investable those businesses are really going to be, but we'll see.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  I do, I do know that there's been one like fiasco where some, like I think a VC firm had a, an AI note taker on the call. And then after the founder dropped off the call, the firm stayed on the same call, was talking, talking, talking about all sorts of stuff. And then the AI note taker sent a transcript of that to the founder to see kind of like what they're talking about behind their back. Very awkward.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Doubt a deal got done.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Very, very awkward. So yeah.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the idea's a 10 out of 10. Founders are a six. Let's go back there, their, their competitor.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Rough.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Rough. Let's go to Trey Stevens, another one of my colleagues at Founders Fund. He says, doing some email deal flow triage during a long plane ride and just opened three consecutive decks for companies building group one to three ISR drones for defense with dual use in industrials. My brothers and sisters in Christ, why are you all starting the same company? Please stop.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  So. The reason that this is not so bad is is these founders are gonna build for about six months, see how hard it is, and then pivot to crypto.

• 1:23:46John Coogan?

  Oh, crypto.

• 1:23:47Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Pivoting to annual job applications.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  The the the cycle will continue, right?

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  It's this perpetual cycle of pivot pivot to crypto, pivot to AI, pivot to defense, pivot to the new hot thing.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  But who knows, who knows? Yeah, I think I think this this, you know, starting a drone company now when there's five or six super talented teams.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  With contracts in.

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, while Anduril is also building their own products in space.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Even Shield AI has a lot of business in Ukraine and stuff like, yeah, it's a it's a lot.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Oh, well, we should still bet on it.

• 1:24:26Jordi Hays?

  On Polly Market, though.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Mica Isagawa says, I'm I must start calling them male founders. This is a throwback from 2022. I think this is like, I think it's a female founder who's responding to this idea of like, if you're a woman founder, people call you a female founder. But if you're a male founder, no one calls you a male founder, they just call you a founder.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, people call you a male podcast expert.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I'm actually, I'm I'm happy to be called a male founder, but yeah, I mean, where are the men in tech conferences? We have the women in tech conferences, but maybe men in tech conferences are next.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  There's women angel groups, we get some of the men's angel groups.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Well, there's a there's a there's a founders fund and there's a female founders fund, but there's no male founders fund. They did, they did, but there's no there's no male founders fund, like a spin off. I think that could be really popular.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  But until until.

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  And dramatic.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  And dramatic. There's also a a blockchain founders fund and an Italian founders fund.

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  It's just hilarious.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  The most racist version of them.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  We only back Italian.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Liquidity says, VCs who pivoted from web three to AI to defense tech are now pivoting back to web three. This is exactly what we were talking about.

• 1:25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep. It is a snake eating its tail. The auroborus of memetic energy and venture. You just got to move from one thing to another.

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you basically get one, you get one pivot like that before.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of, and, and it's founders and VCs. I can name multiple funds.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  The typical cycle, I feel like of a crypto fund is we're just focused on crypto. This is our edge, is our focus. And then as the bear market like really gets into full effect, they start branching out and they're like, oh, we're going to do the SaaS company because like they could have some, use some leverage in blockchain. At a certain point, we'll just slap a token warrant on it.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Call it a day. It's a crypto deal.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  And then they're like, oh yeah, like we're going to do this like cell service company because like they could slap a token on it at some point. And then it comes roaring, it comes roaring back around and then they're back to being fully, just literally on Monday, one of my portcos got hit up by a strictly crypto fund owners, a defense tech company trying to make the case. And this, so anyways.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I saw some of that.

• 1:26:49Jordi Hays?

  I just think this is the argument. I, I think that you're, it's okay as a VC to position yourself as an expert in a certain sector, but branding your venture fund as a specific industry is, is almost like committing supuku.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Because they're just simp, almost always is not quite enough opportunities unless you're keeping your fund size small. Like I know, there's a friend of mine, Nick Milanovich, has a, has a $10 million fintech fund.

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  It's going to perform super well. He's the guy you go to if you want to raise a pre seed in fintech. It's, it's, he's going to do well. It's when you have a hundred million dollar fund and you're saying, we're the XYZ.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Fund, then you get in a bad spot.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just so much better to just be a generalist and just, just move around as you need.

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Chase returns.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just money.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Ride the hype cycles.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  The IRRs. Well, thanks, liquidity. Good post. Oh, this is a great one. So we got tagged by Eric Jorgensen, good friend of the pod. He says, I need the tech bros pod take. And it's a Vittorio tweet that says, the fastest way to make fuck you money is to learn to say fuck you without any money. I think that's right.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I felt, I felt like I had fuck you money when I was making like four grand a month for my first company.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Because that was enough to pay for my rent. I had a two, a car with 200,000 miles and I could go to Trader Joe's without fearing that my card was going to decline.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  And that was like the ultimate luxury for me. I could do, I could live, do whatever I wanted at that point.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's that, there's that meme of like, there's levels to this shit, you know?

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  You get the sports car and then you find out somebody has the hypercar. You get the, you get the NetJets subscription, you find out somebody has a Gulfstream. But if you don't let any of that, if you just completely ignore the, the hedonic treadmill, there's nothing stopping you from acting like you have fuck you money.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  The fuck you mentality is simply not depending on anyone else for your survival.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Everybody depends on somebody for survival, but uh.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Well, that's the difference between being wealthy and rich.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Like, um, being wealthy is being independent and not having a boss essentially. And being able to say no. It's great.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Let's go to Mark Andreessen. Um, he's been on the pod before. Uh, the primary mission of technology and economy policy should be to put everything on the TV price curve. And it's a picture of the price changes from January 20, 2000 to December of 2023. So 24 years, 23 years of, of, uh, progress and hospital services are through the roof. College tuition's through the roof, uh, medical services are through the roof. But of course, cell phones, toys, computer software and TVs are all down 90%. And now, you know, I, I, I, I paid, uh, one Bitcoin for a TV that wasn't even, uh, it wasn't even 10, it was 1080p. It wasn't even 4K and I wound up just giving it away a couple of years later.

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  But then I bought a new one.

• 1:29:40Jordi Hays?

  It's a $90,000 TV.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. And it was, uh, uh, and, and, and now you can go and buy like a fantastic like 85 inch 4K, like everything TV for like a thousand bucks. It's great.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  You know how the, the classic Black Friday, the Black Friday is like much less of a thing now because everything's online.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, but the classic. Sort of scenario in a Best Buy on Black Friday, seeing people fighting, like getting into real altercations was always over the TVs and the TVs are like the rotisserie chicken of a Black Friday sale, right? They're like, this is our loss leader, gonna get him in the door, get him a new TV and then we'll sell him a bunch of other stuff to get some more margin on. But I always thought that was funny because a TV is already the cheapest thing that you can get, like almost year round. They've been so cheap.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  And they just get cheaper and cheaper every year.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  They just get cheaper and it's no longer that like statement.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  It used to be a status symbol.

• 1:30:32Jordi Hays?

  Because like, everybody has them, right?

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go to Dr. Ben Braddock. He says, "There are people laying in a hospital bed begging God for the opportunities that you have right now." What an inspiring post.

• 1:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Simple post, inspiring, not even just the opportunities, but the feeling you have right now.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, just if you're young.

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Remember the last time you were sick?

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  It's miserable to just have like a.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  Powerlessness.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  And there's no better feeling than having fantastic opportunities and I think those opportunities are available to everybody in this country. You simply need to listen to Founder's Podcast by David Senra and start to understand that opportunities are everywhere.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let's go to the Civilization Enjoyer, Lucas. They say, "Dance like nobody's watching, post on Twitter or acts like it will be printed out and read by men in suits."

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  If it's a banger, it'll be read by men in suits.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  So yeah, we gotta, we gotta deep dive this, this guy's account, find some of the banger gems. I'm sure there's some good stuff on there.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  No, he's an emerging, he's an emerging poster.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Oh yeah?

• 1:31:36Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Next generation?

• 1:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Next gen.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  So we're investing pre-seed in this guy?

• 1:31:40Jordi Hays?

  Like covering, yeah, covering this guy's tweets is like, you know, covering if we were around for Daniel's rise.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  To be comparable to that.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  When Daniel at sub a thousand followers is like some real alpha there, so first of many, if he keeps on this trajectory and shout out to the Civilization Enjoyer, Lucas.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  I enjoy civilization as well, so shouts out.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Great, great invention.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Signal, who's been on the show before, says, "My portfolio relies on Trump and Elon never having a falling out. How can I hedge against this?" I mean, a lot of people are predicting this. I certainly hope it doesn't happen, but I mean, it'd be interesting to figure out if there's a way to create a market for this on Polymarket.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  I wonder how you would actually express this.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  See, that's a really, yeah.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Because like, the falling out could be, just happen behind the scenes. It could be, "Oh, he's like, you know, less involved in the Doge in year three or something."

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  So this is a unique thing where it will, in my view, I think it will be beneficial for Trump and Elon to be cordial.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  And have a working relationship indefinitely.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Forever, yeah.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  In the same way that

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  You're not gonna burn the bridge.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Trump having a direct line to Putin is not necessarily bad. Like, it was always positioned as, "Oh, Trump's friends with Putin." It's like,

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:32:57Jordi Hays?

  Keep your enemies close, right?

• 1:32:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  So I think that, I think both Trump and Elon have a lot riding on each other, right? Elon has one of the most influential media businesses in the history of the world.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Trump runs, is about to run the country, and Elon's businesses are pretty dependent on government contracts.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  So, um, I hope they, I hope they continue to bro down forever.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm not sure how you'd hedge against it.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  And they're also technology brothers, right?

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Trump created the hottest, best performing social media app of the last five years.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Elon bought the best performing.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  Elon bought the best social media app.

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  Most influential, best social media company.

• 1:33:39Jordi Hays?

  And so they, they have that mutual respect from both being social app founders.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Let's go to Jeremy Giffon. He says, "Everything good you want in life is on the other side of a single phone call that you're absolutely terrified to make. You know exactly who it is and you know exactly what you need to say, but instead you let it haunt you for years."

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  You know, I saw this tweet, first thing that popped into my head was that call that I needed to make with, to my Porsche dealer. And a lot of guys play this game with Porsche where they say, hey, if you want to buy a GT3 or a GT3RS or a Touring or an ST, you know, you gotta buy the EV Macan, you gotta buy a Taycan, you gotta buy two Taycans, you gotta buy another, another Cayenne that you don't want.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  And those are obviously cars that the buyer doesn't actually want, so they end up buying them, owning them, selling them back to the dealership at a loss.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  Appreciating.

• 1:34:29Jordi Hays?

  And you end up racking up like six figures of losses to buy the car that you actually want.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  So a lot of guys are afraid to just spend a hundred K over sticker to go buy the car.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  To just get it immediately.

• 1:34:38Jordi Hays?

  But I'm just gonna put it out there, like, a lot of people are afraid to make that call, and I don't, I don't think that you should be. You're gonna spend that money one way or another.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're buying on the secondary market, on Bring a Trailer or whatever, just do it.

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  So everybody's gonna apply a different meaning to that, but that was the idea that popped in my head first.

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  And as they say, you know, you can sleep in a GT3RS, but you can't race a house.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Can't race a house.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  So, better to be car rich than house rich. Uh, let's go to Tyler Cosgrove. He says, "You guys can do your tour at U Michigan Stadium. It comfortably seats 110K, so as, so long as we get a couple thousand more folding chairs, it should work fine."

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  So this is our new campus rap?

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  This is our new campus rap. We love Tyler.

• 1:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I had a good call with him. I really like this guy. Young, hungry.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Studying physics.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, really, really thoughtful.

• 1:35:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm kinda worried to

• 1:35:24John Coogan?

  I'm bullish.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  to gas him up too much.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  I know, I know, he's gonna get stolen, he's gonna get poached.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Other, other, uh, people are gonna try to poach him, but uh, that's a free market.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you for representing Technology Brothers.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and thanks for, thanks for flagging this. Uh, we'll do that tour soon. Let's go to Drew.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  The world, we're gonna do the Technology Brothers World Tour, and it's only gonna be in the United States.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. All the most important destinations in the world.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Las Vegas, Miami, New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Michigan.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Michigan, exactly.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Drava says, "Nothing is more expensive than cheap goods. The price of cheap goods from China are factories never built in the United States, industrial technologies never discovered, younger generations that look down on factories, deep process knowledge that dies out, and dependence on an adversary." Interesting. Yeah, it's true.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  We need to reassure.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Drava is CEO of a company called Deterrence, which I was part of getting off the ground. Deterrence is doing high-volume energetics manufacturing, so manufacturing like the super boring components that go into different types of munitions.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  He's probably struggling with the supply chain right now.

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, supply chain is the biggest thing. Basically, a lot of the US military's arsenal is dependent on overseas sources. And that puts us in a position of potentially a catastrophic supply chain crunch, depending on how the world shapes out over the next 10 to 20 years. So, the real... Yeah, and then looking at the externalities of offshoring our manufacturing throughout the last century, the job loss, the cratering of certain towns and communities in America, which is all the stuff that J.D. Vance has talked about over and over. There's a real cost to getting stuff cheap.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to the next one, but first, we have a promoted post from Mont Blanc. We want to put them on the show, and we're excited to bring them to our audience. Mont Blanc writes, "A nature-inspired color palette refreshes Mont Blanc's timeless leather goods in the Mason's Spring/Summer 2024 leather collections, filled with pieces that combine aesthetics and functionality." You might know Mont Blanc for their fantastic pens, but we encourage you to go to montblanc.com and check out some of their fine leather goods. So, we're excited to welcome them to the Technology Brothers podcast and look forward to partnering with them more in the future.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  Thank you Mont Blanc.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Let's stay on the topic of luxury goods. The Luxury Watch Guy says Sotheby's just sent four world records at its Geneva watch sales. The highlights: in total, the two auctions combined for an impressive $22.9 billion in sales. Patek Philippe reference number 1563 sold for 3.8 million and reference 2499 for 2.6 million.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  I love how that's probably more revenue in a week than the entire last 10 YC batches will generate in this calendar year 2024.

• 1:38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Young collectors under 50 drove 60% of sales. Future is bright.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just love to see that young, you know, younger people are getting in the mix, supporting fantastic institutions like Sotheby's. And it's great to see the watch market coming back. It's been a rough couple of years. It's no probably accident that it correlated with an increase in the price of Bitcoin. Most of the watches that our audience wants cost about one Bitcoin. So anyways, easy, easy trade there.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Let's go to Emily Troy at Coinbase. She says slowly and then all at once. And it's a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal saying Gary Gensler's ambitious SEC agenda could be near its end.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Emily's, from my understanding, been a fantastic leader at Coinbase through tons of ups and downs and regulatory uncertainty and scrutiny and all this stuff. I just don't think it can be stressed enough that like every company, whether public or private, goes through periods of euphoria and periods of darkness. But nothing is more intense than within crypto world. And like as much as crypto, you know, founders and web three people that are pivoting into web three as it gets hot, as much as those people get made fun of, it can't be stressed enough how, how much the people, companies like Coinbase go through

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  on a year-to-year basis and how much they just have to like put the blinders on. And these people are working at a company where they're like embarrassed to say what they do at Thanksgiving, right? And now they're going to go into Thanksgiving. It's going to be a jolly, jolly holiday season. So shout out to Emily and Coinbase for pushing through

• 1:40:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's stay on-

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  And the stock's up like, literally, they added like 30 billion of market cap in-

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I love Brian. Great team. Uh, let's go to Martin Scurelli. He says, "The Future of Finance", and it's a USD, USDC transfer of 100 USDC.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  It's happening on Ethereum.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  And it's happening on Ethereum. And I actually don't really understand what's going on here.

• 1:40:41Jordi Hays?

  So he's sending $100, and it's costing him $10.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:40:44Jordi Hays?

  It has a 10% payment processing fee.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. Yeah, okay, I get it.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, uh, one of the reasons why Solana's just absolutely cleaned up-

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and like, a lot of the developer activities moved over to Solana is-

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  It's just, you know, blockchains were invented to be able to process like, really high volumes of transactions globally instantly.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  And the fact that if you want to send 100 bucks, it's like a 10% payment processing fee.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  And it's not even going to the Colson Brothers. It's going to, uh, Vitalik. What's his name?

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Not directly, obviously.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  The Ethereum shareholders. Uh, let's do another promoted post, uh, this time from Steinway and Sons, who you've heard from before on the podcast. Uh, Steinway writes, "During World War II, Steinway Victory verticals were shipped to every theater of war." And it's this amazing picture of these upright pianos that the Steinway Company was, was building, just lining this factory, uh, during World War II. And it really speaks to the heritage of this company and why, uh, we're so proud to support them and we love them so much. Um, but it's, it's, it's great to see, I mean, this was posted on Veterans Day, uh, it's great to see a company that, you know, they're not, their CEOs aren't like shitposting on Twitter all day, but they still get it. They're still pro-America. They're still, you know-

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the classic images you see around World War II industry is these massive hangars and facilities spinning out, uh, planes and tanks and guns and cars. But it's important that we understand that when America rallied around World War II, it wasn't just aerospace and defense and automotive manufacturers. It was some of the greatest companies in the history of America, of Steinway being one of them that, that rallied around the cause.

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  So, thank you to Steinway.

• 1:42:27John Coogan?

  And if you think about, you know, you're in the, you're in the theater of war in World War II, like- They didn't have iPhones at the time, like literally having a friend who could play piano and entertain you was probably what got you through. So we love Steinway here. Please visit Steinway.com to learn more. Let's go to Sheil Monat. He says, Don Jr. is a VC. 1789 Capital invests in the Republican/parallel economy, deglobalization, anti-ESG, and cutting-edge technologists that disrupt industries weighed down by excessive bureaucracy. And so he's, Don Jr. is joining a venture capital firm. Interesting. What do you think?

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Deglobalization, anti... So it's funny that...

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  These are all framed in like the negative.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  They're all like negative. Yeah, I don't really like that.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  But like, they really could just be like, you flip this around and it's just like, American manufacturing, like...

• 1:43:16Jordi Hays?

  Energy independence.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, mission-driven companies, right?

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  You know, founders that move fast and ignore bureaucracy, like, in founder mode. It's really just a reframing of the same pitch we've heard from plenty of VCs.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's always been the, one of the critiques of Trump broadly is the negative view on things, right?

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  American carnage as opposed to optimism.

• 1:43:37Jordi Hays?

  He's obviously, yeah.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of everything. I mean, even Make America Great Again, it's like, are we not great right now? What's going on?

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  But that, but like, you know...

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, these trends, I think they're generally, you know, it sounds like they're going to be a pretty generalist fund, but not, not bad themes overall at a high level.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Let's go to Nikita Beer. He calls the top on 11/11/2024 at 6:54 PM. And I think he was wrong. I think he was calling like the Bitcoin top more or less at like 84 or something like that. I'm not exactly sure what inspired this.

• 1:44:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, so here's the funny thing. Usually the top correlates with Coinbase going number one in the App Store.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  And Coinbase as of this morning was number one in the App Store.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So that's what he's saying.

• 1:44:21Jordi Hays?

  No, I, no, I think that, that this, this post predated that number one, but...

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  By a couple of days, but, but yeah, I just think it's funny if, I think what Nikita should do is tweet top once a day.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  For.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Delete all the ones that are wrong.

• 1:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and just go back and delete them.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  And be like, I called it.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  And then he can say he called the top and then he can sell more.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  But we would have the evidence here that he did that because we would be printing them out.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  We're the only, we're the only people in the world that are printing out tweets.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  You're in the truth zone, Nikita. Good luck.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  Can't pull that on us.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, I think right after this, he tweeted, we're back. So.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I know. He's, he's, he's optimistic. Uh, we got one more promoted post today. Uh, this time from Gulfstream Aerospace. Uh, Gulfstream is proud to announce that Starlink has arrived. Gulfstream has officially received FAA supplemental type certification to install the high-speed internet service on the G650 ER. STCs are also going in progress for the G800, G700, G600, G500, G400, GIV, GIVX, GV, and GVSP. And you can learn more at glf.aero/starlink. So shout out to Gulfstream. Big, big, uh, big fan of the pod.

• 1:45:32Jordi Hays?

  Two of our favorite companies.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. We love SpaceX and we love Gulfstream here. So, uh, happy to support them. I mean, this tweet did very well. They got 1.7K likes, 100K views. Hopefully we'll get them some more attention because we love Gulfstream here and encourage all of our employees.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Go buy Gulfstream.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  To go buy Gulfstreams.

• 1:45:49Jordi Hays?

  Takes a little bit of time, but it's worth it.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  It is. Uh, let's go to Rune. Rune writes, uh, when you're good at something, it doesn't feel special or high-agency or brave. You're like, what else would I be doing? It's a good post.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Podcasting.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  Podcasting, yeah. No, no, it makes, it makes sense. It's, it's the Ica guy thing. It's like figuring out what, what, what your life's work is, what you're meant to be doing. This is important. I like this.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a big thing, a big thing that ends up happening is people have like all these incredible insights and learnings that they don't end up sharing with the world because they just seem so innately obvious to them that they're like, why would I ever talk about that idea or thought?

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just so, so obvious. And then turns out like thousands, tens of thousands of other people would like, be like, mind blown.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  I can't believe you're doing that, yeah.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  It was like Mark talking about all this stuff.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  At the Rockbridge event, right? Where the politicians' minds were like blown.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. To him, it's, it's, it's second nature.

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. So find the thing that's second nature to you.

• 1:46:44Jordi Hays?

  And talk about it.

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  Avoid memetics and, and just do whatever.

• 1:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Become the best in the world at it.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Like Rune is, Rune's the best in the world at posting and language models.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Like undoubtedly, right?

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of alpha sitting in that.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we gotta wrap up because I think Jordy has to hop on with Manila, but we will see you later. Subscribe. Thank you. Goodbye.