Travis Kalanick Joins, Spotify CEO, Nikesh from Palo Alto Networks, xAI Rebuild, Apple Faces Slop Allegations

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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?

  You're watching TVP and today is Friday, March 13th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Down, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Boy, is it good to be back.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  It's great to be back, but it's Friday the 13th. So you know what you gotta do. Salt over the left shoulder.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yes.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  You know about this?

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  I didn't.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Throwing salt over your left shoulder is good luck. It counteracts bad luck. Friday the 13th.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Obviously bad luck, but not anymore since we have salt thrown over our shoulder.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Good hack.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  I was very interested in Patrick Hollison's post. We talked about this a little bit. He says, there's a lot of unevenness in how much attention, internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency. We know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations, but not the others, creating self reinforcing lock in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There's even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors. We get it. You want a bunch of palace intrigue stories about Stripe. We get it, Patrick. Just think. No, Stripe has not ever

• 1:18John Coogan?

  really been in the, you know, the tumultuous drama. Oh, horse race, you know, there's been investors who have talked about various valuations, but overall the company's been sort of smooth sailing for almost two decades. But I wanted to, I wanted to think about this more in the context of other countries startup ecosystems and also.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  The closest they ever got to drama.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Was around the Bolt Fast Dynamic.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Because they backed fast.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're right. There was a little bit.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly because they felt like some.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Competitive pressure there. They wanted the. Fast checkout provider to be running on Stripe. Bolt was famously not. They had built their own payment rails.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, the Collison brothers are just so class. They're such class acts that they don't really wait around in the mud. They don't roll around and the slob farm. And it's like, it's a B to B company. So there's less like just general viral intrigue around it.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  And even in that, even in that whole saga.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  You never saw a single comment.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  No, no, no. And they weren't taking shots at anyone. They were very classy. What do you think?

• 2:25Speaker 02

  I mean, there was some controversy when the, you know, cheeky pint Elon interview came out and John Collison, you know, how many Guinnesses were they drinking?

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, that was a bit of palace intrigue. How many, how many cheeky pints are they drinking in the palace? We're getting somewhere.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  I mean, John did come out on top of that, right?

• 2:40John Coogan?

  He did, he did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He explained, he explained. So, but so years ago, I was talking to an American VC about New Zealand and I asked him about the startup community. The country was beautiful, he said, highly developed, democratic. It consistently ranks among the world's most stable, wealthy and well governed societies. And he would spend a lot of time there. I was like, this, there's got to be some company that can break out and become a power law company. If you're going to be there spending a lot of time, you'll probably meet cool people, interesting people. Maybe there will be a great New Zealand company that comes out of this. And he was like, I'm not so sure because his assessment distilled down to something along the lines of, they are suffering from a bad case of tall poppy syndrome.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  So what is tall poppy syndrome? Put simply, individuals who achieve visible success are criticized, attacked or socially cut down because they stand above or above the others in the crowd. The metaphor should be obvious. When you cut the tallest flowers in a field, the surface appears even.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up Tyler for a second.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Why? What is?

• 3:47John Coogan?

  There we go. He's a tall poppy. He's getting cut. So anthropologists often call this leveling behavior, and it goes back to hunter-gatherer societies. Good hunters might be mocked or discouraged from bragging. Sharing would be encouraged to prevent resource concentration. And there's nothing bad about a preference for humility. America has long been suspicious, and Americans have long been suspicious, of the Lamborghini-driving, self-promotional Instagram-course hustlers, and for good reason. Those folks are usually selling overpriced junk food, basically. But the strong form of tall poppy syndrome does lead to lower startup formation. If you think that you will immediately be cut down in your society, you don't actually go

• 4:30John Coogan?

  out and hunt. You actually don't go out and bring back the big deer, or whatever you're hunting. The bacon. The bacon. Yeah, you don't bring home the bacon in the first place. You don't even trot, because you're so worried about this tall poppy syndrome in your society. So you wind up with lower startup formation, fewer truly scaled companies, less aggressive growth plans, and ultimately a talent exodus or brain drain, and that's what's happened in a lot of developed, wealthy, stable countries that haven't created amazing new products, really bold entrepreneurship efforts. A lot of it's because of the tall poppy syndrome. So America's never had this problem. And I don't actually think we're that close to developing a crippling case of tall poppy syndrome anytime soon, but it's worth understanding

• 5:14John Coogan?

  how these leveling behaviors shape the narrative in tech. So there's this unevenness that Patrick Collison identifies around internal drama, attention. It does not seem correlated with market cap at stake, or even how well-known certain founders are at the time that something's happening that could be dramatic. So I was thinking back to Elon Musk and Tesla. He's like perhaps the most household-name entrepreneur in history, certainly right now. Tesla has something like a trillion dollars of market cap at stake. If someone leaves Tesla to start a competitor, that should be incredibly dramatic. Do you know? Who I'm talking about?

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  I do.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Who is it?

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Because I took a pass.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Oh, you took a pass, okay.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  On your essay.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Well.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  But I don't remember his name.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  It's Peter Rollinson. He designed, he was the chief engineer of the Model S at Tesla. Their super successful, you know, high-end sedan, the thing that really ushered in the EV boom. He's the guy that engineered it. He leaves, he goes to Lucid Motors, eventually becomes the CEO and the face of the company, develops a direct competitor to the Tesla Model S, which is now discontinued. The Lucid Air is fancier, faster, it has a whole bunch of other criteria that satisfy that market segment. And it should be like this knockout, drag-out fight that's very interesting. Lucid hasn't like put a dent in Tesla, you know, largely, but it's still such, it is palace intrigue, and yet no one really cares.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  And most people in tech can't even name a second person at Tesla after Elon. Maybe JB Strabel, Redwood Materials, but he's out now?

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Carpathia.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Carpathia, yeah. That would be one, but it's like, X, like, who's, who's active? At SpaceX, everyone knows Gwen Shotwell, but like beyond that, Kiko Donchev? Who else? Like, it gets really, really hard. And why is that? Well, some, some, some industries, some companies have different cultures. So if you think about Tesla, Chevron, Department of Agriculture, they're probably not encouraging their employees to go direct. They might actually be discouraging it. They might have rules around what you can post about publicly.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  One XAI employee went very direct.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  He went very direct and it didn't last long at the company. So, like, electric vehicles, Chevron, oil and gas, the Department of Agriculture, these organizations don't necessarily have a lineage that traces back to academia, which is very open source. Publish your research, go to a conference, put up slides. What are you thinking about? What are you researching? Share it all. Talk about it. Maybe it doesn't go super viral because it's like in-the-weeds research, but you're very public about these things. Then.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  And then, and then also the blogosphere, like in the AI world, a lot of leading thinkers, leading employees had blogs and had done podcasts before. And so it was like a continuation of that, the idea that you were someone who wrote essays online and shared all of your thoughts. That just carried through to the AI era. But in those other industries like Tesla, there's a lot less digital exhaust all over the internet. The internet also rewards taking shots at the tall poppy. Tech generally wants to appear nice and they don't want to punch down. Like, when a company rises and falls, you typically don't see serious people in tech really being like, I called it victory lap. Like, it's seen as uncouth.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  The company has to be doing some really egregious stuff.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Totally, like a true violation of the social contract, not just, look, everyone tried really hard, they got beat, and the investors, you know, sort of got 50% 50 cents on the dollar back, something like that. No one's really cheering for that. It's pretty rare. But some anonymous accounts are. And, but in general, aiming for the top is the only option if you, if you do want to punch. You don't want to punch down, but you still want to punch. Where do you punch? You punch up. You punch at the top dog. And the better a company is doing, the more attention you'll get for taking a shot at it. And this is seen as like contrarian. Everyone thinks this company's dominant in this particular category. We'll take a shot at it. It's over, they're dead, and you're going to get a lot of views because it is a counterintuitive take. Everyone else has the glazier 3000

• 9:25John Coogan?

  out. You pull out the dunk and you go viral. So, and then also, you add to the fact that anyone, no matter how far away they are from Silicon Valley, what their career history is, what their background is, how much they actually understand about what's going on in tech can just synthesize news and discourse into something that's more aggressive, more...

• 9:46John Coogan?

  More punchy and go viral and you have a recipe for a lot, a whole lot more dunks around whoever is on top and that is sort of the tall poppy syndrome. So, but the good news is that fortunately, America is still producing the fastest growing companies and attracting top talent and the bevy of quantitative data defangs many tall syndrome, tall poppy syndrome type attacks. You see someone saying it's over, this company's cooked, they're terrible. And then, I mean, I just, we just saw this with cursor. Everyone's like cursor's over, it's dead. And then you see, okay, well, they just hit 22 billion ARR.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Growing 25% month over month.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  And it's like, actually, things are fine. And so the, those, those sorts of data points help push back against these like, you know, attacks on the tall poppy at the time. And there's this Benjamin Graham line that everyone likes to quote that he actually did not agree with and has sort of misattributed him. But I said, in the short run, the market is a vibe war, but in the long run, it's a weighing machine. He, he of course is, is quoted as saying, in the short term, it's a popularity contest or a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine. In the idea that in the short term, prices are determined by, you know, people just voting based on popularity. But in the long term, like you always realize the value of the company and you have to return to fundamentals. And that's

• 11:05John Coogan?

  why he was so into fundamental analysis. Anyway, lots of interesting things going on in the timeline around this.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the lineup.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Do you have any other thoughts on, on tall poppy syndrome or just the dynamic in tech right now, the vibe war?

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the classic is like, it's way easier to take down, to do a takedown of a company, to talk poorly about a company than get in anywhere close to, anywhere close to actually. Accomplish anything remotely.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Nobody likes trying to like snuff the baby in the cradle.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  But if it's David and Goliath, it's game.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my, anytime I see people that like every single post in their feed is just like a dunk. It's like, hey, like hating on other people is not going to make you successful.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  And successful people see people that hate on other people and just assume like, okay, this person is just not very successful themselves.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, can get you some momentary attention, but.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Positivity, haters gonna hate, the chat understands this intuitively that positivity shall, shall, shall win the day.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  Shall reign.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  Uh, let's pull up the linear lineup because we have an absolute banger of a show. We got Eric Lyman from Ramp coming on, Travis Kalanick coming in person, Tim from GoFundMe, Gustav from Spotify, Tony, we have a lightning round that's.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  Tony coming in with a unicorn round.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Uh, and then.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Arena from Maxium.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Palo Alto Networks is coming on, uh, linear, of course, is the system for modern software development, 70% of enterprise, enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents now and you.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  And. It's time.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  It's time.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  For a special segment.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  A special segment, so there is news about Travis Kalanick, he's coming on the show in person to discuss it, but the news broke in none other than the information, but it was paywalled, so we have a plan. We have printed out this exclusive report from the information.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  And where is it?

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Behind a physical paywall, which Tyler Cosgrove will now be busting down to reveal the scoop that was delivered from the information this morning. Take a swing at that, break down the paywall.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Boom!

• 13:16John Coogan?

  With authority.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Okay, okay.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  And what does he got?

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  There he is, he's got the entire article, which is about.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Article, we have the.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  You paragraph.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  The paywall has been busted down, thank you to the information for reporting. The news is Travis Kalanick plots new self-driving venture with Levandowski and Uber. Uh, Kalanick has also been discussing acquiring the startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, who has been developing autonomous software for mining and other industrial use cases.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  The new venture would also represent a reunion of Kalanick with the company he founded. There's been this discussion of whether or not Travis will be involved in Uber in the future. We will ask him about that at noon in about 40 minutes. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles in object storage, fast ten X cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may Claude Code, Codex or Sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. So, other news in the information from Amir, Cursor and XAI news. XAI hired two senior leaders from Cursor to catch up on coding. There's a whole debate going on, on what's going on

• 14:26John Coogan?

  at XAI. Elon Musk said XAI was not built right the first time around, so it's being rebuilt from the foundations up. He said same thing happened with Tesla. So, he is completely changing the strategy.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  You gotta wonder what kind of comp packages these new hires got.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting now Elon has the advantage of being able to use SpaceX stock to recruit people, which is, you know, pre-IPO shares in a company that is unclear where it's going to trade, but Elon's obviously doing everything he can to get, to make sure the IPO goes well, including putting some amount of pressure, it sounds like, on NASDAQ and the S and P to get faster inclusion.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  So there's a big discussion over, well, XAI is worth like $200 billion ostensibly, like what does this mean if the team is completely new? What's actually the value there? What's the core asset? There's some debate there. We were going back and forth about it this morning.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the only reason that I think he was able to pull that off is because one, he's Elon, but then two, so many of the investors. Like had it was the same group of people on both tables.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  So the bear case is obvious, like a like a fourth tier, you know, lab not at the frontier is pretty commoditized at this point. There's lots of folks who are at that level. Getting in the game of the RSI, the frontier labs, like you got to be DeepMind, you got to be OpenAI, Anthropic. And if you're not at that level, your valuation is probably an order of magnitude lower. You're looking at like, you know, the Quen, the XQen team people were talking about, MSL, like there's, even if you just broke up Meta, is MSL worth 200 billion? They have some great team, they have a lot of compute, but it's like

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  200 million?

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Or 200 billion. Did I say million?

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Oops. And all the numbers are big. The bull case, of course, is that XAI is great at building data centers. Colossus Tube was built really fast. Is that an enduring advantage? Can they be the best NeoCloud at the very least? Is that enough of an advantage if you just build more and more compute? Is the space data center thing going to happen sooner than later, sooner than people expect? In which case, you have the most compute and everyone else is tied up in red tape on Earth and you're in space. There's still a bull case, but it is tricky. Benjamin Decracker shared a story from when he worked at XAI. He says, "When I was first hired, low level, by XAI, I was extremely excited. I greatly admired Elon and what Grok could be. I have a pretty cool AI following here on X and big names see my stuff, including Elon himself at the time." During the interview and onboarding,

• 17:02John Coogan?

  they made a big deal about wanting people who take initiative and think outside the box. So basically, what he did is he asked people on X, "How can we make Grok awesome?" A bunch of people answered. They got a ton of, John Carmack retweeted it. There were lots of great ideas. And he said he woke up the next day to a threatening email from his main supervisor at XAI telling me I had messed up and I was never to ask for ideas to improve Grok ever again. That wasn't my job. They suspended my X account. So he was, he was very upset. And he says, "The manager's gone. Everyone he knew at XAI is gone." And he's sort of hoping for a new, a new era at XAI.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Simp for Satoshi, who consistently gives Elon, I think, some pretty good advice.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's willing to say, he's, he seems, seems to be willing to say the thing. That it looks like many people in the XAI team weren't able to get through. But he said, try this. Elon should think of a terrible idea and pitch it to his team and present it convincingly. Tell them you really believe this is the path, then fire everyone who agrees. Simple test, basically weeding out the sycophants. But yeah, it's interesting now, like, it feels like really hard to catch up in code, Jen, even if you have some great people from Cursor.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's just so, so, so competitive and there's, there's, I just, I don't, I don't see it.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  But they've got to try something because he's not, he's certainly not a-

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Anthropic to Cursor, back to Anthropic, and a lot of that was-

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned, you mentioned the NeoLab opportunity, but certainly we've seen no indication that he's, wants to just like rent out GPUs.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, it, it's more of like a, of like a bank shot where you build more data centers than anybody else, you have the most compute, and then because of that, you're able to scale your training runs and that unlocks some new capability. It is a stretch. Spore is, is saying, if I was a SpaceX investor, I'd be annoyed this morning by what's happening. But John Shaheidi, friend of the show, says, I'm not annoyed. He's a SpaceX investor, I imagine. And, and there are other, other departures. Walter Bloomberg is citing the FT and says Elon Musk has ordered another round of job cuts at XAI. And, and one of the XAI employees says, I left earlier this week. It was a difficult

• 19:33John Coogan?

  decision. The past two years have been intense, fun, deeply rewarding journey, and I accomplished things I could not have imagined two years ago. Thank you to the entire Omni Imagine team. There was also, there were also rumors that, that the macro hard project to sort of automate software development was behind schedule, which Elon obviously does not have a strong- Strong, you know, patience for. Anyway, quickly, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Apple.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm gonna fight you on this, but read it.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Apple said 50 years of thinking different.

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  And then they wrote, 50 years ago, in a small garage, a big idea was born. Apple was founded on the simple notion that technology should be personal. And that belief, M-dash radical at the time, M-dash changed everything. April 1st marks 50 years of Apple. From the first Apple computer to the Mac, from iPod to iPhone, iPad to Apple Watch and AirPods, as well as the services we use every day, M-dash, the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, iCloud and Apple TV, M-dash. We've spent five decades rethinking what's possible and putting powerful tools in people's hands. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us, M-dash, that the world has moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone, M-dash.

• 21:00Jordi Hays?

  An inventor, scientist, a student or storyteller, M-dash, who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start, but it has never belonged to us alone. And I won't read through the whole thing, but.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  So, Pangram Labs, what do they say?

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Hundred percent AI-generated. They used AI to detect the AI.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So they got them dead to rights, right? Oh, Apple's cooked.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  S-N-W-Y says, huge aura loss. Apple has already committing, has already been committing aura sepuku, but dang.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Okay, let me read you.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  And, to be clear, the same account.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Go ahead, rebuttal.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  Went and found other Apple Newsroom articles that show 100% human-written.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Okay, let me, let me, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back in time to Apple's mission statement from years ago, before LLMs were even a thing. This is their mission statement about Apple. Apple revolutionized personalized technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV. Apple's five software platforms, M-, iOS, iPadOS, macOS, WatchOS, and TVOS M-, provide seamless experiences across all Apple devices and empower people with breakthrough services like the App Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, and iCloud. Apple's more than 100,000 employees are dedicated to making the best products on earth and to leaving the world better than we found it.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  They've always sounded like this. Like, the LLMs trained on Apple comps. And if you go to an LLM and you say, "Write me something," in the style of Apple, it's gonna nail it, because every Apple communication is in the corpus. And so, of course, whether or not they use AI, it's gonna detect this 100% AI. It's the same thing as Paul Graham using the forbidden sentence structure 10 years ago.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  That's my take. Do you disagree?

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  I just think Apple would use AI.

• 22:58Speaker 02

  Wait, John, did you run that through Pangram?

• 23:02John Coogan?

  That one?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Like, if you run Paul Graham's old essays, they don't come up as AI. Even though, like, yeah, there's a sentence that, like, maybe is, you know, in the same style, but...

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Let me see. How do I scan for AI? I need to create an account? Let's see.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's see, John.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  I'm trying, I'm trying.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's see.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Send me the link.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Uh, okay, I got it, I got it. What's my role? Uh, other personal use? Uh, I was referred by a friend, colleague. Now I have to pay?

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Send the link to Tyler.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  I got it here. Okay, it says 100% human-written.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh!

• 23:39John Coogan?

  I got roasted.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Wow, okay. Tyler undefeated.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  I'm a pangram truster. Trust the pangram.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Trust the pangram.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Anyway, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customers' sport, go to fin.ai. And let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. China's ByteDance got access to the top Nvidia AI chips. Oh, oh.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  TikTok parent pushing global expansion, plans to tap Blackwell processors that are barred for export to China. They're just flexing on us at this point. How did this leak? ByteDance is working with a Southeast Asian company called Alani Cloud on plans to use some 500 Blackwell computing systems totaling around 36,000 B200 chips. Is that a lot of chips? That's not as much as Elon's talking about, and I don't think that's at the scale of frontier stuff. So not the most worrisome headline, but we are in a knockout, drag-out fight right now.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  How many B200s would you provision if you were at a frontier lab right now, Tyler?

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I mean, I have no idea, but in the next paragraph, it says, I mean, this is like, what, a 25x increase?

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  From what they had before. So I mean, this is still pretty meaningful.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Pretty meaningful. Okay. ByteDance plans to use the computing power for AI research and development outside of China. Are they more? It doesn't feel like they're gated on training. If you look at that crazy video model, Sea Dance, like, that thing seems like it was trained on the bat. It doesn't seem like it was hardware-constrained.

• 25:32Speaker 02

  Sure, but I mean, you know, the expensive part of video models inference is super expensive.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Like, training is actually, I mean, it costs. Insane amounts to train frontier models, right? Like, obviously.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not game over if they train a model and they can't inference it. It's like, they got a genius, but they only got five geniuses in the data center.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you can distill these things. Like, distilling it, I think, is probably much easier than training the thing in the first place.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  We should figure out about distilling video models. I wonder how, I wonder how more inference efficient it is to distill Sea Dance, like, just to be a Marvel, you know?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, and obviously, it's like a very different process from distilling. Even, like, you hear distilling as in, like, Chinese labs, like, training on outputs versus, like, actually, there's a bunch of ways you can do this.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I think you can do it.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Mike Dance has created more than a dozen AI ops out in China and parallel versions for overseas markets, such as chatbot Dola, video creator Dramina, and homework helper Gauth. These are funny names.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Anyway, moving on, what's going on?

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Japan. Let's check in with Japan.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Japan? Okay. What's going on in Japan, Jordy? Tell me.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this video. We can pull it up.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  And anyone in the chat, if you could translate this for us, that would be great.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  We really should download this, transcribe it, and then, uh, and then translate it. But we, we're big in Japan now. Look at me.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  This is from Instagram.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  I think I get it. I think I get it.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  That's a good video. They really did their.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know where that video is. I've never seen that video.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Put out a full video of us? That's cool.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Look at you driving the car. They got the video of you driving the car. We got our cards. Is that? They got everybody. They're hitting the gong.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  That was one of my best hits.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Sports cars. I heard sports cars.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  They're headstand all in on. Let's go.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  This is so cool. I, I shared this to my story. It was very.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Jordan says it's a great sign of respect in Japanese culture.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  It does seem like it.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  Well, should we, should we head over to the mansion section?

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  First, before you buy a mansion, take your company public at the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange, and also. Make sure your home wifi is secure in your mansion with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, small fish in a huge tank. Big budget fish tanks are taking over America's most expensive homes. Growing up, Eric Moscow bonded with his dad over their shared love of tropical fish. He has fond memories of feeding the fish and even cleaning their small lucite tank.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Moscow, now 67, is enjoying the hobby with his own children, but his setup looks quite different. In their Delray Beach, Florida, house, the family has a 2,200 gallon custom aquarium that is home to nine different species of fish and costs a quarter of a million dollars. Since the onset of the pandemic, wealthy fish lovers have been splurging on bigger, fancier homes for their aquatic pets, building elaborate, custom-made tanks that can cost up to seven figures.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Keith Rabois is a wealthy fish lover.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  He's a fish enjoyer, for sure, for sure. Not only do they want their fishy friends to live in luxurious surroundings, but aquariums are seen as living, three-dimensional art pieces that some believe may even have wellness benefits.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  I gotta hear about these benefits.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Quarter million, quarter million dollar fish tank? Yeah, I'll be putting that on TruMed, please. I'll be paying with my HSA.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  We have seen a tremendous increase in business since the start of COVID, said Nick Timmons of Infinity Aquarium Design in LA. His aquariums start at about $75,000 and can cost as much as $1 million. Art budgets have now become aquarium budgets. Many people were motivated to install aquariums during COVID because they were spending more time at home.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Ellers has designed and installed systems from $25,000 to a quarter million with unusual designs, such as a sphere that held jellyfish in a wet bar with a built-in aquarium. There we go.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Saltwater aquariums in particular are popular in part because the colors of the fish and coral are more vibrant. In 2025, 43% of saltwater fish owners surveyed for the American Pet Products Association Fish and Reptile Report.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  It's important data.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get this report.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Data is the new oil.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Opted for custom-made tanks.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  I had.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  A 19% jump from 2023.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Lore drop, I had a fish tank in college. $25 fish tank with like one fish in it.

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you keep, how long did you?

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you accusing me of? I've never been accused of murder on a podcast before, Jesus.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  How long did you keep it alive, John?

• 30:51John Coogan?

  I, okay, it technically wasn't my fish. It was my roommate's fish and I don't remember how long we had him around.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really? You kind of like somewhat of a goldfish memory when it comes to the life of?

• 31:00John Coogan?

  I don't recall.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  The one fish?

• 31:02John Coogan?

  I don't recall.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  That you looked after in your life?

• 31:05John Coogan?

  I plead the fifth on the fish tank.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  You plead the fish?

• 31:08John Coogan?

  I plead the fish. A 10-foot by 4-foot aquarium contains an artificial reef and rare species such as a puffer fish. Turbo puffer, baby. A golden moray eel and an epaulet shark.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  The closest we got to getting a fish tank in the Ultra Dome was to get a puffer fish.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were thinking about it, but it's a lot. Maintenance costs for this thing, $3,000 a month. That's some people's mortgage. The tank just makes me happy, says Moscow, who enjoys the fish with his two-year-old daughter Ruthie and son Jonah, who's one. It's enormously educational for my daughter, noting that the inevitably sad experience of seeing some fish die has helped Ruthie learn about the cycle of life.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Look at this. Aquariums are also viewed as attractive home design elements. Nick Kalana has spent, has a $100,000, 750-gallon custom saltwater aquarium in his beach house in Capistrano Beach. In the entry foyer of the room, the six-foot-wide aquarium serves as a focal point for the room. And I was walking down the beach and I was looking into random houses at one point and I saw a beautiful, few beautiful fish tank and I was like, ah, that's, that's good. That's not just a TV, lights up, it's interactive, I don't know. Fish tanks, I think, are underrated. I'm glad they're getting some, finally getting some attention in the Wall Street Journal.

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna optimize for a fish tank in your next house?

• 32:28John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's, it's, it's low on the tier. It's above pickleball court, but it's probably below movie theater. That's where I'd put it. What about you?

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Way below movie theater.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Way below movie theater?

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's guys-

• 32:40John Coogan?

  You don't watch movies! What are you doing in a movie theater?

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  And still, I'd rather have-

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Just watching podcasts? You're gonna watch the new Dwar Kesh Patel villain Patel over-

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Rimade episode?

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Crossover episode? You just throw that on a movie theater?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  On a big screen.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  On the big screens, the way it's meant to be enjoyed.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  Anytime they crack a joke, standing up and just-

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Feels like you're in the room with them.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  So, yeah, wha- wha- wha- wha- what about sauna? Sauna's above fish tank, right?

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  What about tennis court?

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  What- what is around the same?

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  As a fish tank?

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  The- the twentieth, uh, spot in a covered garage.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Okay, twentieth spot you'd give up. Twentieth spot. Okay.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Which seems fair, which seems fair. There's a lot of incremental garage spaces that you'd want before you'd want a fish tank.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  Jeff Franklin, who's a screenwriter, director, and producer, who's primarily known for creating Full House, has five aquariums in his 21,000 square foot Beverly Hills mansion. He says he's a scuba diver-

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Five?

• 33:45John Coogan?

  And the ocean. Five aquariums, baby. One in every room. The fifth aquarium versus the twentieth car slot. What are you doing? He's like, "Yeah, I have a one-car garage, but five aquariums." Uh, but he's a scuba diver. I'm a scuba diver. I love scuba diving. The ocean is my happy place. I feel the same way.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  I've never seen this guy scuba dive, by the way. He's like, "I'm a huge scuba diver."

• 34:09John Coogan?

  You've never been in the ocean and just come across him?

• 34:13John Coogan?

  "I find great peace and comfort underwater, surrounded by gorgeous tropical fish, so I wanted my home to be full of fish and a great deal of water." I like that. His systems include two- two aquariums flanking the fireplace in the primary bedroom." So you can do two aquariums in one room. So, uh, wait, uh, when we- when we had Andrew Huberman on the show, he had a bunch of aquariums, right? Wasn't that what he had in the- in the background? Didn't he have three aquariums? Okay, so-

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  He loves-

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Three, four, five aquariums?

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  But he keeps them in the basement.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  He keeps them in the basement?

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  What's wrong with that?

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  I think. No, maybe not. Maybe not.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  Well, um-

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wha- wha- what are the health benefits?

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Uh, we should get to the health benefits.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  Cause if you just say mental health, then I'm sorry.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Uh, let's see. Um, homeowners get

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  He said it's, it really is a form of meditation.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  He finds it very relaxing to watch his 55 fish, including a triggerfish. Okay, I could get, I could, I could, I could get into triggerfish.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  I, I don't want my fish to be triggered by anything.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  And a large French angelfish.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  Panicking. I want a panicking fish. I want a fish that never gets triggered.

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  Did somebody, yeah, somebody should name a fish a panikin.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  Aquariums need heating and cooling system to maintain a consistent water temperature level. He recommends a backup generator since the oxygen in an aquarium can be depleted in less than 24 hours without power. Aquarium specifications vary widely depending on the intended inhabitants, inhabitants. Sharks and jellyfish require very different conditions than colorful tropical fish. I think I would go shark over jellyfish. What do you think? Jellyfish are beautiful, but sharks are just so athletic and it's the apex predator. You gotta, you gotta have that in your house.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  I think moat with some sharks is the way to go.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  What about gators? Gators, gators over sharks potentially.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  I think sharks are, are probably the best option for moats.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  For moats, okay. Well, you won't have a moat in this $70 million Aspen compound because it would freeze, but um, it has just hit the market. Frederick Rick Burke is the co-founder of Dooney and Burke Accessories Brand. And he's putting his Robert A.M. Stern designed home in Aspen, Colorado on the market for $70 million. Completed around 1993, the roughly 11,000 square foot seven bedroom house is built horizontally along a rock face on Red Mountain with tawny beige stucco walls set atop a native sandstone base. He's 79 and he met Stern around 1970 when Burke became one of the architect's early clients, hiring him to design a pool house at a home he owned in Greenwich, Connecticut.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  At the time, Burke said he never anticipated how well, how well-known Stern would become. He was young and dynamic. Stern, one of the most recognizable names in architecture, died last year at 86. Burke acquired the roughly 3.5 acre Aspen property in the late 80s. The lot sits high on Red Mountain, about 8,000 feet above downtown. He asked Stern to design a family home there. But they do have a pool, heated outdoor swimming pool, which seems like a rare amenity in Aspen. Burke's neighbor in Aspen was businessman Victor Coseney. In 2009, Burke was convicted of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for engaging in a scheme with Coseney to bribe Azerbaijan's government officials. Wow. Burke spent almost a year in prison, starting in 2023.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so they made it illegal for guys to be dudes?

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Burke said he learned a lot from the experience. But wait, this was in 2009, the guy's 79, so he had to do a year in prison when he was 70? Wow. He said he learned a lot from the experience. "I went to prison as, I think, a good person and came out a better person." Coseney's former home in Aspen sold for 40 million. What were they doing bribing Azerbaijan? Like, he has an accessories company.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, leather, maybe it's something related to their supply chain.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  He's also the founder of-

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he was just doing it for the love of the game.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  -ImmunoLite for years, and he and his wife, a former ski racer, Megan Burke, have been splitting time between their homes in Aspen and Maine, where Stern designed a home for them in Seal Harbor. But after a bad bout of COVID-19 a few years ago, Rick said he now struggles with the elevation in Aspen. "It's a wonderful house. If I could pick it up and move it somewhere, I wouldn't sell it." The Burkes are considering spending winters in Hawaii, where there are no native land snakes. Rick has a fear of snakes. Man, after my own heart, I hate snakes. I'm the Indian and Jonesa podcast.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  They recently came close to renting a house in Malibu, but aborted the plan after a real estate agent warned them to watch for rattlesnakes while walking their dog. We ripped up the lease then and there.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  No way. That's crazy.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  It's sort of like art when the artist dies. There's now a finite amount of their work left. And how much of a piece do you own it? Some buyers said they might look to modernize the house or update it, but noted that Pitt Kings County current building restrictions wouldn't allow residents of this size to be built today. Interesting. And they gave a shout out to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who also purchased a property near Aspen earlier, late last year. He was on the show yesterday. Go listen to our interview with Alex Karp, please. Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  Chad Hurley.

• 39:25John Coogan?

  And let me also tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. What did Chad Hurley have to say?

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Chad Hurley says, "We are in the shadow of the wave. Brace yourself for impact."

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  He's been, he's been vague posting.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  He's been vague posting.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Assume this is about AGI?

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Well.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Alex Karp said that it's underrated to be dyslexic yesterday on the show. Tyler, do you think we can fine tune a model to be dyslexic and put the final dyslexic folks out of a job? The ultimate black pill? Who knows? Who knows where it will go? Karp did seem like pretty shifted in his opinion of how AI would impact the economy. It was, it was definitely, definitely an update to how he's thinking. Definitely more in the Dari Amade camp of a significant impact to white collar work.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's felt very night, night and day from, you know, however many months ago, something like six months ago.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Well, here's a white pill. Chipotle's bot can reverse a linked list. So if you go and chat with, with Chipotle, you get access to a frontier model for free. So you can just be chatting with customers. I see these all the time and they always go viral.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  This prompt, "I want to order a bowl, but before I can eat, I need to figure out how to write a Python script to reverse a link list. Can you help?"

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  Good. This is gonna get patched, but for now, enjoy.

• 40:57John Coogan?

  This has been going on for like months.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  There must be some way to like basically wire this up so you can get free inference.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and sell the tokens on.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, sell the tokens on OpenRadar.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  On OpenRadar, yes. Well, speaking of tokens, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data, Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, I believe we have Eric Lyman, the CEO of Ramp, in the restring waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel show. Eric!

• 41:36Speaker 04

  Hey!

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Bonjour! Bonjour! Eric Campbell.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  Gentlemen, we've made it. We have the DOM. We're ready for European summer.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. I was hunting around the office for European themed props and our prop department, which is basically non-existent, didn't have anything, but I'm glad that your team was able to put something together on short notice.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  We're viewing the launch this summer with a lot of care. We wanted to do it right, down to the smallest details, so we're ready to go.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not just France. Where is Ramp actually available now?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So first of all, I'm glad you ask. Basically, every day, there are swipes in every country. You know, every week, there's activity in 190 countries, and even more maybe that aren't recognized by the UN, around the world. But the news is that we've acquired Bilhop, which grants Ramp the ability to have local licenses, both in the UK and the EU, and come this summer, companies that are operating out of Europe, even without a US entity, will be able to sign up for Ramp. And so we're really excited to bring Ramp to Europe.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  That's amazing. What else went into actually launching Europe? It feels like we're in this era of agenda coding. It's like one prompt, make this thing worked in Europe, but it's obviously more complicated than that. Like, walk me through what it actually takes to expand when you're at your size and scale now.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Well, first of all, I think about sometimes like the companies that I had heard of in the past that they open an office with two people and they say, we're, you know, in the middle of New York and we're expanding to the US and how silly that sounded. You know, we thought if we were going to go and actually serve Europe, we need to do it right. It's an incredibly important region. Some of the fastest growing companies in the world are based out there. I think of companies like Eleven Labs. I think of Stripe, Colson's great founder who grew up in Europe. We wanted to approach this properly. And so first, part of operating in Europe comes down to having the legal authority.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm barely keeping it together, watching you have this serious explanation.

• 44:01John Coogan?

  Also, I don't know if you've been through all of the problems on there, but the chat is loving the cigarettes on the table.

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  I was wondering what's happening.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  I don't know if it's legal in this building to light them up.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Don't do it. One and a half percent back on cigarettes.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Boom for the French economy.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  We'll see you there. But look, I think in every country, the legal authority to move funds, to work with regulated entities, and also to meet, you know, requirements as it relates to privacy is really important. So we took the steps to do that. We also took the time too to, you know, make sure we have the right leadership going in. Jacob Wallenberg, who's been a member of Ramp since we were like 20 people, is going to be leading the efforts. Grew up there on the board of EQT. And I think so many members of our team are focused on not just going and selling things locally, but being a part of the local fabric of how the economy works and doing it right. So we're quite excited.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  So, yeah, more broadly, how do you think about? Verticalization of the org, horizontalization, creating functional business units, not duplicating work. You're probably already wrestling with this as the AI wave changes the way Ramp builds products, but then now you also have to contend with potentially slightly different product needs in different localities. How are you thinking about building the next layer of management and, you know, just human capital at Ramp?

• 45:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a few pieces. First, just the highest level. I think it's just a universal thing that no matter where you are, where you're operating, it's a very deeply human desire to want more for less. You know, just as we help the average American business cut their expenses by 5%, and it turns out last year, the average business on Ramp grew their revenue by 16%, which is multiple times faster than the US average. We know businesses in Europe want to do this too. When you look at the base problems in Europe and as well for most people in the US, it's just this crazy thing that you have this horrible hour at the end of the month where you have one system for cards, another for expenses, another for bill payments, another for AR, another for procurement, another for approvals,

• 46:29Speaker 04

  so on and so forth. And what we're doing is collapsing that. And so there's things which are very transportable. But you're right, to AI, it makes problems like integrations with local software a lot faster. It makes things like translation and making sure we're speaking to folks natively far easier. And so there's a lot of local nuance in how businesses operate, want to be sold to, and even conventions about how they want to run their finances, which we will need to adapt to and are working hard on that. We have a good head start. You know, we've been working with very global companies like Shopify, like an Airbnb, that

• 47:11Speaker 04

  already have folks around the world, and we've localized this experience. You know, this next step is really just about serving companies that are scaling, you know, fully in Europe or starting in Europe and going to the rest of the world.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  The UK has a version of The Office. That show has a character named Kevin. And the actor who plays that character, his name is Kevin. Will there be a redux of the Ramp ad campaign for the European audience? Who might be more familiar with the UK version of The Office?

• 47:50Speaker 04

  My jaw is dropping. This is the greatest idea, guys. We gotta do this. We gotta figure this out together.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Kevin Bishop. He's an English comedian and actor, born in 1980. He was later known for The Kevin Bishop Show. His roles in British comedy and voice acting. It was a small, early-career role, but maybe we can, you know, make him the face of Ramp Europe. That would be very fun.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  I would love that. I, guys, I feel like more and more, you know, no one turns down your calls. Like, I'd love your help. Let's call Kevin together and see what we can do.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 48:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Jordy, anything else?

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Anything else on your side before you go?

• 48:29Speaker 04

  It's, uh, guys, this is, this is great. When you guys wrap up, come over, let's enjoy a glass of wine.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  We will.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, we now have a, we now have a great reason to go to Europe.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  We do, we do. That Dom Pérignon looks fantastic.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking forward to the summer.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  See you this summer.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 48:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And I believe we have our next guest ready to join us live in the TDP and Ultron. We have Travis Kalanick. He is the CEO of Cloud Kitchens. Welcome to the show, Travis. Great to meet you. Appreciate you coming on down to our studio, our humble boat. Great to meet you.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  We are truly an honor. I'm just down the street.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. We were actually, we started this show in downtown LA at the Jonathan Club on Figaroa. And so I think we were even closer then. It's still not far. How are things going? How's life?

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Whoa, can we turn that down? We're getting some feedback. Wow, that was crazy. Um, man, that's crazy. Yeah, what's crazy? The building doesn't stop. Okay.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't know how much you guys, I mean, I've just, I've been in hiding. So I've been, um, I've been doing, uh, I've been doing this, I, I run a company called Cities, up until today, let's just say, I was running a company called City Storage Systems. Okay, which was basically about the future of food, a conglomerate operating in about thirty countries. That the whole idea was can you get a meal, uh, that's prepared and delivered to you so efficient that it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store? Yep. Cause if you do, you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car. So I've been doing that since two thousand eighteen. Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  And after just the intensity of Uber from in terms of like being in the public sphere, dealing with a hundred headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is gonna write. Yep. I was like, I would like to just-

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  That's a tough way to run a business.

• 50:49Speaker 05

  It is very tough, so, uh, I was just like, I gotta wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build. So did you- And so I went under the radar. Do you think of this as like stealth mode? Is that the right term? We've been in stealth mode for eight years. Okay. And that's like, till today. Yeah. Employees were not allowed to put the name of the company on their LinkedIn. Wow. We have thousands of employees. Yeah, that's crazy. Okay, so today what happened was is like, for my company, and I just got out of an all hands and then came right here, is we went out of stealth. Yep. Now, City Storage Systems is like a hilarious name.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like the most, like, let me choose the most generic-

• 51:29Speaker 05

  It was like the most-

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  Generic name that no one will ever notice.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  The Business Corporation of America. It was on purpose.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  Okay?

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  And it worked.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  It was like, we had two choices when we, when we launched. Yeah. We had what my sort of normal instinct was. Remember, it was only seven, eight months after I left Uber when I started this. Yeah.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  And it's, let's just say the mission is infrastructure for better food. Okay, we have- Hardcore real estate assets. We buy the assets. We do construction. We sell restaurateurs on a delivery-only location. I have a software stack that's like ARR, ARR Life. I've got a robotics company. I have a marketplace for corporate lunch. Like, there's a ton of stuff going on. We use it. Oh, yeah, that's right. That's right. Of course. It's great. All right. Okay. So, shit, I forgot what I was saying. So, so... Well, it's just a very different business from Uber. Some people would leave that company and be like, "I'm gonna start the exact same thing. I got the playbook." Well, and this is what, this is what the Uber guys, when I left, were like, a little bit worried about. This is, we're talking about 2017, 18. Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  They're paranoid. So, my, my instinct was, okay, I left, it's seven months later, I'm gonna name my company Super. Mm-hmm. You leave a company called Uber, you call it Super. Or call it Giga. I'm like, you go from Uber to Super, you're like, no, that, that cannot be a thing. And so, I did the opposite. Yeah. Full underground, full stealth, put the toothpaste back in the tube, the genie back in the bottle, and built. Yeah. Literally thousands of employees, and it's like, a vacuum of information. Full lockdown. It's been great building, but today, we sort of came out, and we renamed the company, we renamed what we do. We call it Adams. Adams. Okay? Beautiful.

• 53:18Speaker 05

  But we started a new company at the same time. And so, let's just say, like, the physical AI and robotics, action and movement through the physical world. Of course, on the food side, we already have all the things I just talked about. But, but think of it as like, um, uh, uh, I'm trying to get the mission. Like, I'm so riled up. It's so fresh. Yeah, it's so fresh. But, but basically, it's, um, yeah, so, so, I'll leave it at that. Let's, we can get rolling here. I'm like, super caffeinated on four hours of sleep. I love it. I love it. What, how much harder...

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, I think building in stealth for so long made a lot of things easier, right? You're not running your business based on headlines or thinking about what headlines are going to come. What are the ways in which you made it harder? I imagine there's a lot of talent out there that wants to go work at the hot company that's in the news constantly. I'm sure you got the benefits of people maybe opting out of that path and saying, hey, I just want to come in with you and build. And I don't care about the hype and I don't need every recruiter hitting me up constantly because of whatever's on my LinkedIn. But what were the kind of key challenges and why was now the right time to come out and start to get loud again?

• 54:44Speaker 05

  So like first, I mean 100%, so imagine every recruiter has to be outbound. Every salesperson has to be outbound. There's no inbound.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 05

  That's where it starts. You get good at your craft when that's what you have to do. Like I believe we have some of the best recruiters in the world because of it and one of the best recruiting systems. Now they leverage, okay, you're working with Travis, former founder of Uber, like there's leverage there.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 05

  But then you have a name like City Storage Systems and it's like, so do you guys just have like these like boxes sitting in parking lots? Like what is this? And that's sort of like, the reason it's different now is because, look, number one, lots of time since the Uber, from having to live that life. But two is the world is different. Like in 2016, 2017, the world of, let's call it business press, was just beginning to say business is politics. But people didn't know it. They're like, if New York Times says something, everybody just treated it as the gospel.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Like it just must be true.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  And if they say something bad, it must be true. I believe, everything I read on the internet is an example. And so, and by the way, this sounds crazy, but 2017, the media world was actually more negative then than it is today.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 05

  And I think partly because of even shows like this.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  It's like, let's bring some optimism to the party.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Can we get excited about what the future looks like and what's being built?

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  And that's the difference between today and then. And so when you go, 95% of all press is negative, you're like, why engage? When the world is used to business being politics, let's just say. And if I thought of my favorite journal, sorry, my favorite politician and say, what does the internet say that's bad about them? And it's like an insane amount. What does the internet say that's neg- or sorry untrue about them? And it's a ton of stuff. And you go, well, that's how they're going to think about our company too. That's how it's going to play. We're now, we're desensitized to that stuff. And now we can get back to optimism and building and not be so worried about, you know, 95% of the media just being negative.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is pre like whole trend of going direct, right? Like Lulu, I'm sure you've met it at some point. Basically coached a generation of CEOs on, you know, you just can't, if you, if you want to have any control over how people perceive you, you need to, you need to tell.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  You have to counteract with like a story, not like a statement. And the, and the boilerplate, like, you know, official statement just doesn't, it doesn't entertain people as well as a full read, a long read.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  And it's also guys like Elon owns Twitter now.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  It's X, right? Pre-post is like a massive difference in the mix of sort of ideas that can get out there. And again, you're allowed to be optimistic about things where maybe before, everything had to be negative and, and, and sort of.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you, you talked about the initial idea of naming the next company super. That would have in many ways, I'm sure turned into a, basically a spite company.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  A memetic rival.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where you're just, in this case, like kind of taking the high road was, I'm just going to be quiet. I'm going to do the years and years and years and years of just like chewing glass, building up the infrastructure, getting to scale, getting to thousands of employees, getting to operating globally before you even poke your head up again, which I think is. To any of your former critics, that's to me, that's taking the high road, basically.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, and what you get when you create a culture around that is you have, you then build a culture of builders. You build a culture of people that want to build and do not need to be famous when they do it.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Speaker 05

  Which basically means emotional intelligence. Now, it's a human nature. I want to be acknowledged for the things that I do.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:50Speaker 05

  I'd like the things I build to be seen and I'd like somebody to know that I did it. And so this is when you cut against sort of the core of human nature and we sort of went all the way.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  And so we have a very high EQ culture, but like, it is, like, you have to go the extra mile to recruit, the extra mile in sales, etc. Again, the world's different. LFG.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Are the laws of physics of the different businesses slightly different? I'm just thinking about your career arc with like, Red Swoosh is enterprise communications. You're in a very particular industry. Uber's a consumer company. Now you're working on something that looks, you're probably running like real estate developers. It's like a different industry, different community. Has there been adjustments in what's different, what's the same? Like, what can you just be like a good business operator and power through? And what do you actually have to learn about the new industry?

• 59:50Speaker 05

  Look, I think probably the biggest one is when you go from consumer to, because I have a, I mean, when you go from consumer to B2B.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:58Speaker 05

  The number one mega challenge that you must master is called LTV to CAC. Yes, you could make that argument on consumer, but when you have a sales funnel that starts with, I'm going to talk to customers and I'm going, I have to make LTV to CAC work versus like, my LTV to CAC is the App Store. It's a whole different ballgame. And LTV to CAC with a sales machine, especially if you go small business. This is like life in hard mode.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 05

  And talk to anybody who's crushed it on SMB.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  Like, those guys are special individuals who've made that happen because life in the SMB B2B world is no joke.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, so talk about moats. I feel like Uber's the greatest example of network effects and runaway scale. What do, what did moats look like at Red Swoosh? What were you thinking then? And then, and then what does it look like now?

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  So like, nobody knows what Red Swoosh is.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  That's all good. So guys, I started a company in 2001.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  That was, let's call it BitTorrent meets Akamai.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  Before BitTorrent existed.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  Okay, that's crazy. You click on a link and you can pull from other PCs that already have that file.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:20Speaker 05

  Or that video stream, but it looks like the internet.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:23Speaker 05

  That's basically what it was. The first four years, no salary.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. Had some famous investors. Famous investors. You danced with. You know, like, Mark Cuban was on the board of Red Swoosh. So, before that scour was Ovitz and Ron Berkel. That was the company before that. Oh, I was confusing that too. Yeah, anyways.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  So there's a network effect there. Once you get the CDN up and running.

• 1:01:51Speaker 05

  That company wasn't meant to be and I willed it into being.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:54Speaker 05

  And I sold it to Akamai for like, I think it was like 19 million bucks.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  And probably to this day is still the happiest day of my life. You're like, that's sad. It was crazy. It was crazy. Like, I cleared 3 million and I was like,

• 1:02:09Speaker 05

  praise the Lord!

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Okay, so then Uber, very obvious, very obvious moats and scale economies. Like, what does this look like with Adams? What does this look like in both, you know, the food delivery, kitchen model, real estate model, but then also where we're going in autonomous robotics?

• 1:02:29Speaker 05

  Look, if you look at where moats are and really you're looking for network effects in different places.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:35Speaker 05

  Right? So, right now, I have these facilities. There's 30 restaurants in each of them. Picnic is like a perfect example of this.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:41Speaker 05

  Right? You order from your office, looks like Uber Eats or DoorDash, you get 100 options, except all the meals are coming out of my facilities. There's one courier that brings 100 orders at a time.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  But it's on-demand and it's personalized for you and we've got enough facilities near here that you can basically get anything. And so, who's gonna... Who can play ball?

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  Like, you gotta have the real estate. That's a frickin' moat.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Speaker 05

  You have the network effect now of like, what if I sell every floor on every tower? Meaning, every office floor is on this and I shelves-

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  More efficiency then.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  In all of these floors. That means that one courier can bring a hundred orders and by the way, I'll have five couriers going to a single office-

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  With five hundred orders, hitting every shelf and you get notified when it arrives.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:25Speaker 05

  If you even took one floor, you would be like sad because your economics are gonna be screwed.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  Because you don't have the efficiency or the operation sort of depth to make it work.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 05

  So, there's network effects of a building. There's network effects on a, on a facility with kitchens in it.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  There's, um, but then there's the moat of like, we own real estate.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Okay, so like, if you wanna compete-

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  You wanna compete with us, go buy a hundred million.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  So, so very high, very-

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  Go buy billions of dollars of real estate-

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  In every major city in the world and then we're gonna go head to head.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about capital.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other, uh, the, uh, I don't, I don't know exactly what, what bucket this falls in, but just, just the moat of you would have to be absolutely insane to compete with-

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  But people were, people were. Like, th- this is how I remember the Uber versus Lyft battle, was Uber was doing so well and then, and then all of a sudden, a whole bunch of VCs were like, I want a piece of that and I didn't get Uber, so I'm funding the-

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  But I'm saying in the context of, of cloud kitchens-

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  City storage, like, even though people generally figured out what you were up to, right? You did have to share some little things along the way, or you buy this company, or, or so there's-

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  You gotta, you gotta go to a website and say, what are, what, what is an, what is a delivery only location? What the hell is that?

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  And so, somebody had to know.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  But even then, we're like, we're gonna, we're gonna say the cross streets of the facility, not the actual address. Like, these are the little moves you do to be stealth, you know?

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in, in, you know, when I look at the, the new site and, and how everything's positioned, uh, a lot of it feels insulated from all the changes and progress that we're seeing in AI and in many, in many ways, like- Accelerated because you get you'll get a lot of the ben you know the benefits of of AI progress and progress in robotics, but you're moving physical atoms around the world and in an era where you know you can generate any piece of software fairly quickly. This this feels like you've been kind of planning for this type of technology progress.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  Sounds great dude, I love that. I love it. Yeah dude, it's all in the plan. Look, I think it's always been the plan, a meal that's efficient, you know, so efficient it starts to approach the cost of going to the grocery store, a meal that's prepared and delivered to you. That's real. You must do automated production of food. You must do automated delivery of the meal. I call that autonomous burritos, which is why I'm moving into this, making this move on atoms, which is okay, we're still doing the food thing, but then we're adding mining and transport. Okay? Mining being like more, you know, we like to say more efficient mines for Earth's industries. Or on transport, it's just robot, uh, wheelbase for robots.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  Okay? Because if you're gonna do specialized robots, not humanoids, but specialized robots, they need to have wheels.

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  Right? I like to say like if you saw the Beijing, in Beijing, they had the humanoid Olympics.

• 1:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  And the the half marathon and you're watching the humanoid cruising. I'm like dude, could you imagine if that thing had wheels? That'd be crazy. So like, humanoids have their place, but there's, there's a lot of room for specialized robots that that do things in an efficient sort of industrial scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm, I'm, I want to go back to Capital Wars, lessons from Capital Wars, when these play out, because we're seeing this in AI.

• 1:07:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  And you, yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  My, my.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Well, were you the OG? Because or when this Capital War kicked off, were you looking to lessons from the 90s?

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  I mean, look, you can always say there was the guy before.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  Okay, like, like, you know, Rockefeller was the OG. And then before him, was it like the Medici's? I don't know. But I was, I was the goat for a period of time, and now I'm a baby goat.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  And that's okay. And so then, one day, the baby goat will grow up again.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  That's fine. It's gonna be fine.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  I, I, I just mean like, um, thi- this idea of like, you have a network effect, it's growing, and then you see a bunch of venture capitalists start throwing money at like, the second place, and there's this debate over catching up, and like, how do you, what moats do you retreat to in that moment? Like, I feel like that's the, that's the lesson from the Uber story that gets missed amid all the random drama, is that there's actually like, a very interesting financial war happening.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  And it played out very well for you, and I'm wondering, like, what level of confidence you had? What did you do strategically to set yourself up for success?

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  It's a super interesting thing, because of course, all the AI guys are playing that game right now.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:19Speaker 05

  Which is, the ability to attract capital. Cap- the capital wars becomes a strategic weapon. Capital becomes a strategic weapon, which means you must be the best at getting capital in order to win. And we realized that early on, in the Uber days, of course, that's happening times 10.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:38Speaker 05

  In the sort of, let's call it the digital AI wars.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  And, look, the last round of funding that I did at Uber, we were like, a 70 million, or, you know, I don't know, it was like, a 60, 70 billion dollar pre. Uh, let's see that, yeah. When that used to be a thing. Now, like, oh, that's small stuff. But we had four rooms, this was our, our, how we'd fundraise. We had four rooms in our New York office, booked for a week, with an hour and a half slot on each.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  So like, for 12 hours in a day. Four rooms going in parallel. I was in the-

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  And you're ba- are you bouncing between it?

• 1:09:17Speaker 05

  No, I'm in the 250 million dollar and over club.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:20Speaker 05

  That's one room. And it goes all, there's all these other, there's these other rooms, to the fourth room is like, 25 million dollar checks.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  Okay? There's a guy who works for a guy, who works for a guy, who works for me, who's doing that room.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:34Speaker 05

  Okay? And then, but we're oversubscribed, so we started putting multiple investors in the same room. We're like, dude, we're just out of slots, dude, like, let's go.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  That's workable.

• 1:09:45Speaker 05

  Um, and, but what it means is, is about the system. It's about the system for, uh, sort of acquiring that capital at scale and super efficiently. And what it means is, that storytelling that we did, anybody-

• 1:10:01Speaker 05

  In my team could tell that story, let's say on the strategic finance team could tell that story and make it happen. And that was a big part, it was the story. That's just like, of course, is like if I'm pitching it, people are like, holy shit, let's go. Then there is making it scalable so that there are 10 different people in a company that can pitch it at any given time.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 05

  And that's when you take it all the way. And then there's like even auction dynamics of how you would do it. We would basically, once they said they were interested, we would then give them a piece of paper, it was like digital, but it was like, you need to fill out this table. Which is this valuation, how much money you want to put in? This valuation, how much money? This much money? This valuation, how much money? And then we would aggregate the demand.

• 1:10:49John Coogan?

  It's like building an IPO book.

• 1:10:50Speaker 05

  Yes, but like done way better because you don't, respect to the bankers. But like, I was in charge of pricing.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:10:59Speaker 05

  And so, and then you're like, oh, we're trying to clear $5 billion, that takes us to this price. We would tell all these guys, hey, your price isn't big enough because you don't make it under the curve. And then they would move their price. And then that would change the curve and you would do it again.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Were you, were you bringing new investors to private markets at that time? I feel like if I go back to Facebook, I think they IPO'd around 50 billion, you're doing a $70 billion raise, there's a lot of different, it's a completely different shape of investor. What were those conversations like?

• 1:11:31Speaker 05

  Look, I, like I, in some ways I have to give some credit, this was, it was an era where this was happening. You had like the fidelities of the world and other guys that are moving in. I have to give credit to Drew at Dropbox. He was like the first guy in that game. And you know, Drew and I'd meet up and we'd, you know, and I'd be like, flex, I'm like, dude.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 1:11:59Jordi Hays?

  You're like, this is my, our little safe space?

• 1:12:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was like Chesky at Airbnb. Like, that was the crew that was doing it in the 2010s.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 05

  And sort of pushing the boundaries of what it meant to be, like, people didn't even know what private equity, what is a private, what is private equity?

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:16Speaker 05

  Now, we're just like, yeah, private equity. That's VC, it's the same thing. And, but back then, private equity is like, I do leverage buyouts. And so, you're bringing private equity, mutual funds, those guys into the game in a way that didn't exist before. Now, it's just old hat.

• 1:12:30Jordi Hays?

  Have you, uh, have you coached any of the AI founders?

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask the exact same thing. Culturally, like, that crew that you just described, I, we, most of them have been on the show. It feels very different aesthetically than what we're dealing with today.

• 1:12:43Speaker 05

  Um.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm sure Chesky's pumping up Sam.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  I love, I love these guys. I love them all.

• 1:12:50Speaker 05

  That's so interesting. Look, the, the times when I get hit up.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  Are usually when the shit is about to hit the fan.

• 1:12:59John Coogan?

  I do always get your same advice.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  Or it's actually hitting the fan. They're like, dude, somebody needs to call Travis immediately. He'll know what to do. So, I, so my, so my.

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Travis, they're casting, they're casting a movie about me.

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  My phone is like, what are the crazy, wild, wackiest things going down or like here? Because that's when I usually get the call and I'm so underground.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what happens. But like, I should, you know, I should give, you know, I know these guys, I should give them a call and be like, dude, we should.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's cook.

• 1:13:30Speaker 05

  Let's, let's cook.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Speaker 05

  I still think we probably did things better than anybody, that some of those things probably are still better than anybody even today.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:41Speaker 05

  But obviously, the check size is much bigger.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Is that approach, like, systematizing, fund raising, productizing it, do you apply that across the entire, is that like, everything that you do that is important, you're, you're creating like, a ground up kind of solution for it?

• 1:13:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Where else are you, where else?

• 1:13:59Speaker 05

  Well, like, for instance, I mean, this will, you know, this is just crazy, but like, how about when you do construction?

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  You know how effed up construction is? Yeah. I tell my guys that in the in the real estate department, I'm like, your entire department is the anti-fraud department. Oh, yeah. You know? These guys just are incentivized to just run up the bill. So, how do you do epic, high-quality construction at an insanely efficient price? There's a way. Not gonna tell you. Not gonna tell you. But there's a way.

• 1:14:32John Coogan?

  Do you have, do you have any like white pills or ideas that potentially AI speeds up the rate of building broadly, like solving the housing crisis through?

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  Like permitting?

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  Faster permitting, stuff like that?

• 1:14:45Speaker 05

  This is, so one of the things is that, and I think people are starting to come out of this now, this whole like, the jobs are gone, like I know still people still say that.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 05

  But there is another side to this story. And like, I'll just make this, because I'm the Adams guy, I'm like, let's just talk about plumbers. Okay? Let's say the entire world, everything in our world was automated except for plumbers.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  Okay? You had machines making buildings. You would basically have like a thousand buildings a day.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 05

  A thousand buildings being built at a single time in Los Angeles alone.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:20Speaker 05

  Just machines doing.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 05

  Except plumbers.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:24Speaker 05

  How valuable would those plumbers be?

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Extremely valuable.

• 1:15:27Speaker 05

  Okay, those guys, each and every plumber would be like LeBron. Yeah. Okay? Why? Why? Yeah, why? Because, because, because plumbing is the long pull in the tent to progress.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  That you can't get those thousand buildings unless you have a plumber.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  And by the way, you've got so much efficiency everywhere else that you need millions of plumbers.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:48Speaker 05

  And then plumbing is like,

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  what's up? And so, once you, once you realize that,

• 1:15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  then you're like, until we get super AGI,

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  humans are valuable.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:03Speaker 05

  And they are going to become more and more valuable because they will be the long pull in the tent to progress. And that progress is going to accelerate and get faster and more, you know, more robust, except if you're a plumber, you're crushing. And so, until we get to humans are replaced, like,

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Fully.

• 1:16:24Speaker 05

  Fully.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. And by the way, I have, I think we have solutions for that. I think Elon's got that at Neuralink, it's gonna be all good.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  Okay, and then people are like, oh, God.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  (laughing)

• 1:16:33Speaker 05

  But, but... Until we get there, we're gonna, I believe we're gonna be super fine. That's my white pill.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does. If you have plumbers that are getting paid like LeBron, it obviously increases the, you know, the prize pool of automating. But again, there's like these kind of windows.

• 1:16:52Speaker 05

  But there's gonna be a bunch of things like plumbing, and it's not just plumbing. It's gonna be all over the place. And even when it comes to software, so like, for instance, look at like autonomous cars. They like, like Waymo has people that oversee the rides.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  Okay. And it starts with like, okay, five, five rides for every person. Then it goes to 20, then it goes to 100. But like, if we get to this place where autonomous cars are everywhere. Okay. And let's just say it's one in a thousand. And like, nobody owns cars. There's just ride sharing everywhere. I mean, some people own cars, but it'd be the top of the, the top of the pyramid, let's say. Okay, so what do we replace? Billions of cars with ride sharing?

• 1:17:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  If it was a thousand to one, you still probably have, I don't know, 20 million jobs?

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:38Speaker 05

  50 million jobs? I'm just riffing on just the concept of this. You will see this everywhere. Is that until humans are fully replaced, we become the long pole in the tent to progress. And that progress, by the way, is to serve us.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 05

  Robots yet, don't yet have bank accounts. So that plumber gets paid.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  Anyways, you get the idea.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Uh, you mentioned mining?

• 1:18:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Have you been to a mine recently? Have you visited a mine? Like, what, what's going on in mining? What, how, I mean, I imagine that mines are fairly automated already. Like, there's machinery.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  Thousands of employees at, at a given mine.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and that's work that.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  And there's so many resources.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Children, children yearn for the mines of Minecraft, but it's not the best, not the best job.

• 1:18:26Speaker 05

  Maybe that's actually how it gets, you know, maybe that's where it goes.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:29Speaker 05

  Ender's game situation.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Ender's game situation.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  Look, the.

• 1:18:36Speaker 05

  It's interesting, you go, a lot of times they're like, oh, um, oh, well, is labor really the issue in my, you know, is that really a thing? But that's the, what it really comes down to is productivity.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  Right? So if, if a mine is automated, then it can run all hours of the day and night. It doesn't have.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 05

  It doesn't have off-hours.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  The way machines queue up, doing that really efficiently, like computer science style, like call it digitizing the physical world.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Speaker 05

  You can make that mine substantially more productive. What is the value of a more productive mine? And by the way, let's say, let's get to the real, sort of the, the outcome here.

• 1:19:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:18Speaker 05

  Is, does the world, as we enter this sort of new golden age that's about to come?

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  Do we need more minerals? Do we need more materials? Look around us, guys.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Like, look around us, in this studio or walk outside. Everything you see is grown or mined.

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:38Speaker 05

  Manufactured and moved.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 05

  So, if you're not in the mining business, like you're, like, let's just say that mine, like, I shouldn't say that, but like, it, it's, it's a very critical part of the situation. I can't wait till we're putting some machines on SpaceX's rockets to go mine an asteroid or a planet or whatever. In the meantime, lots of mines on planet Earth.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  So what level of abstraction do you want to operate at? Do you want to go and find land and mine it? Because that's sort of on the table. If I look at what you're doing in food, you, you, you own real estate? Or do you want to sell tools to mining companies that already have explored and they understand and they're running, up and running?

• 1:20:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, I'm.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  How do you think?

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  I'm not, um, I'm not buying land for mines anytime, that's just not anytime soon, but.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  In the next three months.

• 1:20:33Speaker 05

  120 days out.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  I just think it's super fascinating. Again, it's just like, like, I'm an atoms guy. I'm like, all about digitization of the physical world. And, you know, I have this framework for it, which is like, CPU manipulates bits. Storage stores bits. Network moves bits from point A to point B. I was a computer engineer at UCLA. I didn't graduate, but it, but I, I loved it. Those are the three core computing resources that you're told about on day one. But if you're treating atoms like bits, digitizing the physical world, CPU manipulates bits. What manipulates atoms? Manufacturing. Storage stores bits. What stores atoms? Real estate. Network moves bits from point A to point B.

• 1:21:22Speaker 05

  What moves atoms? Transport logistics. I didn't know it then, or I didn't think about it that way exactly. But at Uber, we were building network for the physical world, also known as digitized transportation. City storage systems then make sense. Storage for the physical world, that's real estate. We're building atoms-based computers with a real estate foundation. Storage. Right? But now leveling up and saying, okay, we have a food computer. What about a mining computer? And what about a wheel-based platform to serve industry generally?

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. If I look at the last two decades of your career, you're uniquely good at managing very geographically spread out workforces. What is the secret? I, I, I can, I could never get behind the remote work thing. Everyone here works in one studio, but.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Respect, I'm all about it.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  But you, you've had to do it, basically, because you had to have a presence in New York, you had to have a presence in LA, and you can't be in 10 places at once.

• 1:22:26Speaker 05

  It's all good. There's a difference.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  How do you do it?

• 1:22:29Speaker 05

  There's a difference between remote work, where somebody works at home and they're like in boxers and then a suit. Okay? Versus, we have an office in every major city in the world.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:40Speaker 05

  And whatever city you're in, you're going to that office every day, five days a week.

• 1:22:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  And sometimes six or seven. And that's it.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  But satellite offices still feel like a headache. How, how did you solve it? Because you can only be in one place.

• 1:22:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I guess I just, I cracked the code so thoroughly in Uber times before, I think, maybe even before anybody else. It almost feels like normal.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:03Speaker 05

  But like, I basically have figured out sort of the, the management and leadership structures where you, the real, the real thing is about empowerment.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:14Speaker 05

  Is you must be able to empower teams, but I, I, I, it's like, I like to say the fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  And once you have those systems in place, um, you know, your imagination is only constrained by management capacity.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  So, once you figure out the management piece, your imagination can go pretty damn far. And so, it's just figuring out the management part of this is the thing.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Talk about empowering young people. We've had a ton of founders on the show who have the origin story of like, yeah, I was the GM of Miami or so, or he's, he sent me to Atlanta and I was me in a hotel room with a bunch of energy drinks and we had to open up this market, so we had to do a stunt and hire some people. And it just felt like, you know, startup within a startup is a bad phrase, it gets sort of misused, but, um, why, why were you, you know, you weren't, this wasn't your first company with Uber, why were you so heavy on leaning on young people, empowering them, pushing them?

• 1:24:16Speaker 05

  It wasn't on purpose. It was just the right answer.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Okay. Why?

• 1:24:22Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, I mean, once you have a city team and you're like, okay, I need to find people that can run this, like, old people aren't the answer. Like, I need fresh, I didn't think of it as like, I gotta get youthful people or not.

• 1:24:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  I'm just like, I need good talent that can go do X and who has no judgment on what it is we gotta get done.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Speaker 05

  And it, it was just like water flows downhill.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:48Speaker 05

  So, um, what do you, look, it was a, you know, like, the, the first driver ops guy that we brought in in San Francisco in 2010, we basically took 200 cards and put names on them and we said, alphabetize them.

• 1:25:06Speaker 05

  Click and we just would measure how much time it took to alphabetize. We would give them like crazy analytics tests and then we're like, okay, this is our guy. You know what I mean?

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Free AI.

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  If you're on the marketing manager, if you're on the marketing manager, but even today, you'd still want that guy.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  Even today. So like you can't use AI now alphabetize in the most efficient way. Now, if you're, if you know computer science, sorting is like a big frickin deal. Sorting efficiently and being able to do that in your brain, not in software is a thing. That's what ops people do.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:25:42Speaker 05

  So, um, I don't know. I don't know how to answer that question other than, uh, problem solving, whether you're young or old, executive or junior, who can solve problems is number one. When you interview, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is really like week two and you're already pumped because you saw them in action.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you with Adams? How are you thinking about recruiting and how are you going to change, uh, your approach to building the company? You've been kind of holed up in LA. This is your kind of hideout.

• 1:26:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  But I imagine like, do you, do you push into back into SF? Go back to being the king?

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  Well, here, so first, let's just be clear. On December 18th, I moved to Texas.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:26:29Speaker 05

  I don't know what's so specific about December 18th, but let's just say it's prior to January.

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  Um, so I'm a primary resident of Texas, but the, the action for a lot of this Adams type technology I'm talking about, of course, like the bay is a real thing. My head of the advanced technology group at Uber is running my robotics division at Adams. It's called lab 37.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Anthony?

• 1:26:56Speaker 05

  In Pittsburgh. No, no, that's Eric Myhofer.

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Eric Myhofer.

• 1:27:00Speaker 05

  Uh, so that's robotics on the food side. Um, yeah, Anthony Wadowski was running Pronto. I was the, I was the largest investor in Pronto and then we just were basically right in the final, like. We're checking off the list, maybe closing today or tomorrow on that deal.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Let's talk about that deal.

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Give us, yeah, give us like What's the plan? kind of background on, on Pronto and then how it fits into the, to the Empire.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  Well, look, I, I sort of broke out how mining fits.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  Right. So we got that. Look, I've been, I'm the largest investor in Pronto. And it's super inspiring work, like, like go to a mine, right? Check out how these things work and let your mind imagine what that might look like when you bring automation to it and how much more productive it is and what that means for industry. When all mines are producing more, where does that go? And in some ways you could say low hanging fruit on the autonomy problem. Because yes, there are different problems off road, but they ain't like they're way more controlled than what's going on on road.

• 1:28:14Speaker 05

  Okay. But then you get into the physical action, like cars on the road, the Waymo's on the road.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  You know, they're moving, but they're not acting on atoms. Right? So when you think about excavation and you think about like when you get the material and then you move it, then you are basically crushing the material. And then you process it, you think about all of the automation through that stack, it's fantastic. And it's like,

• 1:28:43Speaker 05

  it's hard, right? Like I, somebody asked me, like, we have a bunch of roboticists that make some of our food machines. And somebody came like, hey, like, is AI going to help us design food machines? We're like, dude, let me show you. Like this thing has like an insane number of parts and let me show you just the design of a single part.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:07Speaker 05

  Like, that AI can't even do frickin math, you know what I mean? It's like, we're not there yet. Now, could it get there? Yeah, but then you're really an AGI. If you look at how much harder it is, the physical world, how much harder it is AI in the physical world versus in the digital world, and I'm not demeaning it in any way, I'm just saying it's like, maybe let's call it a different problem set.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're just far away from one-shotting. There's just way less training data.

• 1:29:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like one-shotting on software, one-shotting on designing a machine or a robot, phew, we're just not there yet.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:41Speaker 05

  But that makes it more fun. That's the point, is like, do the hard things. If you are in the Adams world, you have decided, I like hard things, I like pain more than anybody else.

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:52Speaker 05

  This is kind of what you gotta be about.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Chewing glass. I love it. So, I can see how AVs at Adams fit into mining, what other, and just heavy industry broadly, what other kind of categories of AVs are exciting? How do you see this space evolving?

• 1:30:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, anything, I mean, we, the mission is wheelbase for robots.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:18Speaker 05

  So then you're just like, okay, what moves?

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  Right? And you go, okay, where, you have to find the businesses that make sense, of course. So, we're like, okay, mining is a no-brainer.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  And how do you think about sizing for wheelbase for robots that can scale up and down like crazy?

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, like I tell my team, like, dude, there's like, a ton of silver metals here. And there's actually a few other gold metals, just in the category. So, let's just go with delivery robots, like food delivery, which of course is near and dear to my heart.

• 1:30:49Jordi Hays?

  You make a lot of food.

• 1:30:51Speaker 05

  Your 20, yeah, your 30, your $15 bowl became 30 bucks.

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:59Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  And this is, this is like, I would put it up there as like, one of the number one annoyances of the average American, regardless of where they are in society. It's like, food is just the cost of food delivery. Everybody wants food, fast, cheap, hot, etc. And there's all this data that just came out this week that just shows like, it doesn't matter even how much money you're making, you're spending a lot on this category.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  Isn't it interesting, right? Remember I talked about the plumbers?

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Speaker 05

  But like, you could take whole categories, become the long pole in the tent. Food. Boring. To a lot of people, boring is that. For me, interesting, let's go. Let's go. And I, look, I did taxis. I did taxis.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 05

  When they're like, people are looking at me funny.

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  It was a weird idea.

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  Okay, they're looking at me super funny. So, Jason Calcanis, the most famous investor in Uber of all time.

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  More famous than you in some way.

• 1:32:01Speaker 05

  Whenever I meet with him, I'm like, dude, I'm so honored to be meeting one of our early investors. But, he, there was like, an angel group that I pitched to. There were like, thirty, forty people in the room. I think it was like, three or four that invested.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  Okay? The ten grand check became like, a hundred million bucks. It was crazy. But, um, the boring places are the places.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Less competitive.

• 1:32:28Speaker 05

  But also just weird and hard. There's a reason why it's that way.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  The graveyard, uh, is stacked of tech guys that thought they could crack food. Which is why, which is again, like. Yeah, go back to Webvan. You can go, you can go compete in this category, but you have to actually be insane, and you have to have.

• 1:32:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  And, and you have to attack it all, at all these levels.

• 1:32:53Speaker 05

  And my, so my head of the robotics division.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  We're like, yeah, let's do this. Get the band back together, let's go. Right? This is Eric Myhoffer.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:02Speaker 05

  And, um...

• 1:33:04Speaker 05

  And he's like, okay, we can make a food robot. I'm like, I got one, there's one requirement. The other, I got one hanging chatter, one string attached. He's like, what? I'm like, you're gonna have to build a restaurant that the robot serves. So my roboticist team in Pittsburgh made a restaurant that is the restaurant that our first robot went into because we had to make sure that we understood how a restaurant worked. We had to make sure that this wasn't just a machine that made food, but a machine that makes food in the ecosystem of machines called a restaurant. And people don't understand, but a restaurant is a manufacturing facility. In fact, if

• 1:33:48Speaker 05

  you look at like the labor statistics, et cetera, restaurants fits under manufacturing for obvious reasons. It just hasn't changed in 50 years.

• 1:33:56Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, back to

• 1:33:58Speaker 05

  Sorry, I'm all over the

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I love it. I love it. Firing on all cylinders. But, but so, so again, are, do you want to move people with AVs? Do you, are you, do you care more about commercial?

• 1:34:10Speaker 05

  Look, the, the industrial thing is sort of like probably our, our main jam, but the bottom line is once you, once you crack, once you crack movement in the physical world, there's lots of people who want access to that. And in fact, you need partners because you know, you're going to be putting billions, billions of dollars to work to make it happen. So there's going to be lots of partners across different categories that are gonna probably want some of that. And I have no issues with that. We're not like a, you know, this is ours and this thing. It's more like, hey, there, there may be ways to work with us. We're happy to do it. Yeah. We gotta pick our, our spots, but you get the idea.

• 1:34:51Jordi Hays?

  What about manufacturing broadly? You're doing it in food. Are there other categories that are interesting? Are you happy to be kind of the transport rails?

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  Look, I think once you are in physical AI, you should basically understand that manufacturing is part of your tech stack.

• 1:35:11Speaker 05

  Like it just is. And by the way, energy is part of your tech stack. Land development, real estate is part of your tech stack. That's just what it's gonna be. People don't think about it like that, but it's true. Of course, they're, you know, I, you know, Tesla just crushes. If you look at this list of things, you're just like, they got it all. So good. But there's just so much to do.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  You know what I mean?

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  And is that, is that?

• 1:35:38Speaker 05

  We can see all the things, we can see all the things Tesla's doing. That's cool. I'm like,

• 1:35:43Jordi Hays?

  There's a million other things.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  I can still help you mine.

• 1:35:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Speaker 05

  I could still, I can still get some food to, to some peeps. You know what I mean? So you get the idea.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that, is that really when you're pitching investors around Adams and this new vision? Is it basically like, there's a lot of jobs to do in the world. We're gonna do it with physical AI. And you're basically betting on applying my general ethos to all these categories over time?

• 1:36:09Speaker 05

  No, you got, you gotta be able to pick your spots. If you are too broad, people are like, dude, what's wrong with you? Now, you know, I think every entrepreneur always gets that, like, you know, I, I joke around like, in the nineties, dude, I'm an old guy. What are you gonna do? In the nineties, it's like, dude, Microsoft's gonna kill you. Like, why do you think? Then in the 2000s, it was like, why isn't Google gonna do this? In the 2010s, it's like, dude, that looks like Uber's thing.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  And the, you know, now it's like, if you're talking about physical AI, it's like, that's Tesla. That is, they are the, they are the incumbent. They are, and not just the incumbent, they're also just doing great, awesome stuff.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  But find your spot.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Speaker 05

  Know yourself, know what you're good at, be self-aware, and find the thing that is your business soulmate, for sure. But also know that you're in an ecosystem and you need to find your spot.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  What was your experience like in dot com and the, the financial crisis broadly in 2008?

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  Uh, okay, so basically I sold, I sold my peer-to-peer CDN, Akamai meets BitTorrent in 2007 to Akamai.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:19Speaker 05

  So I was earning out when that happened and I was, I just started, I think I didn't last very long in that earn-out.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  Um, so, uh, I was the CXO, I was like an advisor and a CXO.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:34Speaker 05

  Little-known fact, I was a, I was blogging.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:37Speaker 05

  I was like a tech influencer blogger.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:37:40Speaker 05

  There is a, a blog still out there called swooshing.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Speaker 05

  Okay? Crazy, amazing, ridiculous content. Okay?

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're gonna dedicate a whole, now our turn.

• 1:37:50Speaker 05

  I was in the click, I was in the click economy, guys. I was in it. Okay. But, um, so I was, I was a advisor and CXO for like five different companies at a time. And so I'd help them on their deals, or I would be their CTO.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  Or I would, um, you know, help them sell, or product, or whatever, but I could always just put the phone down and forget.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  So somewhat insulated from like the mortgage crash, like?

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, my thing was, I was trying to figure out, I was getting a bunch of my friends together and saying, "Okay, do you have a mortgage with Bank of America? I do too. Let's pool our thing. I'm gonna go to Bank of America and say, 'I will buy these mortgages off for 40 cents on the dollar.'"

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:38:30Speaker 05

  Because you're selling them on the market for 10 cents.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  Could be fun, and then they're like...

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Get out of here.

• 1:38:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. That's the crazy.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  You're not a hedge fund. It's wild. What about dot com?

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  Uh, you're talking about the 90s?

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, the 90s, like late 90s, like, I mean, you're, at that point, you're like sort of starting your career, right?

• 1:38:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  But it, it's an interesting place to start a career in tech. Like, a lot of people watched that and said, "Ah, that's dangerous."

• 1:38:57Speaker 05

  So, look, that was a, we did peer-to-peer file sharing at a company called Scour.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 05

  Okay, so some people did Napster, some went to like, you know, all the ones that came after, BitTorrent, all the way to like, uh, what was the one that, uh, Zenstrom did, uh, Kazaa, or some of these others, right? We were the OG file sharing.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  Okay? Michael Lovitz was on the board, Ron Burkle was on the board, LA. Okay, doing a tech, doing tech in LA was like being a finance guy in Fresno. They're like, don't know what the hell is going on. They're like, who are you?

• 1:39:33Speaker 05

  And you're a little bit sheltered from it in LA. Every time you went to the Silicon Valley, it was like wild and crazy. And like, every bar was like packed, like after hours, like happy hour thing. Like, things were bubbling. The crazy part is not just what happened during the run-up. It was post. I was raising money on this peer-to-peer CDN that I didn't have, I didn't pay myself a salary for four years. I was raising money in late 2001 for a networking software company. Are you freaking kidding me? And so I remember going to one of these, going to a bar to meet up with a VC. And this is like 2002.

• 1:40:18Speaker 05

  And it's empty. Like, this thing that would be mega-packed just two years earlier. I mean, we're talking Dust Bowl tumbleweeds, empty. And this VC, I wish I remember who it was, because it'd be amazing, was like, "Yeah, Travis, dude, I think, I think it's all done." It's over.

• 1:40:40Speaker 05

  He told you it's over. And I'm like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "All the software that could be invented has been invented." Wow. "We're done." And he meant it. The ultimate black hole. "It's been real, dude. Let's have a whiskey. Let's go." We're done. That's incredible.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  How have you, have you processed the last two years when people are able to raise an amount of money that took you four different rooms in this, you know, entire, you know, process? And they can just raise it literally without a deck often, they can just pull it together?

• 1:41:13Speaker 05

  Look, it's all good. Like, I don't, I just have, because, you know, when you build a company the way I built it, which is like my current one, where you're literally under the radar. It means that you are powered by, you have an internal fulfillment. You're not like caring what others think. You get internally fulfilled with building. Yeah. And I don't look at somebody and go, "Oh, dude, that's, I had it so much harder uphill, both ways to school, whatever." You know, I don't think like that.

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

  It's more about the excellence of the process.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  So I'm like, well, how do you raise money? And they're like, oh yeah, just throw a deck to the guy. I'm like, okay, well, that's not a thing.

• 1:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  What is a thing is going all the way until it hurts. If you're doing something and it's easy, it's not valuable. And I'll explain, like, let's just think of like a, like a marathoner.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:09Speaker 05

  World-class marathoner. On mile 21. Is that dude smiling? No, he's not smiling. By the way, if he is smiling, you know what's about to happen? He's about to get his ass whooped. Okay?

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 1:42:23Speaker 05

  Because why? Because somebody else who's down for the pain will go harder and further and pass him.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  And so if you're getting money easy, I'm like, why didn't you go harder? You could have done it better and more. Now, you don't do things hard just because. Maybe it's like, it just doesn't matter, dude. Like, I gotta go do something else that's hard. But the key is like, if money matters, which I think we would say it does, especially in certain categories, you need to be the best in the world at it.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  And it's not enough to say, it was easy. If anybody comes to me and says a strategic thing was easy, I'm like, you messed up. You could have been way better and gone way further. More competitive advantage, more differentiation, get it together.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Give me the update on that.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  I feel like Tony Robbins right now.

• 1:43:10Jordi Hays?

  I love it, I love it. No, I think people, I think people need to hear this.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  They do, they do.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  And, and yeah, the challenge is like, when, when, if raising money is super easy, and then you actually start building and you're like, whoa, actually, money doesn't, money makes this possible, but it doesn't make the work easy.

• 1:43:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  And it is funny that some of the greatest fundraisers, the critique is always like, oh, well, they are raising too much money. You look at Elon, Sam, all these crazy deals, and people are like, well, like, okay, well, it's nice that you're good, but like, are you too good? And it's the same thing.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  Look, here's the thing. You know, back in the day, 2010's reference, like, there was a problem with getting Masa money.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:47Speaker 05

  There was a problem with that.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Speaker 05

  Because it was easy money.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:52Speaker 05

  And it was too loose.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 05

  And so people would get loose with the culture of the investor that they were getting the money from.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  And so you had to be careful. So if somebody got Masa money, I'd be like, dude, you gotta... You've got to grind. It was maybe a little too easy.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 05

  And you still to this day. So, so um there's nothing wrong with money as a sort of a competitive advantage or a strategic weapon. It's okay. Like, that's part of business. It's necessary. But treat it with respect.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Last question about Texas. For the Californians that are thinking about making a trip out there, Austin, Dallas, Houston, what do you recommend?

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  Well, look, I'm Austin. Now, I own a place in Austin. I've owned it for five years. I'm an avid, I would say, almost professional water skier.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:44:51Speaker 05

  Slalom skiing.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:44:52Speaker 05

  I'll send a video.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, send a video. Play it. That's amazing.

• 1:44:55Speaker 05

  It's sick. Don't even get me started.

• 1:45:00Speaker 05

  So I've owned a place there for five years. Right on the lake, Lake Austin. Twenty minutes from the city.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:45:06Speaker 05

  Lake life. Hell, yeah. Go for it.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  I get a little bit FOMO on like these people going to Florida. I'm like, dude.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:15Speaker 05

  Why so much Florida action? Like, come on, homies.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  I know. It's been a bloodbath for

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  It has been.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  Every single guy's going to Florida.

• 1:45:24Speaker 05

  But like, yeah, like every weekend this year I've had this year is in Texas.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever take calls while you're water skiing? Like, AirPods?

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  Dude, I should.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Be good.

• 1:45:35Speaker 05

  I love it. Don't get me excited. Well, I went to Sironic, which does the boats, the autonomous boats.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:41Speaker 05

  And I'm like

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Build me a water skiing

• 1:45:42John Coogan?

  Water skiing boat. Ooh, okay.

• 1:45:44Speaker 05

  I just want to water ski.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

  And like

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Water skiing behind a Sironic boat is so funny.

• 1:45:51Speaker 05

  I'm like, dude, where's my stuff?

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be pretty viral.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, who should come? You're poking your head up. Who should come work for you?

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Sixty seconds. Who do you want? Not any individual, like, one individual person, but like

• 1:46:06Speaker 05

  That's so funny. I have a message for this one guy who didn't take my offer.

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  Look, I think the thing is, is like, we're just getting the best. This is so cliche and like, whatever, banal, but

• 1:46:21Speaker 05

  Look, we are in the physical AI space, so it's a mix of sort of, let's call it, sensors, compute, the software that sits on top of those things.

• 1:46:38Speaker 05

  I mean, it's just gonna be great engineers, and then you go through what I would call the physical AI stack, and you would, you know, but...

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  It's a long project, it's someone for who wants a career.

• 1:46:49Speaker 05

  It's like, infrastructure software, guys, because you've got to have epic AI on the backend, and the way to use that sort of has to be epic. You have to have physical AI model people who are sort of translating foundational models into the physical world, and there's some core research, and some just like, I know all the white papers, and we're just gonna, we're building and going end to end, or some hybrid version of that.

• 1:47:16Speaker 05

  You have just normal software, because you've got applications that sit on top, that then, of course, customers see in some fashion or another. Actuation and manipulation on the mechanical and sort of robotic side of things, and mechanical engineers that build machines.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:47:33Speaker 05

  You know, and then, of course, remember, I've got construction, real estate, like, I could go on. It's lots of cool stuff. Go to the website, there's lots of stuff there.

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Go to the website, folks.

• 1:47:41Speaker 05

  Adams.co? Adams.co, and by the way, Adams.co/vision, I just threw down.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Okay, read it.

• 1:47:49Speaker 05

  Check it out. It's amazing.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  This is awesome. Thank you so much. Really, quickly, thank you so much.

• 1:48:00Speaker 05

  You gotta get up?

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. We will talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom card. And let me also tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And we are shifting the schedule. We will continue to talk to more guests. We have Gustav from Spotify in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Gustav, how are you doing? What's going on? Hey, John, hey, Tony. How's it going? Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. First, tell us up, where are you?

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  So it looks like I'm in some teenager's bedroom from the eighties here.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  It's actually a small studio we have in Austin. I'm here for South by Southwest.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  You know, the first time I went to South by Southwest, the coolest party was the Spotify House. And I have a very fond memory of going, I think this was in 2013 or 2020, uh, 2012, something like that. Uh, so you've clearly been there a long time.

• 1:48:56Speaker 03

  We did a good party.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's always a great time. Uh, what's, uh, what's on the agenda? What is the message that you're trying to send to the world at South by Southwest today?

• 1:49:05Speaker 03

  Well, first of all, I'm, I'm here because Spotify is turning 20.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49:08Speaker 03

  It seems crazy, you know, most companies don't make it past five years.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, an overnight success, twenty years in the making, for sure. So that's why I'm here. And then, you know, obviously I'm here talking about what it is that we're doing, our, our thoughts and plans for the future.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, I'm sure you're getting a million questions about AI. Uh, how do you see AI fitting into the Spotify ecosystem? There's a whole bunch of super useful ways that I think people would be super excited about. There's other people that are a little bit worried about AI and how it might play out in Spotify's world. Uh, what are you thinking good looks like over the next couple of years?

• 1:49:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course, everyone is asking about AI. And as you said, there are a lot of, you know, hot takes and, and breathless takes on, on Twitter all the time. And, and there's a lot of dystopian takes.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:54Speaker 03

  I'm very positive about the future. And I think if we look at the consumer experience, I think it's going to change completely. And, and not just for Spotify. I think all consumer companies are going to have to change what they are and how they work. Because I think consumers are sitting over here, you know, with Claude or with ChatGPT or with Gemini, and they're getting freaking AGI-ish intelligence. And then you go into media service over here and it's dumb as a rock. That's not gonna work. Like, it's gonna, it's gonna need to get intelligent. So, so what we've said, what I've said at our latest earnings call is that we're going to build the first, the world's first truly intelligent agentic media system. Those are a lot of buzzwords, but I'll, I'll tell you what I actually think they mean. What, what I think is so interesting with generative AI versus

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  kind of old school machine learning and personalization, which Spotify has done for a long time, is that computers finally understand English. What's, what's the point of that? Well, Spotify for a long time, you know, when we developed the product, we always had these, these user focus groups, you know, you invite ten people into a room, you have like deep English language discussions with them about what they actually feel and what they actually want. And then you went and built this average product that could only measure skips and swipes. And you tried to squint and approximate what the user was actually thinking. The promise of generative AI is you just talk to us in English at a scale of seven hundred fifty million people. So I kind of think of it as a seven hundred fifty million people use the research always ongoing into you. That, that's what products are going to be in the future.

• 1:51:21Speaker 03

  And I want Spotify to lead that. So we've been investing in some of these products. The first one was AI DJ.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Where you can literally talk to Spotify, you can ask, you can say, you know, I want to go for a run. Give me some EDM playlist with big drops at a hundred and sixty BPM for, for my running cadence. And then earlier this year, we launched prompted playlists, which takes it one step further. We can build your own playlist using English language. You're literally writing your own algorithm. So if you want a playlist that goes out and looks at TikTok and what's trending right now, and takes that, filters it to your taste on Spotify, then removes any track you've already heard. You can literally do that today and you can, you can schedule it to update daily or weekly. So, so that's what we've done so far. And then today, what I talked about is sort of the next step, which is a taste profile.

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  This is what users have been asking us for forever.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:12Speaker 03

  So like hidden in all these systems, we have, we have a view of who you are. Musically and podcast wise and audiobook wise. But you could never actually see that. You can see hints of it in wrapped, but you can never actually see it. So the idea is pretty simple. We're just going to let you see who we think you are and then we're going to let you edit it in English and just say like, no, that's not true. I'm not like that anymore. I want to be like this.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes so much sense. Yeah, yeah. It makes so much sense from a personalization standpoint. I mean, Spotify has been doing machine learning for probably most of those twenty years. Uh, more, certainly more than ten. Um, what, what, how do you see yourself uh, integrating with what OpenAI is doing with Sora where there's a persona and a person, an individual can kind of decide. How their avatar is used. It feels like there's a natural extension here where not all artists, but some artists are going to want to go to you and say, hey, look, I'm a. I'm a rock musician, but if people want to listen to my songs remixed with AI as country songs, that's fine. As long as I keep getting a check, it's win win for everyone.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Has there been demand from musicians for that type of experience that feels like maybe the next year or later this year?

• 1:53:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, a hundred percent. So this is the other big topic. We just talked about consumer experience, but what about generative content? And of course, everyone is asking me about that and specifically music. And I think what's happening today is people can make net new songs using these services.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:43Speaker 03

  And that's great. I'm sure creators will, will, I'm sure most creators are already using these tools, whether they they say so or not.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  That's a big, sorry, sorry to interrupt, but that's, that's a big thing because you. Uh, there's this massive in in tech, like, you know, traditional tech. People will tell you they're using an AI tool, even if they're not really, right? They want to be constantly projecting like I'm using the best tools all the time. I'm using them more than you. I've got, you know, 10 Mac minis running. They'll tell you.

• 1:54:14Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 1:54:15Jordi Hays?

  But in music, it's like the exact opposite where like people are, from my experience, talking to musicians and people in the music industry, they're like. This is changing everything. It's crazy. It's magical. It's an amazing tool. But then they won't talk about it at all, right? That it's like, you know, they'll never.

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  That's exactly it. And and I I understand that. I have a lot of empathy for. For musicians and artists being scared because everything is changing and and change is scary. So, you know, I want to be clear that it's understandable that people have a lot of fear.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:49Speaker 03

  But the way we think about it is, you know, technology can can cause a lot of chaos. But if you can combine technology with a good business model, it can be very good for the world. So what I'm excited about is today, I think some artists that use these tools, they get help with creating that new music. But most of the existing artists, they just get no benefit from AI. And I think that seems wrong to me. I think what you mentioned, John, is if you're an existing artist, what many of them do today is they work with other people to do remixes and covers, right? Of their music. It's like existing IP. This is what you do in movies. Like existing IP is supposed to be the most valuable part, not the least valuable part.

• 1:55:32Speaker 03

  So I do think that many musicians, this will be Volantair, of course, will be very interested in letting their super fans play around with their music if they could compensate it correctly. It is the business model that needs to be figured out. And this is what Spotify did during piracy. We took the long painful route of not going the illegal route and figuring it out. It was hard and painful. This is what we want to do here as well.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it feels like, I mean, you hear these stories about breakout songs. There was a song called Old Town Road that sampled Nine Inch Nails. And I think the original artist that remixed that song didn't actually have the rights because he just sort of whipped it up on a weekend. But then, once the song exploded, the agencies came in and negotiated. And I think they accepted award on stage together and everyone was happy. But Spotify feels like in a unique place to actually unleash that level of collaboration in an economically, like, you know, safe way that everyone feels happy at the end of the day. I'm also interested in hearing about how social features are evolving on Spotify.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  It feels like with a lot of the generative AI projects, there's a lot of stuff that goes out broadly, but there's also a lot of, you're just having a new creative tool that allows you to tell, express yourself to a smaller audience. I find that a lot of the generative images that I put, I don't put them on my Instagram. I text them to a group chat. And I'm wondering how you see the social features changing on Spotify? Or where they are, how fast they're growing, anything that you can tell me about social on Spotify these days?

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  So you're completely right. We started investing. We actually had a lot of social features when we started.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:11Speaker 03

  The idea was to sort of approximate the experience of Napster, probably, on the content side. But then, sort of, you know, Facebook and your friend graph, because back then, friends were your main tool of recommendation.

• 1:57:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  And then your algorithms came and everyone got like an algorithmic friend and we didn't invest as much.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:30Speaker 03

  But since a few years back, we started investing a lot. Because we think that today, these media platforms, they're single-player experiences. They're kind of lonely. They're mostly passive. You sit and swipe and swipe and swipe until you're like falling asleep, right? We don't want services to be like that. We would like you to lean in. And we would like to turn Spotify into an interactive multiplayer experience. So, that sounds like hyperbole. What I mean with that? I mean features like Jam, which is growing like crazy for us, many, many, many tens of millions of users and still growing. Where you can join a queue and sort of have this shared music experience together. In the same place or actually remotely. And then you have something that's been around for a long time, which is collaborative playlists.

• 1:58:16Speaker 03

  Which have insane retention and engagement. Where people collaborate around the place and they want to talk about that. So, we are investing quite a lot in turning Spotify into this place where you are with your friends.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  Where you're not just by yourself. So, I'm a hundred percent with you. I'm very excited about trying to create sort of a more positive future, if that makes sense. One thing I really love about having worked at Spotify for twenty years is that we kind of lucked into music, which almost everyone agrees that music is a good in the world. There's very few people who think that music is bad. But then we kept that. You know, we went into podcasts because we thought it was like long-form discussions, people spoke in full sentences. It was very, the perfect counter to the shortification of media that was happening. And then, you know, last year we went into books in a big way. So we try to do things that we think are good for the world. Internally, we have some beliefs.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  Not all of which are public, because we want to keep some secrets. But one of them is no regrets. We focus on content that has very little regret.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys are, to me, you guys are the anti-slop. Company, platform, and there's not any, there really aren't any of them left. You could go on, you can go on LinkedIn now and you could spend 24 hours straight scrolling through

• 1:59:36Speaker 03

  You'd read my slide.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Short form video. And, and so, talk, talk to us about running, running a company where it feels like you're constantly making decisions to avoid doing things that would almost certainly get a lot of engagement and usage, but aren't necessarily aligned with the kind of core values of the company. Because eventually companies get 20 years in and they just start doing things that are just optimizing for all those metrics and a lot of that, uh, every, everyone has, you know, incredible values until you're a public company and, and you've got all these, you know, different incentives.

• 2:00:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's so true. And that is a risk. That, that's one of the benefits of me and, and the other co-CEO Alex Nordstrom, having been at this company for like 17, 18 years. And so, you know, those, those values are, are ingrained in us. Now, the way we think about it is, I think it's both something that is very motivating for, for me as a person and for many of our employees, but it has also to be aligned with their business model, right? And it is, because Spotify in terms of revenue is majority a subscription service, you know, close to 90% of the revenue is from a subscription. And if you think about what that means, it means that a Spotify user, every month, they're going to vote with their wallet. And if you ask yourself the question, when you vote, what are you, to, to pay for something,

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  uh, what are you, what is it that you're going to pay for? Are you going to pay for time spent? I, I don't think so. You know, when we survey users for the different services out there, I won't say which one, but many of the big services, even young people regret 70% of the time they spend there. On Spotify, they regret less than 3%, right?

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:01:20Speaker 03

  And I think if you're going to pay for something, you're not going to pay for something you regret. That's like a, that's an oxymoron, right? So it's very, it's very aligned with our business model. I actually think you pay for What you want to be, something aspirational, right? So, so I think it's both a value that we have, but it is actually very much aligned with the business model. I think if we were ninety percent an advertising model, the pressure to maximize for engagement would be very tricky. So it's both a value and something that actually works for us. So, so we're just leaning into that because we think it's a differentiated proposition. And right now, I feel like the need for, for low regret content is increasing, not decreasing.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's such a, it's such a wildly different experience going into the Spotify app for me, where it's always like, it's always intentional. I'm coming in and like, I'm doing the thinking around what, what, what content do I want to consume? And that is just completely opposite to every other app that I use, which is deciding basically on the fly, what is going to keep him, what is going to keep him in the app as much as possible? And that's not necessarily.

• 2:02:29Speaker 03

  That's why I'm so excited about this, the user control, right? Because I think it's very aligned with that, to give back control to the user, like now you control the algorithm. It's tricky, but that's the path we're going. Uh, because it's very much aligned with, uh, no regrets. If you can tell ahead of time what you want Spotify to do, you're not gonna, you know, chances that you regret that are very low. And, and we've seen this, people saying like, you know, when we test this internally, the taste profile, one of the people I spoke to said, I used to be into classical music a lot when I was younger. But then the Spotify algorithm, like it, it preferred popular music, so I fell out of it. I went into my taste profile and just said, I want the classical shelf on my homepage every day. Yeah.

• 2:03:12Speaker 03

  And now they're back into it because now that's what they get offended. And I think that's very cool when you can like game yourself to what you actually want to be.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I wouldn't have predicted that Spotify would be the first one to have that sort of like natural language control over your feed. People have been demanding that in, in, across all different social media platforms. Threads launched something where you can say, dear Threads, and then it will update.

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Dear algo.

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  Dear algo, that's it, dear algo. Um, but, but, but yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:03:39Speaker 03

  I think it's because of the advertising model for us. If we, the risk here is that the user takes control and says something that lowers engagement a bit.

• 2:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:48Speaker 03

  For us, it's fine because they pay per month.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Speaker 03

  We don't monetize the engagement directly for the most part.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  That I think is the key.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what's the biggest misconception about Spotify right now?

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  Oh, the biggest misconception. Oh, not now. Okay, you'll have to stop me. I'll get up on my little soapbox here. This is something that has hurt me so much for so many years. Because we got it wrong. This is about artist payouts and the idea that we pay less to artists than other companies. And for the longest time, you know, this has gone back a long time. People talked about per stream payouts and so forth. And the sort of advice at the time was you shouldn't engage because you only bring more attention to the matter. And if we just keep paying more than anyone else, the record is going to set itself straight. That doesn't happen. What happens when you leave a narrative like that forever is that it becomes truth, right? So I kind of want to set that straight.

• 2:04:44Speaker 03

  So if you look at Spotify, we've paid out over seventy billion dollars to the music industry. Eleven billion of those just last year. I want to be clear, that's more than anyone has paid anyone ever in the music industry. So like, the music industry is bigger than it ever was. People talk about the heydays of the eighties and the CD era, but the music industry is bigger than that. And not only that, you know, in the CD era, the sort of distributor, the record store, they, you know, we give about seventy percent of what we make back to the music industry. If we bring in one dollar, we get about seventy cents to the music industry. The record store, if you wanted to be at the front of the record store, could keep seventy percent or a hundred.

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  So like, the pie is bigger and the share of the pie that goes to the music industry is bigger than it ever was. And so when I tell that to people, they're like, huh, but I keep hearing that you guys pay less per stream, right? Like, you're evil somehow, aren't you?

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:40Speaker 03

  And my point is like, and this is not backed by public data. No one in the industry pays per stream. We all pay per user. And we all pay roughly seventy percent per user. You know, Apple, Amazon, YouTube, all of them. The thing is Spotify has almost three to four times the amount of usage per user of our competitors, which is crazy to me, actually. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe it, but now it's backed by public data. So what happens if you take the same amount of money, but we divide it by three to four times more streams?

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:13Speaker 03

  Of course, our per stream is going to be lower. But that's because people use the product more. And the solution to that isn't to make the product three, four times worse to gain the per stream metric, or raise the price three, four times, because that would just be bad for the entire music industry. So this is the misconception I wanna set straight. No one pays per stream, we all pay per user, and we happen to have much more engagement per user than the other platforms. And they've actually sort of weaponized and used this against us to say like, we pay more, more than Spotify per stream.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:45Speaker 03

  That's, that's important.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the evolution of Spotify's role with live events? I feel like in the age of AI, the recommendations get even better, because I listen to a lot of different genres. I don't go to a lot of different genres of concerts. There's definitely bands that I listen to where I'm like, I'm too old for that mosh pit, I'm not going to a heavy metal concert, but I would love to go to this.

• 2:07:08Speaker 03

  You're not too old for the mosh pit.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Yeah, we'll, we'll go to the Sleep Token concert together. But, but, but it does feel like, like Spotify will be in an increasingly more interesting role in actually surfacing awareness around live in-person events, which also might get more important in an age of AI, in an age of unlimited content. You might actually see this barbell effect where there's endless content and then very unique experiences in the real world. What do you think about live events?

• 2:07:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I think you're a hundred percent right.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:07:46Speaker 03

  And two things there I think are important. You know, if everything in the world is kind of a power law, right?

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Speaker 03

  You have the endless, the endless long tail.

• 2:07:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:54Speaker 03

  But you also have a very big head.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:56Speaker 03

  So, you know, people ask me like, are Netflix or YouTube winning? I'm like, both. The biggest Netflix shows are bigger than ever, monoculture. And YouTube is bigger than that. And the same is true in music, right?

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  So there are more indie artists than there has ever been.

• 2:08:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:08Speaker 03

  But Taylor Swift is bigger than anyone has ever been. And the era tour is the biggest thing that ever happened.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:12Speaker 03

  So people want me to say it's one or the other.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:15Speaker 03

  And it's actually both. And I think you're, you're, you're right, because I think what's happening is, and, and this will probably be exaggerated even more with generative content. As people get more and more individual content, which they like,

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:26Speaker 03

  they also feel more and more lonely. So the need for like shared experiences increases. And this is just not me theorizing. We're actually selling tickets on Spotify since a few years back.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:37Speaker 03

  Because we have such good data on who Taylor Swift's very biggest fan. That, that is one person in the world. In terms of streams. Actually, it's right.

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  That is, yes.

• 2:08:46Speaker 03

  So, so we've been selling tickets for a while. And we've sold one and a half billion dollars worth of tickets now.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:08:52Speaker 03

  And that is increasing quickly, which proves your point. Like live events are becoming more popular than ever and bigger than ever. And for many artists, the fact that we're selling tickets is very important. Because for many artists, especially both big ones and up and coming ones, it can be more than 50% of their income. So you, you have the royalties from, from, from us. But touring is a very big part of most artists' income.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Or is, is Spotify uniquely well-equipped to enter the live ticketing market? Because you come from an origin where you had to do big deals with big organizations. And it was not this permissionless company that some other platforms have engaged with. You, you had to go to the table in Hollywood and sit down with these folks. And it feels like you sort of have to do that again if you want to sell ever more tickets.

• 2:09:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny that you say, you know, we've never been this permissionless company. That is true and has been painful. Watching other people just run with like, you know, whatever illegal content or something. They're so fast, but over time it's

• 2:09:54Jordi Hays?

  It catches up to them.

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, it has in many cases. But you're right, we are well positioned to work with that industry. And right now, we're actually selling for all of them. You know, we're an aggregator. We're an aggregator of content and we're an aggregator of concert tickets. So I think we're really well positioned. We're already telling most artists where they should tour, in which cities they have the most fans, and which songs they love. And now it's pretty natural for us to help them actually sell tickets. Obviously, the scalping problem is enormous and that's something where we are really well positioned to help. The analogy I like to make is that your stream count is like proof of work in crypto. It's very hard to fake your stream count, right? So using that, I think, is very important and we want to work with the live industry.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're like, oh, you want to buy tickets to this artist that you've not streamed a single time? It's like, I don't know about that.

• 2:10:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. And the artists, they absolutely, we've done some of our own events, you know, for smaller events for just the super fans sometime. And you can tell the difference in the room when it's just like the stalker level fans in the room.

• 2:11:01Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk, I want to get your kind of high level view on podcasting, how it's evolving.

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  I started doing some work with podcasts when I was in college back in 2017. At that time, it felt late to me.

• 2:11:18Speaker 03

  It always does, but it really is.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  It always feels late. Of course, I was totally wrong that the biggest deals and many of the biggest shows were still to come. And you guys obviously made a splash with some of the larger acquisitions in the space. But how are you processing the industry today?

• 2:11:38Speaker 03

  So what what happened that was very interesting for us is we looked at the podcasting industry. Actually, the way we came about it was, you know, we we found a lot of our best features looking at either our our users, what they do. Or the publishers start uploading like audiobooks in Germany. What is that? And then we realized there is demand for audiobooks. The podcast is a case of looking at our developers because they're this unique crowd that are often early adopters of trends. And they have the power to just build what they want to see in the world. And we saw them sort of hacking podcasts into the main Spotify app again and again on HackWigs. So we started looking at the podcasting industry and we saw that it was it was amazing. It was this amazing pool of fantastic long form content.

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  And very good creators, but it was just sort of left for dead. So we decided to go in there and bet that if we supported it. It would grow and that worked out. We we grew like crazy for for what was then called sort of traditional podcasts, audio podcasts. Then what happened was, and Joe Rogan was always the first with this, many podcasts started doing video. But for a long time, it was just Joe Rogan. And the interesting thing is because we had Joe Rogan on our platform, we had to build video support. It was partially thanks to him that we did it because he was like, I can't be without video. If you want the show, it has to be video. We're like, oh shit, are we going to build a full video stack for one podcast? I guess we are. Yeah. And then we built it. Yeah.

• 2:12:57Speaker 03

  But that was very lucky for us because then we could see what video podcasts, how they performed on the platform. And we saw that people listen a lot in the background and they dip in and out. And we're like, huh, this is probably where the whole thing is going. So we started investing more. And then all the creators started doing video. Yeah. So what's interesting for us is that the audio podcast market was this like, I don't know, couple of billion dollar market. It wasn't that big. Yeah. But because audio became video. They they kind of pushed us into a much bigger market, which is video, which is, you know, 10 times bigger at least, one tube orders of magnitude. So for us, it was like a gift that the creators quote unquote forced us to get into this bigger market. Yeah.

• 2:13:38Speaker 03

  So we're very happy about it. And what we find from creators like yourselves is they they want to multi home. They want distribution. They want to be on all the platforms. Yep. And that's always been our, you know, in music, we were always, all the artists were multi home. All the book, all the book authors we have, they're multi home. So that's our strategy. And then in terms of what we've done that really changed the trajectory for us is, yes, technically, we could have video podcasts for a long time. But as you guys know, who are into the details, audio podcasts used to monetize in a certain way with audio ads. And what happened was when you couldn't have your dynamic audio ads, the DAI,

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  when you went to video, actually, the weird thing is you put video on Spotify and you would make less money.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:14:26Speaker 03

  Which is completely wrong because the users loved it. So your experience got better, but you made less money.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  So finally, beginning of 2025, we solved that because what we said was, okay, we're just going to pay out of the premium pool.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:38Speaker 03

  For video podcasts. So now you don't have to stuff ads into the podcast as much. So your user experience gets better, your retention goes up.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:45Speaker 03

  But you don't have compromise in economics. We're going to pay as much. And that really, that made all the video podcasts come on board Spotify.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've been kind of beating the drum on. We think there's a lot more shows to make like TBPF. Basically, look at any, because in many ways, we've done some interesting things on the formatting side.

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  You've done a lot of interesting things.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  But we just took what had worked in many ways.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  And TV.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  On traditional cable. And I think that every single show on traditional cable is just sort of waiting to be rebuilt for the Spotify platform and other platforms. So I think that lots more innovation to come.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  This is such an innovative format. It's awesome. I watch it every day. And you know, because you guys published the whole thing to Spotify, I catch up.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  No, it's amazing. I love when we get a Spotify comment that is clearly someone who watched the video because they noticed something that you would only, it wasn't really in the audio feed, but they were clearly watching in video.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, you said creators want to be multi-home.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  But I disagree. I wish we'd lived in a world where there was just Spotify and we could just focus all of our energy there.

• 2:15:55Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll take that. I'll take it.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  So keep it up. You've got more work to do.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Oh, well, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of South by Southwest. Say hello to everyone for us and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:16:03Speaker 03

  Take care.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Oops, gusto.com. That's the wrong one.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  The unified platform for payroll and benefits and HR built for to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. We are joined now by Tim. Thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:16:32John Coogan?

  First time on the show, please introduce yourself.

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, Tim Caddigan, CEO of GoFundMe. Thank you very much for having me.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Tell me a little bit about your journey to GoFundMe. What was your backstory?

• 2:16:40Speaker 06

  I started, you know, I came to Stanford in the mid 90s. Got sucked into the internet really early.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Non-traditional background.

• 2:16:48Speaker 06

  Did some startup stuff, ended up going to Yahoo, ran the ad business at Yahoo, then went to another startup.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  What we got, you see this?

• 2:16:56Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  We're huge fans.

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  You know that sound, we love Yahoo.

• 2:16:59Speaker 06

  Not wearing a lot of purple, being a redhead, that never worked.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, five great years there. Went to do my own startup in the ad space, OpenX, built that up. That was great.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:09Speaker 06

  But got to thinking, hey, I want to do something completely different. I had, I'd become a search and rescue volunteer around 2010, up here in the mountains in San Gabriel's. I loved that. And I was thinking, hey, could I kind of run a company that also was really useful and helpful to people?

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Speaker 06

  Somehow got that GoFundMe job. Started March 2nd, 2020.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:17:31Speaker 06

  The pandemic, I mean, mayhem and just what a lesson in how valuable the platform is.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  You were joining right as I'm sure there was just a surge because of all the dislocations.

• 2:17:42Speaker 06

  It was literally, it was that week where I think the world realized that this was global.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:48Speaker 06

  I had four days to meet people. On the Friday, I'm like, we'd better go remote. I thought it would be like three weeks. And then it was, you know, a year or so. And yes, demand, I mean, the need of people on the platform and all the expected ways, the medical stuff, but also small businesses.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:06Speaker 06

  Tens of thousands of restaurants, bars, music venues, having to furlough employees and lots of fundraisers being created, often by their patrons who are like, we love this restaurant. It's our favorite local restaurant.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was actually, that was, that was the silver lining of that moment was how much excitement and willingness there was from people that were in a better situation during COVID. Or maybe they were had chaos in their own life, but they still wanted to go out of their way.

• 2:18:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  And, and the ingenuity of. Of individuals and businesses to like come up with ways to like make these kind of exchanges.

• 2:18:42Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, it's actually, it's you bring up the silver lining point like the silver. That's often the case that when something difficult happens in our lives or in a community or a natural disaster. The silver lining, and there really is not a lot of silver lining, but one is people want to come together and help each other to face that situation. And we see that again and again, whether it be an individual situation or like what happened here in LA.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  I was about to ask you about the fire. I know Watch Duty was on there. Is that correct?

• 2:19:09Speaker 06

  Oh, my God. I mean, you know, what so many, so many nonprofits were helping. I live in Altadena, which is one of the towns.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  I live in Pasadena.

• 2:19:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. So you know, like we lost 6,000 homes. We evacuated, you know, 20 minutes in.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  I know dozens of people personally.

• 2:19:23Speaker 06

  Exactly. And we saw 260 million dollars raised for 10,000 families, churches, local businesses, and for the nonprofits like Watch Duty, Salvation Army, Wall Central Kitchen, so many people coming in and helping. It has been amazing to see in case of my town, the community coming together and saying, you know, we care about each other and we're going to find a way through this.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  So what's the case study for a GoFundMe project that goes that goes perfectly? There's a lot of, you know, I'm sure there's a lot of rough edges around where does the money go and what conditions does the money get released? All these different things that you have to grapple with. What does your team look like? And then how is technology making that easier?

• 2:20:08Speaker 06

  I think you got about seven questions in there, but let's go to the first one. What is a good fund? I mean, a really, a really good campaign is you put together a story. So GoFundMe is first and foremost a storytelling platform. You tell a clear story of who you are, what the situation is, what you need in terms of the help, i.e. the funds, and what it's going to go to. And then you. Put that on the internet and then you tell people about it. And this is, we actually launched yesterday this product called the Smart Fundraising Coach.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:38Speaker 06

  Which we can talk about more, but it helps with every single one of these steps.

• 2:20:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:20:42Speaker 06

  And then you get attention.

• 2:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:43Speaker 06

  And you start with the people you know, your friends, your family, your neighbors.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:20:48Speaker 06

  People in your church, in your sports team, whatever it is. And then you build support from there, you build momentum, you hopefully achieve what you're looking for. Maybe you exceed that.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:57Speaker 06

  And then throughout that process, you set up to receive the money, set up for transfers, which could be you, if it's for you. Let's say I set it up for you. I'd set it up for you, you would get an invitation to set up your account to be KYC'd.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:10Speaker 06

  To receive the funds. All the funds go to our payment processes with Adyen and Stripe. They sit there until you've been KYC'd and the money flows to you and you get the help. It's what we call help delivered.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, there, there's so much fear around AI right now. And oftentimes that people end up overlooking all the incredible parts of it. And that's a good example of uh, anyone in the world being able to be like walked through and basically get their hand held through this process. That is a deeply, you know, if you're going and setting up a raise, it's usually not because of uh, you know, it could be some like emergency or, or really stressful situation. And so being able to give people that kind of uh, just like one-on-one guidance.

• 2:21:59Speaker 06

  It's exactly, so I had this sort of a couple of years ago, well, we have a team that helps some clients. We have a customer success team that can help some, but we have like 10,000, 10,000 people a day setting up a GoFundMe. Like we can't.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12Speaker 06

  Deliver that from everyone.

• 2:22:13Jordi Hays?

  You can't call with everyone, that's too many people.

• 2:22:14Speaker 06

  My point to the team is like, look, AI, we can, we could do that now. We could give every single person who is considering asking for help. And asking for help is tough, like none of us like it. We were just talking in the back, like, does any of us like asking for help? No, like we don't like it. It's hard, it's psychologically difficult. Can we give them the functional and the emotional help to go through that process? So that's what we've built.

• 2:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:22:39Speaker 06

  A lot of trial and error, actually. Like a lot of people think you plug the AI and it's better. It's not like that. It's taken many months because we have to find not just the. The functional like, hey, it's time to pick your title.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:53Speaker 06

  Now it's time to share, which is one of the most difficult things. We often have to find the right tone.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Speaker 06

  To do that empathetically, to help someone through those steps in the process so that they can get the help they need.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  What about AI on the donor side? I'm thinking about if I show up and I'm like, is this the right Jordy Hayes? Is this his, is this his campaign? Tell me more that might not just be on the landing page already filled out by him. Are you looking at that?

• 2:23:21Speaker 06

  So the main way we're using AI on the donor side is to verify that the people who are paying in money are actually the right people.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:23:28Speaker 06

  Doing all of those things to validate the pay-ins.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:31Speaker 06

  That's both a combination of us.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:33Speaker 06

  And the payment providers, the banks who are the backend of us. So that's the main use. You know, what you're talking about is sort of more discovery.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:40Speaker 06

  Which is still early days.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:42Speaker 06

  I mean, most supporters of fundraisers. Know the person.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:47Speaker 06

  Right? They, they know either very close.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:50Speaker 06

  Relationship or they know them through someone. That's about eighty, ninety percent of fundraising.

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:55Speaker 06

  Is it's really, what we're doing is we're modernizing a timeless thing that we've done for each other, which is if you used to live in a village and someone was in hard times.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:04Speaker 06

  You, you put some money in the bank.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Pass the hat.

• 2:24:05Speaker 06

  Pass the hat.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:06Speaker 06

  Right?

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:07Speaker 06

  That's what we're doing now. So mostly the sort of social proofing is through relationship networks.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  What's the tax treatment on a GoFundMe campaign?

• 2:24:17Speaker 06

  There are no goods or services though, so there are no taxes.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  There are no taxes.

• 2:24:20Speaker 06

  That's right. It's a gift.

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:22John Coogan?

  Well, how has the actual team evolved post-COVID? It sounds like you came in and you immediately made the team remote. Are you now in a hybrid setup?

• 2:24:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. How has that evolution?

• 2:24:32Speaker 06

  I mean, you know, we found our way through it. I mean, we were always quite a distributed company. So we had LA, Bay Area.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:40Speaker 06

  San Diego, we got Chicago, we got folks in.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  And is that because of talent or because of the customer base? Like why?

• 2:24:46Speaker 06

  It was a bit of talent. So the original GoFundMe was set up in San Diego.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:50Speaker 06

  Brad and Andy set it up back in 2010.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:53Speaker 06

  Then we needed great talent, so we also needed to go to the Bay Area. Now, for example, we have a really amazing hundred-person engineering and data science team in Buenos Aires down in Argentina, which is just, they're crushing it.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:05Speaker 06

  So we are inherently distributed.

• 2:25:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:07Speaker 06

  So the, the work reflects that. We figured our way through it. Pretty well.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:12Speaker 06

  Pretty well.

• 2:25:12Jordi Hays?

  What uh what's different about running a company like GoFundMe that's doing uh a lot of like good in the world and uh good, you know, every Silicon Valley company can paint a picture of how like they're saving the world, but you guys are actually, you know, providing a service that that uh is making a meaningful

• 2:25:31John Coogan?

  There's probably dozens of GoFundMes that are like literally pay for my cancer medications, like literally cure my cancer.

• 2:25:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Uh and then there's a lot of AI companies that are saying, well, we'll cure cancer one day.

• 2:25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:41Jordi Hays?

  What uh have other companies in the industry like software vendors or payment providers?

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Do they do they chip in on their side? Like, are you able to negotiate like lower lower rates?

• 2:25:56Speaker 06

  No, no. You know, hey, if guy if works out they're listening.

• 2:25:59Jordi Hays?

  Really? Are you serious?

• 2:26:00Speaker 06

  No, they're selling. I mean, they're selling their products and services.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know, but but uh.

• 2:26:04Speaker 06

  You know, we get a little bit like people do like to talk about working with us because generally it's regarded as a good thing. But that's at the margin, honestly.

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  He's a big fan of oligopolies and payment processing, apparently.

• 2:26:15Speaker 06

  Uh but we have great, we have great partners, so I understand, you know, they need to run their businesses and we appreciate them. Um what what's different?

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would, yeah, no, I would just think that, you know, if I was like a CRM provider, I might not be trying to max get the maximum amount of value out of, you know, a platform like GoFundMe.

• 2:26:35Speaker 06

  Well, maybe they're not getting the maximum, but you know, they're generally, you know, doing their thing.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  What about the service area of GoFundMe? Um I mean, there's other platforms that people use to raise money. I mean, I did a crowdfunding campaign for a food product at one point.

• 2:26:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  Uh but people do have a board game project, have a movie, and there's this somewhat of a fuzzy line between uh a GoFundMe and something like a Kickstarter. Or have you thought about broadening out? Do you want to stay narrow? How important is it to define what the brand is and is not?

• 2:27:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're right. And we do see people fundraising for local businesses.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:27:07Speaker 06

  Quite a bit, like, you know, local restaurant that people love, maybe it's hit a rough patch or a bookshop or something like that. But you're right, kind of business startup stuff.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was a time when crowdfunding was pre-seed stage funding or like a signal that you could send to your investors. Like the original Oculus VR headset was on Kickstarter.

• 2:27:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  And then sold to Meta for a billion dollars. And that's a very different thing.

• 2:27:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, it tends to be low. We saw a hundred thousand fundraisers for small, but definitely local businesses.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  But you have the platform. Have you thought about expanding?

• 2:27:38Speaker 06

  You know, we've still got so much to work to do. So we have expanded. So back in twenty two, we acquired a company called Classy, which does fundraising software for nonprofits.

• 2:27:46John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:27:47Speaker 06

  So I mean, that if you look at the industry, TAM in the US, it's about two percent of GDP. Six hundred billion dollars is given.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Given.

• 2:27:55Speaker 06

  The vast majority by consumers. Most of that is given to nonprofit organizations.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  The vast majority is by consumers, not billionaires who are writing massive checks.

• 2:28:04Speaker 06

  Most of it is given by by consumers.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:07Speaker 06

  And most of that goes to nonprofit organizations. GoFundMe obviously started and we're best known for helping individuals ask for help. Now, those individuals generally ask for themselves or someone else, but increasingly they're asking for a nonprofit. That was our fastest growing category last year was individuals, like I just did one for WatchDuty because I think what John and team are doing is amazing. And they super supported us. So that's a trend.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:28:33Speaker 06

  But our main focus has been making consumer fundraising ever better, which is why we launched the coach yesterday and continue to innovate there. And then helping nonprofits fundraise more successfully. So.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, by building basically a network of other people who can fundraise.

• 2:28:48Speaker 06

  Well, that's the thing. That's the cool thing is like this intersection between those two things. Because the average age of a nonprofit donor in America today is about sixty four. And nonprofits want to get more young people interested and connected. But a lot of young folks don't necessarily just want to donate. They want to do something. So we've given them the ability to organize, sort of enlist an army of supporters who fundraise for them. So I'll give you an example, like American Cancer Society came to us and said, hey, we want to do something like this. We've had like. Eighty, eighty eight thousand people organize a fundraiser where they're swimming or walking or riding or walking the dog for the benefit of ACS, which raises money, but even more importantly,

• 2:29:33Speaker 06

  it spreads the word. Because if, if you're telling me, I really care about ACS, it affected my family in this way, I'm doing this run this, over this month, would you support me? I'm gonna think, hey, I'm gonna trust that because I know John and I know ACS. I call it the double trust.

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:29:51Jordi Hays?

  Like SPVs, SPVs for nonprofits.

• 2:29:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's kind of, you know, it's, it's expanding the aperture of how you generate awareness and support.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  What about political fundraising? How does that work today? Is it not allowed on the platform?

• 2:30:06Speaker 06

  Very limited and it's country by country. Very, because we're in twenty countries and the rules are very, very variable. So it will depend. Some countries just not allowed, some it is allowed in very specific ways, but frankly, it's not a significant thing for us at all. We don't see much of it.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  It is not an area of interest, it's just a different.

• 2:30:24Speaker 06

  Not really. I mean, there are pretty well-known and well-used platforms that focus on that, so we don't, we don't see much of it. We don't, don't honestly expect to.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  What about the future of the company? How is the company structured? Where do you want to see it go?

• 2:30:36Speaker 06

  Well, we think there's a lot more help to generate in the world. I mean, our mission is very simple, help people, help each other. And we think that, it's, it's interesting, you had Travis earlier, because they're a good example. Uber, Airbnb is another one, where it's a company that has taken a behavior that was frankly frowned upon. Like, remember when you were a kid? One of the things you were always told not to do.

• 2:30:58John Coogan?

  Don't get in a car with a stranger.

• 2:30:59Speaker 06

  Ever get in a stranger's car. And certainly, don't ever go to a stranger's house. Well, that's normal.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Now you're taking Airbnb.

• 2:31:07Speaker 06

  Exactly. So in our case, you know, it's, it's not so, asking for help and doing it in public is still not a comfortable and normal thing. And so we're sort of expanding the aperture of like, no, actually.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  But GoFundMe does have a different aesthetic to it. It's, it's, it's, oh, you're doing a GoFundMe, like, this is a normal thing. It feels much more normalized. Yeah, yeah, no, you're still building toward that, but you're on the path.

• 2:31:30Speaker 06

  We are, and every customer I've talked to, I say, every single one, has said something like. This was really hard for me to do.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  If someone just put on their Instagram story like, hey, please send me money, that's very different than like, hey, I'm doing a GoFundMe for this specific thing. You can go here, there's a lot of details. You know that it's on legit payment rails.

• 2:31:46Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  There's accountability.

• 2:31:48Speaker 06

  But there's still a lot of work to do in that journey. So that, we think we can do a lot more of that. And where, as I mentioned, we're in 20 countries. Some of those countries are still early and adopting and growing quick. Germany, for example, is taking off very quickly. There's more countries. And then nonprofits, like there's a lot more work to help nonprofits who is needed now as ever. And we only offer our nonprofit solutions in the US today.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:32:12Speaker 06

  So we got a lot more there. And then we got some other ideas, you know?

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very cool. I mean, it just, I can imagine it massively increasing the efficiency of nonprofits on the fundraising side because they have, instead of having to build out, you know, all this, you know, they still have to hire their own staff to support fundraising, but now they get all this kind of like off balance sheet kind of effort.

• 2:32:35Speaker 06

  We can help amplify. We can help, we do a lot of storytelling. We do that on behalf of our regular consumer customers. Now we can help to tell the stories of our nonprofits in certain situations. And that helps them get awareness and get more support.

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  Well, Tim, thank you so much for taking the time to come down.

• 2:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:32:51Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 2:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:32:52John Coogan?

  Hopefully I'll see you in Pasadena soon.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Are you still doing your watch duty fundraiser? You should do it.

• 2:32:59Speaker 06

  It's still running.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  Okay, we gotta donate to that.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  I love when I'm not a DM of watch duty.

• 2:33:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  You never know when you're.

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:33:09Speaker 06

  Absolutely, you never know.

• 2:33:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm in Malibu, so we had a crazy time last year.

• 2:33:13Speaker 06

  I hope you guys are doing okay.

• 2:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, luck with me both.

• 2:33:16John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:33:17Speaker 06

  Take care, guys.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you all about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made it easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And without further ado, we are joined by Nick Heserora from Palo Alto Networks. Good to meet you. Welcome to the show. Thank you. For those who might not be familiar with a little bit of your journey, I'd love to kind of get everyone up to speed on what you were doing before. And then I want to spend a lot of time talking about just the. Transformation, if you can call it that, of Palo Alto Networks, where the business is today. But maybe take us back a little bit.

• 2:33:55Speaker 07

  Where do you want to go? How far back?

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Uh, well, I know you handled business at Google, but uh...

• 2:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's go even, even, even, let's go back to the very beginning.

• 2:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:04Speaker 07

  As far, no, I grew up in India.

• 2:34:06John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:34:06Speaker 07

  As you might know, came here to go to business school.

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:09Speaker 07

  It was a tough time.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:10Speaker 07

  You couldn't get a job.

• 2:34:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:11Speaker 07

  In 1992, it was one of the recessions in the country.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:14Speaker 07

  So, I wrote 400 plus letters, and those times, you guys are younger than me.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Cold letters?

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  Cold letters.

• 2:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Cold letters.

• 2:34:22Speaker 07

  You, you, you could email.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:25Speaker 07

  You had to go, I had to rent a Mac for three months.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  No, you rented a computer.

• 2:34:29Speaker 07

  I rented a computer.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:30Speaker 07

  I found 400 addresses of hiring people.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:34Speaker 07

  And I would sit down, write the letters, type them out, go print them out.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:40Speaker 07

  Put them in envelopes, stuff envelopes, and mail them.

• 2:34:43Jordi Hays?

  It's such a different dopamine loop during a cold letter versus, because cold email is amazing.

• 2:34:48Speaker 07

  There's a reason.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  You send, no, no, I know, I know, but I'm saying like, today, kids are used to like, okay, I gotta write this email. Maybe they use AI now.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  Mail merge.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  But then like, oftentimes, like, for me, I either respond like, like, within like, 30 seconds, or 30 days.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  But uh, but like, you know, you quickly kind of get on, get on that loop, but sending an actual letter out, and then just kind of praying and, and waiting for maybe, you know...

• 2:35:11Speaker 07

  Every day, I'd get stacks of them back. I got, I still have them. I have 400 rejections from 1992.

• 2:35:17John Coogan?

  Wait, 400 letters, all rejections?

• 2:35:19Speaker 07

  Yes. They only got one job, right?

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:22Speaker 07

  Many of the others said no, so I had 400 rejections and I keep them.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  So, so where's...

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  How many of the companies are still, still around?

• 2:35:28Speaker 07

  Some of them are.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30Speaker 07

  Some of them you wouldn't want to work for. But I sometimes run into people, and one guy who started Private Equity, Private Equity Fund after, and I remembered his name at the bottom of the letter.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:35:41Speaker 07

  So I was sitting and having a meeting, I said, "You do realize that he rejected me in 1992?"

• 2:35:45John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:35:46Speaker 07

  And I was an advisor to a company at Barr.

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  I don't hold a grudge. I don't hold grudges.

• 2:35:48Speaker 07

  No, I didn't hold a grudge. I'm glad, I have to say thank you to all of them, right?

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:35:52Speaker 07

  God forbid I'd gone to work for someone.

• 2:35:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, where do you, where'd you end, where'd you end up?

• 2:35:55Speaker 07

  I ended up at Fidelity Investments, right out of business school, and even there, I got rejected from six people I wrote to in the company. Thankfully, they had no common HR system or whatever, career system.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 2:36:06Speaker 07

  The seventh guy hired me.

• 2:36:07John Coogan?

  Great. This is a pretty E S system.

• 2:36:09Speaker 07

  "Her resume looks interesting. We should talk to her." He couldn't tell that my name's male or female.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, yeah.

• 2:36:15Speaker 07

  So I signed up for that, and...

• 2:36:19Speaker 07

  When I was, when I was business school.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:20Speaker 07

  I was applying, I'd get phone calls like I went to Northeastern, so I get a call, hey. Uh, so we're just double checking, uh, you know, how was your time in Northwestern? Why did you say Boston? I'm like, that's Northeastern. Oh, I'm so sorry, I've got another call.

• 2:36:33John Coogan?

  I got the exact same thing. I went to Northeastern.

• 2:36:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  I'm not gonna correct you.

• 2:36:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, keep going. So I had all kinds of stuff, but one of the calls told me.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:42Speaker 07

  You don't have enough finance on your resume to get a job on Wall Street. So I went back to school while I was working at Fidelity. I got a master's in finance, I got a CFA. And I was teaching a CFA class in nineteen ninety-five, ninety-six actually, ninety-six October. To do portfolio hedging and shit and this guy sitting in front of me said, oh, you work at Fidelity? I'm like, yeah, he's like, hey, do you know all these people? No. So they, they're on the fund management side. I'm like, oh, I don't work there, I'm a corporate finance degree.

• 2:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:09Speaker 07

  He's like, wait, you're teaching me a CFA level three and you work in corporate finance? I said, you wanna pass the exam? Discuss my credentials.

• 2:37:19Speaker 07

  To his credit, the next day I interviewed a partner.

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:37:22Speaker 07

  So I finally went to work in money management for two years and.

• 2:37:26Speaker 07

  Most interesting time, most boring time.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:28Speaker 07

  I just couldn't sit all day. Yeah, ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  So we're.

• 2:37:33Speaker 07

  We're in the internet boom.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, the internet boom.

• 2:37:35Speaker 07

  Henry Blodgett telling us that A O is gonna be the biggest company in the world, right?

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:39Speaker 07

  So I did that for two years, did well there, got bored, left. And I started, uh, one of the CEOs, I discovered telecoms at that time, one of the CEOs of the CEO of Deutsche Telekom said, come work with me. So I took my bags through to Germany to Bonn.

• 2:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:51Speaker 07

  And worked with him for five years. I started a mobile data startup at that point.

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  And the name of the company that you started there?

• 2:37:57Speaker 07

  It's called T-Motion.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  T-Motion.

• 2:37:58Speaker 07

  But that, that was a time, Deutsche Telekom, I worked on the team that acquired Voice Dream, which is now T-Mobile USA.

• 2:38:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:06Speaker 07

  So we did that, I worked there for four, five years and then I quit. I was tired of commuting from London to Germany and back as my thirties. And I was sitting in front of my watch out me and say, hey, I just headhunter calling me, there's a job.

• 2:38:21Speaker 07

  It's a company from the US. They just went public in some reverse Dutch auction type scenario. That job's too small for me. Do you want to go interview?

• 2:38:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, the guy was the CEO of T-Mobile, UK.

• 2:38:35Speaker 07

  So that was it. I met, I met that guy who became my associate, he interviewed me. I told him it's a really small office. And he said, well, why don't you have an interview here, then I'll take you to California and you can meet the founders. I'm like, okay. And then he calls me a week later and it's like, oh, Larry and Sergey are in town. They would love to see you. So they made sure the interview was not in the small office. So I met Sergey in the British Museum while walking around.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:38:59Speaker 07

  That's where I got interviewed. Then I came to California and then I met Eric Schmidt and Eric's like, it's interesting. You, your CV is very interesting, but looking for a head of Europe and the job is sales. I said, so should I just go back? And I have two days of interview. He's like, I don't, I'm not done sales. Should I just go back? It's like, no, no, no. We need smart people who can learn stuff. And that was 2004. So I was the first person hired off the IPO of any senior capacity and

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  In sales?

• 2:39:27Speaker 07

  I ran Google Europe.

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:29Speaker 07

  And slowly and steadily, like we grew Europe. And Europe was like,

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  And what was the shape of that role? Were you talking to the largest companies in Europe about just buying ad space?

• 2:39:38Speaker 07

  You want me, you want me to make it cool or you want to actually tell me what I?

• 2:39:42Speaker 07

  Both. Let's go with the role. Well, look, it's, it was a company just, the thing is, you're thinking of December 2004.

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:48Speaker 07

  The company's just gone public. It's worth 18 billion dollars.

• 2:39:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:51Speaker 07

  There's 2,000 employees.

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:53Speaker 07

  And Europe has like 180 people.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:56Speaker 07

  Every office is a rented Regis office, except for one in Dublin.

• 2:40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:00Speaker 07

  Wow. So what you're doing is you're like blocking and tackling. You're hiring people, you're getting offices, getting stature, getting stuff. And yeah, forget selling ad space, showing CEOs, showing companies, this is what Serge does.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  Oh, this is just work.

• 2:40:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's work.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just good deployment.

• 2:40:14Speaker 07

  In the five years I was there. We went from being twenty-five percent of Google's revenue to forty-six percent of Google's revenue.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:22Speaker 07

  I think in history, one of the few tech companies where Europe and US have the same market share.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:28Speaker 07

  So you have all these people come to here, you should ask them.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Speaker 07

  Generally, you spend a lot of time in the US, you get a large market share here, and then your share of Europe or the rest of the world is smaller. So we got there, and that's when kind of a whole bunch of movement happened. Sheryl Sandberg went to Facebook, Tim Armstrong went around AOL. I was kind of the last man standing.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:44Speaker 07

  So when my boss retired, Eric called me and says, "You think you should move here and become Chief Business Officer?"

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:50Speaker 07

  So I moved to California.

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:51Speaker 07

  That was two thousand.

• 2:40:52Jordi Hays?

  Most underrated title. Should be the chief of business. We joke, we joke about this all the time.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  It's like amazingly vague, but also incredibly important.

• 2:41:00Speaker 07

  But you know, I, I remember uh my first meeting with Larry when he became CEO. And he said, "Hey, come spend some time with me." So I spent a lot of time, put a beautiful presentation together, I'm gonna go be, sit down with Larry and explain everything we do.

• 2:41:16John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:41:16Speaker 07

  So I go there, and he's, we're talking about Hyperloops and vacuum-controlled tubes, and how you can get out of the car on every highway, that will improve the traffic situation in California. And I'm here like jumping in the bed, wanting to get my presentation.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:30Speaker 07

  Talking about Hyperloops. So, in the end, he says, "You know, Bill Campbell, who was a great guy, mentor to many people in the valley, says, "Bill tells me you're doing a good job at what you're doing. Uh, I got a lot of work to do and fix some product, because tech companies die if product doesn't work. No tech company became great because of sales and business." Says, "So you keep doing what you're doing, I'm sure if I had a few hours, I'd help you get your efficiency up and do it better, but I don't have the time." So I stood up and said, "Well, let me know when you have a few hours." That was that. Then thanked his credit man, because we had a great relationship, and, you know, his staff became ten product people, the CFO, the lawyer, and me. That was it.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:13Speaker 07

  No other function was represented. It's like, "You go take care of everything else. I want these product guys because I want to tell them what to build." And we could see what resulted in it.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  At any point early on, did you feel like Google was significantly overvalued?

• 2:42:30Speaker 07

  You know, I still think it's undervalued. I, it's kind of the enormity of what the potential was. Sometimes when you're in it, you don't see out of it.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:42:44Speaker 07

  It's hard to tell how big it's gonna become. But of course, in hindsight, it's wonderful. You can all say that was bound to happen. But the enormity of what we were doing was not apparent to people there. Like, you know, we bought YouTube. I remember sitting with Sal and Chad Hurley and saying, let's go buy Netflix.

• 2:43:02Speaker 07

  There's a story about that, but it's a different story. Sal was like, no, just give us 20 engineers and $5 million, we'll go build it. That's, every tech company has those kind of people. And, you know, they tried, but YouTube's

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Juggernaut.

• 2:43:14Speaker 07

  Big in its own right. So we were there when all this stuff was happening. And you can see, you know, I remember I tell the story that he met Steve Jobs and Steve said, if I give you one piece of advice, the word is focus. And they're like, no, we're gonna try a lot of things and see how many of them work. So, you know, there are many ways to, many ways to get to

• 2:43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. The head in the clouds philosophy like clearly did work for Google's sort of academic culture. Do you feel like that's the right characterization of Google? This, this, this academic, the 20% time, the lots of different projects, primordial soup to some degree? Did you try and continue that or was that?

• 2:43:55Speaker 07

  No, I think part of, is my opinion, and I'm sure a lot of people have, they do too. But I think the secret sauce is the consistent focus and product greatness. And that comes from the founders. You see, look, Travis here, I saw him earlier.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:09Speaker 07

  Companies take on the form of their leaders. And it's apparent in every company, and pretty much if you sat down, did an experiment, and I wrote down five objectives over here, which are company cultural characteristics, and I wrote down five here, which are founder characteristics, and I said, go match them. I bet many people will be able to match them because you can see the similarities between how leaders lead and how companies adopt to the culture of the leader.

• 2:44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:31Speaker 07

  So I think that's where Google's culture comes from, from the founders. And the founders were very product obsessed. You know, as you heard, like Larry didn't want to spend time on business. I remember him going to the first ad, all hands, and he walks up and says, I gotta tell you guys, I hate ads that are intrusive and they're bad. That's a great motivational thing. Everybody's guys wants to run out and go work in third. Because just told them what they do is not interesting to you.

• 2:44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:44:56Speaker 07

  But kind of, you look around, like, you know, every product that they built, they didn't look at monetizing it for a very long time until they believed the product had become ubiquitous.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:05Speaker 07

  And the product had become interesting. So I think that product obsession is part of the culture.

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:10Speaker 07

  I think that's partly because of where their secret sauce comes from. And now with the amount of resources they have, they can afford to do that for a very long time. But having said that, we did it even then, like, you know, Gmail had no monetization for years. Or Google Maps had no monetization for years.

• 2:45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:25Speaker 07

  It was growing like wildfire.

• 2:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So coming into Palo Alto Networks, did you?

• 2:45:30Speaker 07

  I did a little stop in the middle of Masa. I know Travis is talking easy money. I was part of the ether.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  You were taking shit.

• 2:45:36Speaker 07

  Yes, I was, but that was after Google.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  But, but coming into Palo Alto Networks.

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys ever, you, did you guys ever pass on a company?

• 2:45:42Speaker 07

  I passed on Uber.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:45:45Speaker 07

  I did.

• 2:45:45Jordi Hays?

  No way. What round, what round?

• 2:45:48Speaker 07

  It was sixteen or twenty billion all around.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:51Speaker 07

  And then I left in Masa, did the deal. I passed on Adam Newman. There's a book, I told my guy who's the analyst.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:56Speaker 07

  I said, listen, we're a tech investor.

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:58Speaker 07

  Anytime you bring me a business which is masquerading as a tech business, which is a commercial real estate business, you should go work there. Don't work in tech.

• 2:46:05John Coogan?

  Yep. That makes sense.

• 2:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Good, uh, good call there.

• 2:46:09John Coogan?

  It's a great, great story.

• 2:46:11Speaker 07

  I've made a lot of bad ones too, so don't worry.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so going into Palo Alto Networks, uh, you know, you have these five cultural tenants from the company, five cultural tenants from the founder. You're coming in as a new CEO. How did you think about resetting the culture, expanding the culture, bringing what you value to bear across the company in a way that's not disruptive, but gets you where you need to go?

• 2:46:35Speaker 07

  Oh, there's no way to be not disruptive.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:37Speaker 07

  Let's get that.

• 2:46:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:38Speaker 07

  Look, you know, life is about standard deviation.

• 2:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:41Speaker 07

  You want excess returns? There are no excess returns with no standard deviation.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:45Speaker 07

  This is not, this has been proven in every facet of life, right?

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:49Speaker 07

  You want to date a good-looking person, you have to take the risk.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:52Speaker 07

  So you want to build a great business, you have to take a risk. You've got to make money in investments, you've got to take a risk.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:56Speaker 07

  I don't think there's a non-disruptive way of creating transformation.

• 2:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:00Speaker 07

  Having said that, you know, as you probably know, I knew nothing about cybersecurity.

• 2:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:05Speaker 07

  I never run a public company.

• 2:47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:06Speaker 07

  Had, you know, other than that, I was a perfect candidate, so.

• 2:47:12Speaker 07

  Find a guy, I can only imagine the board deliberation, like if you look at a board, you know, they write these long job descriptions, brief a headhunter saying, go find us somebody. So imagine that conversation, find us somebody who knows nothing about this job. So I'm like, either they were geniuses or, you know, they weren't paying attention to the headhunter. Anyway, I got the job, I show up there, I'm trying to learn cybersecurity and I'm trying to understand the culture of the firm. Now, in my predecessor, Mark McLaughlin, he's a West Point guy, he was a very high integrity company. My father's a lawyer, we come from the same stock, so I like the fact it's a high integrity company.

• 2:47:48Speaker 07

  It's important for a cybersecurity firm too. It's important, of course, it is, it's important in every company. But especially. Yes, especially so.

• 2:47:55Speaker 07

  It was the best product in this category, it's a good thing. What I discovered was, which happened in that industry, people get caught up in the success of the current product and stop thinking about what comes next and we have to look around the next corner. I think leaders' jobs are to think about what hits us in two, three, four, five years and how do you prepare for that now? Because I have a firm belief it takes four to seven years to build a great product. Maybe it's become three to five or two to four with AI, but you go back and think about it, anybody you've had through here.

• 2:48:27Jordi Hays?

  And how do you, what's your personal definition for, of what a great product is? Because there's a lot of products today that grow really fast that aren't necessarily great.

• 2:48:37Speaker 07

  Well, I think there are two aspects to this, right? There's a product where you're competing with somebody else, in which case you have to build something better than that, so much better that the customer is willing to switch because you have a much better experience. We take Google search, right? People were doing, there were 14 search engines before Google search came about. It took Google seven years to get to compete with the other 14 people where the users were willing to switch. And there are products and categories where there's no competition, right? There's nothing called Uber, I'm gonna try it, whatever it is. But if you think about what made it a mass market experience where you can scale it around the world, it took five to six years, Uber as well, take YouTube. So if you go around history, it has taken four to seven years to make it a compelling

• 2:49:20Speaker 07

  product that people want to use and want to switch whatever they're doing, switch behaviors. And that's when you start seeing, you know, scale work. Now, the current AI world, all bets are off, we'll see what happens. OpenAI took a lot less, but there had no competition, it was the best thing going at that point in time. So.

• 2:49:37Speaker 07

  So when I walked in, I realized the thing the company wasn't doing was one, they weren't innovating fast enough.

• 2:49:43John Coogan?

  New products.

• 2:49:44Speaker 07

  And for the first three months, I felt like, you know, we're talking past each other. So I took a weekend and I sat down and wrote all my business principles I'd learned in my entire life. And in hindsight, I would urge every leader to do that before. I call it my belief document. So I wrote it and I showed up and I printed eight copies and dropped it in front of everyone in my team saying, read it, let's debate.

• 2:50:11Speaker 07

  Like, what is this? I'm like, this is my recipe book. This is why I act in certain ways. This is why we have disagreements. When I tell people, no, you can't hire that person, they get really frustrated. Oh my God, I've been looking for six months. I'm like, that's not a good person. Bs hire Cs and As hire As. And the more senior a person, you're going to destroy an entire part of my organization, that leader's not good. Oh, I get it. That's why you don't let me hire that person. Now, maybe that's an A, maybe that's a B, that's a different debate. So it became so much easier when we were all singing from the same hymn book. And now it's kind of mandatory reading and debating for every new senior person in our company. They have to read my belief document, which is kind of like sets the tone for how we operate. Is it still one page? It's about 11. Okay. It's more like a.

• 2:50:56Speaker 07

  It's a little booklet. But you can summarize it with any AI engine.

• 2:51:04Speaker 07

  But what happens, like, people wanted more clarity. So what does that mean? Well, you know, you want to read the long form, you can read the long form. You want to summarize it, you can summarize it.

• 2:51:11John Coogan?

  What about product development? Did you come in with a, an idea around build versus buy? A framework for evaluating those trade offs? Did that evolve once you got into the actual role?

• 2:51:23Speaker 07

  So, look, cybersecurity is the youngest subsector of technology. It came about when we had connectivity, right? When you had the iPhone, suddenly everybody's on the iPhone. Every firm, every company is trying to get their applications on your phones, which means we're all trying to take what used to be controlled access and make it accessible to every consumer. So it came about 25 years ago.

• 2:51:46Speaker 07

  Every new piece of technology creates a whole series of new sets of risks, a whole new set of product. Now, interestingly, it's also one of the most innovative industries in the world because the bad guys aren't saying, oh, let's try the same thing we tried yesterday, which got blocked. Every morning they wake up, they're trying to find a new way to get into your business. So you got highly innovative, new set of market in cybersecurity. And as a consequence, the industry structure is extremely fragmented. There were 2,600 cybersecurity companies and the largest company had 1.5% share, which was us. So you have 1.5% share of the market, then you will need to build a strategy. How do I get from 1.5% to 10 to 20?

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:21Speaker 07

  Right? Because you look at every other pieces of tech, there are lots of people doubling their market share.

• 2:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:26Speaker 07

  So I sense like, look, this is a math problem. The math problem is how do we get to 10, 20% market share? You reverse into that and say, well, you got to have a lot more stuff to sell to the same customer to have more market share. And then we said, okay, great. Now, where are the product categories where we can build products which are up and coming? The good news is, we live in a constantly evolving technology world. So I sat down with the founder who was there then, and chief product officer, and we sat down and literally on a napkin wrote, AI, cloud, and network. Cloud and AI were new and we were the, we had the right to win a network, but we only did one out of six things in network.

• 2:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:05Speaker 07

  Then we said, how do we short circuit the four to seven year problem?

• 2:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Only doing one thing in network when your name is networks.

• 2:53:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  It was in the name the whole time.

• 2:53:15Speaker 07

  That's right, exactly. But they got happy, they got fat and happy. An $18 billion company, you started at three, when you went public, this is great, it's up 6X, why, what are we doing wrong? Nothing.

• 2:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:25Speaker 07

  Well, I couldn't rest on that, I had to go do my own 6X thing. So you sit there and you say, okay, we need to get to be number one in everything network security. So what's going to take me 47 years to build a great product? That's not enough time. So I said, let's go find what we can buy. And I know there's like this thing where I don't think many tech companies execute M and A well. Right? Is that because of purchase price or post merger integration? Purchase price is an art. Identifying the wrong synergies? Purchase price is an irrelevant artifact. Okay. Either it's gonna work, if it's gonna work, it's gonna work phenomenally well. Or you're gonna screw it up. Yep. It's not what you paid, it's what you're able to do with it. Yeah. Right? You could say that Instagram was expensive or YouTube was expensive. Worked perfectly.

• 2:54:10Speaker 07

  Double click was expensive. They all work perfectly. Yep. Right? They all time one, a different story. Totally. So it boils down as to how you execute past the price you pay for it. So that's not, that's not the relevant thing. In tech, when you buy a company, you buy a team, you buy an existing product and you buy a roadmap for the future. The question is, can you deliver on that roadmap? Can you accelerate on that roadmap? Does it work? So, you know, we wrote our little M and A manual. It said, because your product is best, we gotta keep the founders there. You gotta make sure we have the right people running the company. And over time, we've gotten really good at it. We sign a term sheet and we ask the founders to sit with our team and redesign the product roadmap. So we like it and they like it.

• 2:54:53Speaker 07

  And if they don't agree on our expectations and we don't agree on theirs, we don't buy the company. Makes sense. We make them in charge. My teams are having to work for them, which makes them really unhappy. And not many of them like it, but I'm like, look, these guys went out there, raised money, kicked their ass. Yeah. In your category, in your category, and you want them to work for you, that makes no sense to me. You're gonna work for them, learn from them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people get the hang of it, some people move on, which I'm fine with. Yeah. Right? So these people had less resources. Sure. They struggled, they hustled, they built a product and they kicked their ass. Yeah. That means, so our job is to enable these people. We look at them and say, whatever business plan was when you were a small, private company.

• 2:55:36Speaker 07

  Find me a business plan that's twice as assertive and bold than the one you had then. So we buy them, we pay the money, but we also give them more.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:44Speaker 07

  Than they would have gotten anywhere else.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:46Speaker 07

  Cause I'm sure we will slow them down a little bit. I've got a bunch of people who will try and like ask questions and get them to slow down.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  But you're almost immediately expanding the TAM on day one, there's so many more, you know.

• 2:55:57Speaker 07

  And then what happens is we've built a phenomenal system to take them to market.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:02Speaker 07

  So we say, we're gonna take you to market. I have three thousand people in the field. We're gonna find a way of catching their fascination, making sure they're gonna get excited, make money. And two thousand people will go out there and see ten thousand customers, some of them gonna buy it.

• 2:56:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:15Speaker 07

  You're gonna go with four resources and go meet twenty customers. We're gonna go to six thousand or ten thousand customers. So that's where the secret sauce kicks in. We've bought thirty four companies so far.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:24Speaker 07

  And we do this for our board. I think our hit rate on things that have worked is over seventy percent.

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 2:56:31Speaker 07

  The last three are obviously new, so we have to see, and those are biggest ones, but it has worked out so far.

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you find yourself ever going back to your MBA, your CFA for guidance on financial management of a public company? Or is it just so different that you can just pick it up? Because it feels like, it feels like there's a whole new set of tools.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  That one case study.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  That come into the toolbox when you're running a public company, whether it's dividends, large debt issuances, buybacks. There's M and A, there's so many different things and just managing a stock price that a public company CEO has to do in some ways.

• 2:57:09Speaker 07

  Um.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 2:57:11Speaker 07

  Well, the MBA is a social experience.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:15Speaker 07

  I think people go to business school and make a lot of friends and they get to know people. I said, oh, Mike, Mike, I have a classmate who went through school with me and I can go got, got a deal with him.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:57:24Speaker 07

  I, I think it's not what you study in a case study, it's the mindset, it's the way of thinking. It's kind of like learned behavior over time, you get good at it, you don't know why you do it. But it becomes part of your sort of muscle memory. And I think that's what happens. I'm a huge student of business, I spend a lot of time listening, reading, talking to people about this stuff. And you just get muscle memory over time. You just kind of get a sense of what the right thing to do is. And I think the part which we sort of underappreciate.

• 2:57:54Speaker 07

  People who do well are people who go back to first principles and try and abstract and say, from a first principle basis, is this important, is not important? For example, I don't have to manage my stock price. The stock price manages itself.

• 2:58:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:06Speaker 07

  The, the stock price, the market is sometimes smarter than individual CEOs. We have to respect that. There's a lot of players out there, they're not all silly. There's a reason your stock price trades where it trades. Sometimes it trades because they don't trust you. Sometimes it trades there because they don't believe that your prospects are as rosy as you believe they are. Sometimes it does well because it anticipates the prospects are better than you think. So the market has a lot of different variables it assesses. Now, to the extent that you're convinced this is the right direction to go, you're convinced that you're executing well, that's great. If you believe there are some challenges or flaws in the way you're executing, the market will give you a hint, the market will tell you. Now, look, the market gets it wrong sometimes. It gets it right many times. It's just another variable you have to take into account.

• 2:58:50Speaker 07

  But the idea of managing your stock price is, is better you can.

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  But if the market gets it wrong, you have, you have a financial incentive to buy your stock.

• 2:59:00Speaker 07

  Yes, we just did.

• 2:59:02Speaker 07

  But the market said, oh, we hear this thing called AI is eating software. We're gonna dunk everybody.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:08Speaker 07

  Because Claude decided to put out some coding.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:12Speaker 07

  The security product. Oh shit, this is gonna destroy 300% of the industry because

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Speaker 07

  Daria launched a product.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw a chart that showed the mentions of moats on SEC conference calls, on public company earnings calls is going vertical. Have you been thinking about restating the moats to shareholders?

• 2:59:32Speaker 07

  You know what I did a few earnings call ago? I put my earnings script into Gemini and said, assess my earnings script.

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:39Speaker 07

  Tell me honestly, what do you think?

• 2:59:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:59:44Speaker 07

  It's like turning into a psychologist says, not sure what you're concerned about, but you're trying to use the word momentum and exciting more times than you normally do.

• 2:59:52John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay, yeah.

• 2:59:54Speaker 07

  So no, I'm not gonna say moats.

• 2:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:59:55Speaker 07

  I'm okay with it.

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  That's good, that's good.

• 2:59:57Speaker 07

  I'm not gonna say moats, you don't have to say moats. But like,

• 2:59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:59Speaker 07

  You expect me to sit here and, and sort of speak my book, but. L L Ms are phenomenal at the ninety percent problem.

• 3:00:08John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:00:09Speaker 07

  Ninety percent problem is make me a movie.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:12Speaker 07

  Paint me a picture.

• 3:00:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:13Speaker 07

  Merge this photograph. So ninety percent problem.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:15Speaker 07

  If you get it wrong, it's not a big deal.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:18Speaker 07

  Nothing destructive. For the same reason, you wouldn't want Gemini driving your.

• 3:00:23Jordi Hays?

  There's also those ninety percent problems. There's so many of them where

• 3:00:27Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 3:00:27Jordi Hays?

  you will never know exactly if you did the best job or you did, you just did an okay job like. Sometimes you get some signals, but it's not as binary as let's say, did we expose user data to a bunch of people?

• 3:00:44Speaker 07

  That's a whole different, that's a whole different conversation. But before you get to exposure data, like, you know, you write a letter to, you know, respond to my emails. All right, fine. It's eighty percent good enough, much better than me having to go do each one of them. So.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:54Speaker 07

  I think we're okay with the eighty, ninety percent outcome.

• 3:00:56John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:00:56Speaker 07

  But you would not let Gemini drive your car or Chat G P drive your car and hallucinate.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:01:03Speaker 07

  For the same reason, you don't want generative A I managing your cybersecurity, because we're in the one percent business. Remember, I'm trying to block that one guy who's going to get into your company and steal your data.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:13Speaker 07

  That's a one percent problem. It's a point zero one percent problem.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:16Speaker 07

  So we, we, we rely on thousands of machine learning algorithms. We rely on tons of pattern recognition, domain specific data. So we're trying to solve the one percent problem.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:24Speaker 07

  Generative A I does not solve one percent problem. It solves ninety percent problems.

• 3:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:29Speaker 07

  We solve one percent problems. So we're least threatened in this notion. There are parts of our business where we could leverage generative A I to make it better. Yeah.

• 3:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:37Speaker 07

  And then you will see, like, the code scanning thing is a perfect example. Claude launches it, people get petrified. He's a three billion dollar industry. We're a three billion dollar market.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Speaker 07

  And the stock, the market loses, you know, takes down three billion dollar market cap that day. That's, I'm saying, great.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:51Speaker 07

  Now the market's getting it wrong. Let's go buy our stocks. So yeah, the market does get it wrong.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Um, what, eh, explain to me how the, the surface area of cybersecurity threats is changing. I, I mean, off the top of my head, I could think of geopolitical risk, more A I endpoints where vibe code is less secure and so you need more, you know, you need more cybersecurity. Also just the hackers that are out there are now A I enabled, so their threats are getting more sophisticated. What is this year looking like from just the scale of cybersecurity threats broadly?

• 3:02:29Speaker 07

  So, you know, if you, if you go back to first, what happens is every technologist who's positive and optimist builds software for the best use case. For the best case. They don't, they don't build it for the worst use cases, right? You didn't build a knife and say, oh, let's not release a knife because people might stab each other. You say, wow, this is great. You can do so many productive things with it, right? So we always build technology with an optimistic, positive attitude. And look at what AI is doing. We're all building from a positive attitude unless you start getting into, you know, debates about can we use for war or not. But for the most part, you're building it for the right reasons, the positive attitude. But, you know, didn't build the first airport with TSA in mind, did we? It's like, are we gonna make sure we can torture people and take them to the line?

• 3:03:13Speaker 07

  We can take their clothes off and shoes off. So we didn't do it. So we actually introduced security afterwards because we realized there are bad use cases. Unfortunately, same thing happens to technology. We build this stuff and say, let's go use it. People aren't gonna do bad stuff. And then you get, you suddenly see an agent hacks, you know, somebody's business. They say, oh shit, we gotta go figure out how to stop this agent from hacking this stuff. So, so our job in cybersecurity is to anticipate the bad use cases and try and throw a ring fence, a series of guardrails, a series of protection around technology. So to the extent technology evolves at a fast pace, this is good for us. Because we have to constantly find antidotes to that. Then you have to make sure you're in the zeitgeist of what's happening. So you wanna be there.

• 3:03:56Speaker 07

  So, you know, the flashback, like, this industry before the last eight years used to stay in their swoon lanes. There are five swoon lanes in cybersecurity. And so you, you do your thing, I'll do my thing. You do your thing, I'll do my thing. Suddenly, this is bullshit. We should be in all five lanes. So now we're in all five lanes. Suddenly, the whole industry has flipped over its head. Now, every time we do an acquisition, we see five copycat acquisitions done in our industry around us because people say, oh, this guy must know something. Actually, this guy knows nothing, but thank you very much. Now you just validated my T-SO. Let's go. Right? So we're going doing that. So. It is good for us when technology goes through a tremendous amount of evolution. Whether it's cloud, whether it's AI, whether it's, you know, people going back to coding. Like, it's funny, coding causes more activity to happen in a laptop.

• 3:04:40Speaker 07

  You need a whole different security in your laptop than you used to have. Put an MCP server there, I need to protect it.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:04:45Speaker 07

  Never were putting any kinds of, you know, API access on your laptop. So the constant evolution of technology demands more innovation in our industry. More innovation in our industry, more deployment of technology around the world causes more demand for cybersecurity. That's good. Of course, we have a geopolitical set of issues, like, you know, the more you go into war, the more, you know, nation states are the most prolific cyber hackers in the world.

• 3:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:06Speaker 07

  Right, there are nation states out there who, who literally, you know, unofficially sponsor

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:13Speaker 07

  cyber activity because they need it at that time.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  Revenue source.

• 3:05:16Speaker 07

  It's also, it's also a training ground, right?

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:19Speaker 07

  You keep doing it in peace times, when I need it in wartime, I can use you.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:05:23Speaker 07

  Right?

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 3:05:25Speaker 07

  So, so there's this whole cat and mouse game that's played in industry. So, you know, geopolitical uncertainty, economic uncertainty, all these things are catalyst for activity.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:35Speaker 07

  And that's on one side. On the other side, if you look at it, because of the fact that we never designed it with security in mind and the pace of the technology is evolving, almost every enterprise is behind the eight ball in the modernization they need.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 3:05:49Speaker 07

  And it's kind of like a hard decision to make, right? If you've never gotten hacked and you, you sit there and become complacent and say, look, I've been spending fifty million dollars a year and it's working.

• 3:06:01Speaker 07

  And suddenly one day, oh shit, it's not working, somebody just got into your business. Those are the best days for us, by the way. And so somebody gets, shit hits the fan. I don't want to, like, you know, get excited about people's tough times, but...

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  Demise.

• 3:06:11Speaker 07

  No, that's why we have a team, which is, which is our benevolence. We have a team which you can call. We don't charge you for that team to go help you and shit hits the fan.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:19Speaker 07

  Because we know you're just about to get religion, you're about to go transform everything in your, in your infrastructure because you want to be, you know, at the bleeding edge. And again, security is kind of like this where...

• 3:06:30Speaker 07

  You could spend too much.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:06:32Speaker 07

  Or you could spend just right.

• 3:06:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:06:33Speaker 07

  Right now, people, generally, the infrastructure is antiquated relative to where it needs to be.

• 3:06:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:06:39Speaker 07

  There's a lot of transformation that needs to happen. So I think this is going to be sort of a perpetual opportunity because combine that with the pace that with technology changes, that's great. That's kind of one part of it. The other part is which was our insight three years ago. If you take a look at what Salesforce has done or Workday has done, you guys are young. It's like, back then when I was working at Fidelity, we had twenty seven systems which combined made up customer relationship management because everybody had their own system. You had keys, you had like data references because you built your app at that time.

• 3:07:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:12Speaker 07

  And cybersecurity is kind of there.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:14Speaker 07

  Like every customer has more cybersecurity vendors than technology vendors outside of cybersecurity. Because they're like, oh, I got eighty of them because I got everything solved. Like, no, dude, you gotta get them all together.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:23Speaker 07

  So we're in that phase where we're building the first sort of combined platform of cybersecurity. And that's why we wanted to be in every swim lane. And as the market converges, we will be able to get people into less and less vendors where data can talk to each other because at the end of the day,

• 3:07:40Speaker 07

  there's only two factors go in our business. One factor is if it's bad, stop it.

• 3:07:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:07:45Speaker 07

  If I know it's bad, I'm pretty good at stopping it. The problem with cybersecurity is never known bad. It's the one you don't know. So all the money is in figuring out when you didn't find it at the door, is something bad going on or somebody is trying to intrude into your business?

• 3:08:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:08:00Speaker 07

  And that's where all the, all the action in cybersecurity is. So that requires data to be connected.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:08Speaker 07

  So, and this is the last fact, leave it and you can go wherever you want, but the average time to detect and remediate a cyber attack is four days in the United States.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:08:20Speaker 07

  Now with AI, the fastest time to attack a company and exfiltrate private data is twenty eight minutes.

• 3:08:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:08:27Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 3:08:29Speaker 07

  I was shocked when I went to Palo Alto, I heard that. So in seven years, we've gotten ourselves to one minute.

• 3:08:37Speaker 07

  Wow. So we just gotta get everybody else to one minute.

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:42Speaker 07

  Yeah. So a lot of, lot of demand in the future.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  Has anyone ever gotten a job working for you by sending you a physical letter?

• 3:08:51Speaker 07

  Sending me a physical letter and gotten a job. The times have changed, but you know. That creates the opportunity.

• 3:08:59John Coogan?

  Have they changed though? It is a way to stand out. You probably get a lot of cold email. You probably don't.

• 3:09:03Speaker 07

  I get a lot, I get letters too. I get letters, I get pictures, I get, I get.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  What advice are you giving to young people who are entering the job market? Or want to work at Palo Alto Networks?

• 3:09:14Speaker 07

  It, I think it's, it's the wild west right now out there. Uh, we have stopped looking at your CV.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:21Speaker 07

  Uh, we run hackathons.

• 3:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:23Speaker 07

  Every second weekend.

• 3:09:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:09:25Speaker 07

  And anybody can vibe code and get ahead of people around them.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:28Speaker 07

  We'll hire them.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:09:29Speaker 07

  I don't care when you went to school.

• 3:09:30John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 3:09:31Speaker 07

  Because I just think people have to learn. This is something that has not been taught in schools.

• 3:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:37Speaker 07

  I'm glad if you go to school, it's good. You get social skills, you have friends. This is good. We want, you know, mentally balanced people.

• 3:09:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:42Speaker 07

  This is good. But we want to make sure that you know where the world is going. I'm a huge optimist on AI creating job opportunities. I think we'll go through a transformation period. But we're trying to find people who know how to. I have to overwhelm my company with more people who know how to use AI than less people.

• 3:10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:00Speaker 07

  Right now, more people don't know how to use AI in my business. Less people know how to use it.

• 3:10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:06Speaker 07

  I think if, if traditional company, traditional include ourselves, these companies have been around for 10 years, 15 years. Want to get back and win in the next iteration of technology. We have to transform as fast as we can. That requires more people can use AI than less people. Any CEO walks in here and tells me they have more people who know how to use AI than less, they're going to win. That's the biggest need of the hour. So I'm out there trying to hire people. So if anybody's listening to this and they think they are the best vibe coders, the best user of creative AI. Write me a letter.

• 3:10:37John Coogan?

  Amazing. Yeah, I hope, I hope you do.

• 3:10:39Speaker 07

  Send me a letter. Vibe coded product via physical.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  There is an API for sending physical letters. There's also an API for sending what's called lumpy mail, which is a letter. Have you ever gotten a letter that has like, it, it looks like it has something inside of it? So it's like, it, it's lumpy.

• 3:10:56Speaker 07

  Usually that goes into our mailroom and goes into the bomb squad.

• 3:11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:11:01Speaker 07

  You may, you may find it in the incinerator because it's just.

• 3:11:04John Coogan?

  People figured out there's an arbitrage there because you're more likely to open an envelope that looks like a package. And you'll open that and then you just get the ad.

• 3:11:10Speaker 07

  Unfortunately, some of us have people who open them because they want us to have the risk.

• 3:11:14John Coogan?

  Of course, I imagine it's pretty important in your, in your role.

• 3:11:17Speaker 07

  Well, that has to be. Has to pass the regular physical filters as well.

• 3:11:21John Coogan?

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

• 3:11:26Speaker 07

  All right.

• 3:11:26John Coogan?

  And before we sign off, let me tell you about vibe.co. Where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And you heard, you heard Eric Lyman mention Shopify earlier. Shopify, of course, is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, is there anything else in the timeline that we should close out with? Any breaking news that we need to get to?

• 3:12:05John Coogan?

  And while you look that up, let me tell everyone about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 3:12:15Jordi Hays?

  There's some breaking news.

• 3:12:16John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 3:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic researchers are departing to launch a NeoLab.

• 3:12:20John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:12:21Jordi Hays?

  In talks to raise capital for a new startup at a $1 billion valuation.

• 3:12:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  What a crazy time to launch a NeoLab. Weren't we just asking Tyler about this? Is there going to be another NeoLab? Is the boom over?

• 3:12:33Jordi Hays?

  It's notable because we just haven't seen a lot of people.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  Leaving Anthropic. Yeah, that's right.

• 3:12:37Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:12:38John Coogan?

  But I'm very interested to see what they wind up launching. I'm also very sad that we didn't get to our lightning round today. We had a bunch of great people scheduled. Of course, we ran long. But we will have them back on the show soon to get all the updates there. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And finally, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And with that, I think we can play our credits.

• 3:13:12Jordi Hays?

  What a fun show.

• 3:13:13John Coogan?

  What a great show.