WWDC Kicks Off, Jobs Up, Tech Down, VC Horror Stories Go Viral | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Two WWCs ago, we were talking about Apple Intelligence, and it's all finally coming together. The package is finally being delivered. I think the response has been really good. Some of the guys on the team have been watching WWC already. We have a bunch of folks calling in to discuss WWC throughout the week. But let's give you the high level first. Go through some of the immediate reactions, and of course, we'll be covering that throughout this week. So, Apple's annual worldwide developers conference started today, and it runs through Friday. Tim Cook just kicked it off with an opening keynote. The theme for this year's conference is "All Systems Glow." All Systems Glow.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  We're finally getting answers about what the next version of Siri will look like. I think expectations, in a weird place, like they're high. Everyone's expecting like this next version of iOS, which is what they're demoing. That's the main thing of the software version. This isn't an iPhone event. This isn't a hardware event. This is WWDC about the software. Everyone's expecting that the software will go through an actual transformation, and the next version of Apple software will be good, and people will be talking about how good it is, because they will deliver a bunch of things. At the same time, expectations aren't so high, like going into Apple Vision Pro, where people are expecting a breakthrough that's no one, no other company has ever done before. All people are asking for is implement the best practices

• 1:26John Coogan?

  from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, like the stuff we know and love. Even Grok has like nicely interfaced into X, where like people say, "Hey, Grok, is this real?" And it just pulls it up for you. I find myself on tweets just going, "Oh, yeah. Like, I don't want to copy this text out into another LLM app. I'm happy just asking Grok real quick for an extra detail or one more fact." Google search overuse. Like, there's been a lot of AI diffusion into products that's been good. Even Ramp, like Ramp has like chat interface, where you can just say like, "Hey, how much did we actually spend on Amazon last month?" And it'll just pull it up for you. And it's not like this revolutionary AI.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the thing. I think they did a good job letting the hype build or the interest build organically, right? You rewind a year or two ago, they were running billboards for Apple Intelligence, for Genmoji, all this stuff. So really setting themselves up for failure.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  So that stuff was overhyped. And I think this

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  And they were, they were a part of a, they were,

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  They were hyping it themselves.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  They were like, are we coded?

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it seems like they have the right partnerships and, and the right like product strategy at this point. People are familiar with these tools, so just putting them in different places seems reasonable. Models are good now, so make them available at the click of a button. Ideally, the Siri button, which has been completely nerfed for the last two years. Um, actually more than that because Siri has, has never really seen the adoption or love, product love that many other products have seen. And users will be happy. So Google Search, Google AI Search Overviews are a good example that prove that rolling out L L Ms, it can be nerve wracking, but it's not rocket science. Like you spit the text out where people expect the answer. There will be funny viral hallucinations. Like right now, even with all the crazy Google I O news,

• 3:11John Coogan?

  amazing five point, uh, three point five foundation models, like they're doing really good stuff. Deep Mind's really good, great team. Like you still say disregard, and instead of just giving you the definition, it says like, okay, got it. I won't, I won't do that anymore. And it's, he gets confused. So there will be those like viral jokey, wow, it failed, it, it flopped. That's going to happen to Apple and that's not what Apple likes to deal with.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Not at all.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  But I don't think any of that will show up in the user metrics. I think that, you know, churn and usage will be unaffected from the viral moment of like, oh, Apple, like the, the Apple, uh, tech summaries, they're hilarious and they often hallucinate and get things wrong.

• 3:51Jordi Hays?

  You still keep them on them?

• 3:53John Coogan?

  I left them on. I don't mind them. I, and I think a lot of times they're sort of useful. And they're always delightful because they're funny, because they're so like hallucinatory. But, uh, your P R team will have many heart attacks, uh, because you're not in the world of deterministic outputs anymore. So that's going to be a big cultural shift for Apple, I think, in this, uh, non deterministic, stochastic, uh, A I era. Uh, but I think that they can get through it just by running best practices that have been established for a year in, or two years in the rest of the A I world. Uh, the other big questions that everyone's asking around open ecosystems. So will Apple lean into the open claw Mac mini boom at all? That would be interesting to see, say. You know, in in the next version of the software that goes on the Mac Mini,

• 4:35John Coogan?

  hey, we're going to embrace OpenClaw, we're going to embrace AI agents, we're going to do things that make those tools more effective in our ecosystem. You already know and love the hardware, you're buying it nonstop, it's out of stock, but we could do more to lean into that community, or we could do less, we could say, hey, we're going to shut it down, we're worried about privacy. These are the two tensions that they're going to have to deal with. Will there be a pivot around vibe coding apps in the iOS App Store? You asked John Gruber from Daring Fireball this when he joined the show on May 29th. Fantastic interview, had a ton of fun with the Grubinator. But it's a big question, and it's something that Apple is, they don't really have to respond yet, they're pretty quiet when things happen, they usually go and solve the problem, and

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they really don't want to talk about it.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, but eventually they start. Like, they didn't want to talk about climate change, but then they did a bunch of things to get to like net zero and eco-friendly buildings and solar panels on the roof and stuff. And then once they did, they were really noisy about it because they were like, we are carbon neutral, or we will be by a certain date.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  And I think once they figure out how to make money on it,

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  then they'll start.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Which they should.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Which, which, yeah, I fully, I will say, I fully support.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. Will native iOS apps from other AI labs have more access to iPhone functionality? What's the pathway for ChatGPT interfacing, Claude, Gemini? If you're using those apps, how, how, how many hooks are there? Will they be able to siphon in your text messages? If you click, yeah, I want to share my text messages, my iMessage with my app of choice? Or will you need to, will you need to say yes every single time? Which will be a huge burden to having that integration happen. There's a lot of, there's a lot of social media apps that say, hey, we want access to your whole camera roll, all of it forever. And that's somewhat intimidating. You get a number of different options, you can say, I want a temporary access,

• 6:28John Coogan?

  just take this photo, you can't see my whole library. Now, people trust, many people, maybe they just don't know, but they, they feel like they trust a lot of these maps, so they just say, yeah, yeah, take the whole camera roll. Sort of a crazy thing to do, that they can just download your entire camera roll if you press that button, but people have. And so what will the, what will the AI version of that be? And how deep will it be? And how much will it build on top of the Siri App Intense functionality versus other APIs that are deeper in the iOS ecosystem? There's one last thing, which is We, I mean, we talked about how Apple doesn't want to address eco stuff until it's like, okay, we got it solved. And I'm wondering if in the coming years, there's going to be

• 7:10John Coogan?

  pressure for some sort of response on the whole, like, phones are reducing the fertility rate stats, because I don't know if you saw, but there was another research paper that was posted, and Derek Thompson basically zoomed out and said that, I wasn't convinced, and now he, he is convinced that it's like up to 30% of the reason for the recent decline below two. And I don't know where you sit on-

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Below the replacement rate?

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Below the replacement rate. Not good, if you're a fan of humanity and having a high population. But that is something that you could see bubbling up to being something that big tech companies, social media companies, device manufacturers have to answer to when they're in like free-form podcasts, basically. But you know that these companies are not going to want to address that.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  As opposed to the AICOs that are like, oh, you want to talk about it?

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  It's such a different-

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Killing everyone? Absolutely. I'd love to talk about that for an hour.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  The PM of Denmark, or what, what country was saying-

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  It's time to return. I'd rather my kids-

• 8:07John Coogan?

  No, she specifically said, I would la- I would rather let my kids smoke cigarettes than use an iPhone, which is crazy. But I don't know, maybe there's something there. Maybe the cure for cancer is right around the corner, but the cure for brain rot is not. It's possible.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's such a different debate, because clearly, a single drag on a heater-

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Is no good, right? You're ingesting poison.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  A single look-

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Burning ash.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  A single look at a screen, right, is not what is, you know, reducing the fertility rate. So, anyways.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  It's interesting. Anyway, let's go to some reactions from WWDC, but first, I'm going to tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  iPhone, I'm going to update your software tonight while you sleep. Next morning, iPhone says, I couldn't do it, bro. Just didn't feel right. Vibe was off.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  This is something that- I didn't know was so common, but I think everyone's been in this position, which is like a funny thing. I think it has to do with how much the battery is charged, but lots of low hanging fruit, hopefully resolved in W W C. I did see a whole bunch of stats about just little performance gains, 30% faster opening of the lock screen, 30% faster on opening this app and just little optimizations that I think will go a lot further. When we talked to Mark Gurman, he talks about how like the A I features are too abstract. People want battery life, cameras, beautiful screens, fast, like they want the basics most of the time. And so I think this is time to chop.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  It would be funny if they effectively threw up a model card and they're comparing. It's like.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  They actually sort of did. The Bento box is the original model card.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  It's 2% better on.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  That's sort of what they do. You know, the Bento box, right? The Bento box with like how many cameras, megapixels, flops, and how powerful the G P U is, how many cores are over here, how much storage it has, like that graphic is their model card. We were riffing on this earlier, like when a product ceases to be sold on brand and is instead sold on performance, that's usually.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  You have margin compression.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Usually margin compression, like you comp it to cars, like if you're purely buying on like range and price and speed and horsepower and seating arrangements, that feels much more commoditized than you gotta have a Ferrari because it's a Ferrari. Don't ask about the specs. And I think for the Luce, this is the first time that people were talking about like, oh, zero to 60 in 2.5 for that price isn't actually that good. It's like, that's not the conversation you should be having about Ferrari. You should just be like, it's a Ferrari. Next question. Like, do you want one or not? Hilarious post from Sam Henry Gold here. Of course, in jest, but they put up a Apple press release in the newsroom. Apple announces the death of Mark Gurman.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  It is done.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  It is done. Apple today announced the completion of Operation One More Thing, a multi-year initiative to permanently end the unauthorized disclosure of Apple's pre-released product information by Bloomberg Intelligence reporter Mark Gurman. Gurman, who had for 16 consecutive years obtained and published accurate details about Apple's products before their announcement, has been neutralized. Operation One More Thing was completed on schedule, on budget, and without complication. They're not that aggressive towards Mark Gurman, but he is probably a thorn in their side. And here he is. He has a live blog app, Live Blog for WWDC. Go check it out at Bloomberg.com. Eric Suft is leaning in. Why is he leaning in? Because Mark Gurman says something about WWDC. He says, "In addition to the focus on AI, Siri, and major quality and performance improvements

• 11:44John Coogan?

  across the operating systems, I'd expect two other focal points today: privacy and safety features." I imagine Suft is leaning in because privacy, safety features, not great for ad monetization. Usually, you're hiding more information. Tyler, what's been your reaction generally? Take me through it, whatever.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yes, I've been watching the livestream. It's still going on, so they're still releasing stuff. But I would say, just on that point, they've been like every single time-

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Have you been watching or have you been studying?

• 12:09Speaker 02

  I was studying. Like, every time they talk about a new feature with AI, they always say, like, "This is on a private cloud. This is like not public. This is like extremely secure." So they're really pushing on that point, I think.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  What does private cloud mean?

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I don't know. They're talking about like their own foundation models, I think, so they're trying to emphasize that. They said the word Gemini. I don't know if they said it, but it was on screen.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  So, so it seems like they have the ability, with their deal with Gemini, to basically white-label, fine-tune, mid-train, do whatever they need to, and then resell that with their own branding. That's a great deal. My question is, like, who's inferencing that? There's a billion iPhone users.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  And if they're all pushing the Siri button all day long and they're anywhere near the frontier, that's a significant amount of inference. Has Apple built some sort of secret data center that can serve that? Are they saying private cloud and really it's like a corner of GCP? Is it a bunch of Mac minis wired together? Like, what did they do to actually build that private cloud? Because even if they did it, even if they did it and didn't show up in the CapEx numbers, didn't show up in the, in the, any of the SEC filings, like, it would show up in the emissions data and the, and the ESG numbers. Because unless they have some crazy solar, nuclear powered facility, where's that inference coming from? I imagine some of it can be done on device. That's exciting.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Jonah says on device.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Can it all be done on device? Like,

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Groxen says they brought up rate limits and a subscription plan.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that?

• 13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  I'll look for that.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  I mean, you don't have rate limits or a subscription plan if it's on device, because why would you? And then also, you would never say private cloud if you're doing it on device. You would just say it's on device. Of course it's private. So, private cloud, cloud means not on device. It's in the cloud. And so, I, obviously, Apple has a lot of data centers. They have a lot of cloud capacity across their productivity suite. Where are the, where are the photos stored? In iPhones, like, obviously, those are stored in the cloud. They have a lot of storage. Like, everyone gets two terabytes when they get a phone. So they clearly have a lot of data center capacity, and they've done a lot to make that ESG compliant. But I'm very curious about where that goes over time. Anyway,

• 14:29John Coogan?

  we should move on to the, the, the news from Friday. The stocks are already back up. But first, I'm going to tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So,

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one more thing.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Apparently.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  One more thing, eh?

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  One more thing.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  We got one more take from Jordi about Apple.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  Jane says, "Apple concedes on liquid glass design, compromising for usability," and shares a couple screenshots here. And so.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Wait, so they're going deeper in liquid glass or pulling back?

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Pulling back.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  I I saw the new, uh, the new Apple Maps icon and, uh, it looked pretty good. It it had a little feature of liquid glass in there. I thought it looked cool. I did hear people complaining about the new Mac operating system being like too, too bright or too dark or something like some contrast issue. I haven't noticed it, but it was something I saw people complaining about. Anyway, Friday was a big day in the market. We were off, but, uh, the news kept moving, so we're covering it today. The Labor Department reported that the U.S. added a seasonally adjusted one hundred and seventy two thousand jobs and that the unemployment rate remained unchanged at four point three percent. So on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, U.S. hiring gathers steam, third straight monthly increase. Slight decrease from the previous month, which was slight down from the previous month,

• 15:48John Coogan?

  but still in adding territory in the hundreds of thousands. So, uh, the bubble popped, the bubble popped. Friday was the worst day for the Nasdaq in more than a year, four point two percent down. It's over, but good news is that today we're back, we're up one point five percent now. It's officially two thousand three. People ask what year it is.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Reinflating.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  It's no, no, it's not reinflating. We're building back. The bubble popped, it's two thousand three now. It's not ninety nine, it's not two thousand, it's two thousand three. We're well past the bubble popping.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Right? So, uh, but actually, quick explanation of what happened. So, uh, the U.S. labor market is really picking up one hundred and seventy two thousand seasonally adjusted jobs added in May, third month in a row. Decent amount. Decent amount.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Are.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Lot of healthcare stuff.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  For the World Cup?

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yes, and a lot of travel and, uh, and, and workers related to the World Cup stuff that's going on, tourism. This is terrible news for all those black pilled AI leaders that have been praying, manifesting job losses despite their Herculean efforts. They can't get the unemployment rate to go up at all. It's crazy. They've been saying ten percent, twenty percent, fifty percent, a hundred percent of all jobs are going away. Good luck. Yeah, you're gonna have to work harder because the U.S. economy is undefeated and the American worker is undefeated as evidenced by this latest jobs report.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  The AI job apocalypse is canceled, at least for the month of May. We will see where things go, of course, of course. But it is good news. We want hiring. We want jobs to be abundant in our society. And so in general, it's good news. I believe the jobs report. I don't think the numbers are going to be massively revised down. I think that they're generally accurate and track with the ADP numbers and a lot of other numbers. So I think the jobs are really being added. They're not in all the most critical industries. There's a lot of nuance there. How long will it go on? But in general, the economy is healthy. But inflation is rising. The closing of the Strait of Hormuz has spiked the cost of gas and overall prices have been increasing more quickly than the Fed would like. For some time, even before the Strait of Hormuz, inflation was running a little hot.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well above the 2% target.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  For basically as long as I've been an adult.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so this makes the likelihood of a rate cut more unlikely. In fact, it looks like we might be in rate hike territory soon, which is of course not good for tech companies that have earning forecasts that stretch out into the next decade. So the silver lining in high rates, if you want some copium, is that at least the Fed has something useful in the tool chest in case the economy does slow down. You know, like we're running hot, we have high rates. At least there's room to cut to 3%, 2%, 1%, 0% if the market's selling off, if the unemployment rate's going up. You have something in the tank. Whereas during COVID, like the rates were already so low, there was a lot of unemployment

• 18:41John Coogan?

  all of a sudden, and it was just like stimulus, spend a bunch of money, you know, send mail everyone a check. There wasn't that much that the Fed could do.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was a time that we couldn't imagine this level of speculation in the markets at something like where rates are right now, right?

• 18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  People that were sort of born in the Zerp era.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  With all the speculation right now is by itself an argument to raise rates.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Well, yeah, once the rates spiked off of like that 3% jump, like the end of Zerp, it was like, okay, like there will never be froth again, certainly.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Certainly like tech stocks will never see meteorites rises.

• 19:22Jordi Hays?

  A friend of mine Blake made bumper stickers that just said, please God, just one more bubble.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  And God delivered. Okay, so the other story, VC horror stories. This, uh, this was kicked off by Greg Eisenberg. I didn't realize that he was the one that started this whole thing and kicked the hornet's nest and everyone came out of the woodwork with their VC horror stories. He said, uh, he had a big discussion about founders, bad experiences with venture capital and a number of high-profile firms, VCs caught strays. Merckor CEO Brendan Foodie detailed what he calls the Sequoia scam, uh, which is something interesting we should actually dig into. Uh, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince accused Vinod Khosla of offering to invest in his Series C only if he would fire a few of, of the people at the pitch meeting who had just left the room momentarily to go to the bathroom. See, there was a separate, so Greg Eisenberg, I was, I was really crossing wires here.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Because Greg Eisenberg is the one who says, uh, he says, I was once pitching in a boardroom at a top three VC firm for a $15 million Series A. That's pretty easy to narrow down. But anyway, he says 12 people in the meeting. One of the GPs fully fell asleep because some of the top, like, you know, FF doesn't have 12 GPs. They don't really do partner meetings like this. So, uh, for $15 million Series A. So even if you put them in the top three, you got, can't catch a stray here. Anyway, one of the GPs fully fell asleep, out cold for 30 plus minutes. Nobody acknowledged it. Everyone kept going. Then separately, Matthew Prince.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, founder or, or an operator falls asleep in the office because they're so tired because they're grinding so hard and they're a hero.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is what Paki said. When Elon falls asleep in the, in the factory, it's no big deal. But when a VC falls asleep, it's, uh, it's the end of the world.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  We're aware of some static in the Ultra Dom.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we got a new, new, uh, new mic line, but well, I'll, I'll try not to touch it and we'll see what happens. So there's lots of chatter about the VC horror stories. Certainly, certainly a discussion worth having, you know, you gotta keep them in check. But, uh, Silicon Valley has always been so high growth and positive sum that relatively good behavior is usually the equilibrium. Uh, it's pretty rare that you get a really, a really bad VC, uh, because even when a startup fails, investors can't write off the founder entirely because they might start the next generational company. And so they might wind up giving on a. On a non VC friendly sort of aqua hire because they're like and help or like help them

• 21:50John Coogan?

  land a paycheck somewhere, get a job, serve as a good reference, maybe even fund the next product in the next company because they're just like, this is an iterated game and we don't want to have you on our bad side forever. Now, that doesn't mean don't like they can't pass. And so there's basically this wide gap that I'm seeing in these discussions where there's VC pitch horror stories and then VC board horror stories. And I have much less sympathy for the former. Like, I don't really care about VC pitch horror stories all that much because you can just pass.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of founders will have 50 meetings for financing. You would expect at least a couple to just be terrible, right? The person didn't know who you were, didn't read the materials ahead of time, was rude.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  And you might want that person.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Didn't show up.

• 22:38John Coogan?

  You might want a checked out VC who's just gonna let you cook. And they're like, yeah, I see this purely financially, my, my, my team crunched the numbers. I'm in, but like, don't count on me to value add. Like, I'm not gonna be in the weeds with you every day. And then there's a different, there's a different VC who's like, I'm gonna be in the office.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  The best VCs will not even tell you, oh, I'm gonna be grinding for you every day. I'm gonna be helping you get all your key hires.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  They'll just be accurate.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they'll just tell you. One of my favorite VCs in the world just says like, I give you money, and then I will help you raise more money. And that's the only thing I'm gonna do.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  And that's fine.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  And I'm gonna be your friend. We'll get dinner now and then, but that's what you can expect from me. And that's exactly what he gives founders. And so everyone is like, this guy's great.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then there's other, there's other firms that say, we'll help you with go to market, and they will. There's other people that say, we will help you with marketing, and they don't. And you just want to be transparent and accurate there. And so, like, as a founder, your job is to sell equity from time to time. Your job's to find buyers for that equity, investors.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Some companies actually only do that.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  They don't actually get it.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Stock is the product occasionally. So your job is to find investors who want to purchase that equity with cash, VCs. You need to reference check them beforehand, make sure they're fit, think through their competitive investments, keep them entertained and awake during the pitch. VCs shouldn't be disrespectful, like literally falling asleep is. But this is far from the worst thing that regularly happens in the course of growing a business.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  We pitched for Figma's seed round in 2013. Most folks didn't get it, but everyone I met was super nice to me. Yeah, it's so funny when you compare VCs to the other, like I said, the other kinds of calls you have. VCs are probably like generally way nicer, right? Like a customer is less likely to like be overly friendly if they're not interested in what you're selling, right? They're like, yeah, it's like, doesn't really seem like a, you know, doesn't really seem like a fit. Brendan from Merkor, former guest and friend of the show, has a bone to pick with everyone. He's coming after YC, he's coming after Sequoia. He says, "In the last six months, I've seen half a dozen rounds where Sequoia invests in two tranches.

• 24:48Jordi Hays?

  Everyone pretends they only did the higher valuation. Founders misrepresent this to their employees and then chop it to angels two. Sequoia's blended price is blatantly deceptive, less than 50% of the one projected to the market."

• 25:01John Coogan?

  They'll invest at half a billion and a billion, two tranches, and then the founder will go out and say, "We raised 100 million at a billion," when really Sequoia got in at the blended price, right? Now, that's not illegal. There's nothing wrong with that, and that can make sense for both sides for a variety of reasons. You don't want to misrepresent that, though. If you go and misrepresent that to another investor and you don't tell them the actual structure of the deal, that can be securities fraud. So that is a major risk, but that's not on the VC. Like, the VC should not go to another investor and say, "Oh yeah, we just did the full deal at a billion." They should give that context.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's on the founder in the same way.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  This is like classic, like all the crossover funds were doing this, tons of funds have done this. I mean, also, this isn't some secret. Like, you go back to the original Sequoia YouTube investment memo, and it's trunched and structured. Like, they've been doing this for 25 years, and it's just like... Nobody read, nobody read the manual or something because like if you actually study in no ball, like you would know that structured investments exist. At the same time, I don't put it on every employee who's getting stock options and thinking about the heat on a company and every journalist to understand that structure. So there is, there is an impetus and a responsibility.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very aggressive and unnecessary to call this

• 26:22John Coogan?

  A scam.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  The quote Sequoia scam because Brendan also replied to his own tweet saying, uh, just 30 minutes ago, after the post had gone viral, in fairness to Sequoia, this is common practice in the industry.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Three likes on that one. 1,000 likes on the other one.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  Travis Kalanick said, "In 2001, I intercepted a partner at a VC who was trying to escape his office before our meeting was supposed to start. I ended up pitching him in his parked Lexus, uh, from the passenger seat. At one point, he grabbed my laptop, placed it on his large belly, which was pressed against the steering wheel, and rapidly flipped through the slides himself. 2001 fundraising hit different."

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  I want to know how this story ended.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did, did he invest or not?

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Did he pull out his checkbook?

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Cause maybe he was like, you got me Travis, uh, you know? We actually had a plan to test this theory. Tyler, do you want to take us through it?

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so I, I was just looking at this. I found a study.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Basically it was, you, they, they took a bunch of, of older men, 66 to 83.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  This actually happened.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  They put them in a room.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Where it was kind of a slightly dim room.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  There's not a lot of like simulation going on.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Like a lot of VC offices, they're very shady.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  And they just sat in there and they tested how long.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Cloud flares us once.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  And, and they basically tested to see how long would it take them to fall asleep. And so the median was, uh, 36.9 minutes.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  I feel like, okay, so.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  So if you have.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  I mean, and here's the thing, a pitch, a pitch.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Usually an hour.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, sometimes, I mean, if it's an early pitch, early conversation, maybe it's 30 minutes.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  If it's going well, it starts to drift over.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  But that's the danger zone.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Danger zone. So this is the lesson, this is the lesson for founders. If you have a boring business. If you have a boring business and you're pitching a VC who's an older gentleman, you gotta keep the pitch meeting to less than 30 minutes. You gotta bring the air horn.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  In that story, it also said the older gentleman was in a Herman Miller chair, which we know are quite comfortable.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Those are quite popular in Silicon Valley, too.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Compounds the fact.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's an elite spot for a nap.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  That's an elite spot for a nap.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  The chair was arguably designed for office nap.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  No one's getting like real work done in a Herman Miller.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so. So, yeah, I, I, this one's tough because it's easy to just jump right, I'm in Matthew Prince's camp, I'm in Vino Coastless camp. Also, Vino didn't fall asleep, so it's all moot. But we know, we know the secret. It's the air horn. Bring the air horn. No one's falling asleep. Problem solved.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Tyler had a good story when, when they were building Divvy.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  They pitched Rajiv Misra in the SoftBank Redwood City HQ. And then Masa in Tokyo soon after. It was absolute cinema. Popping zins, smoking a vape, loud coughing to throw us off.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Wait, why? Intentional coughing?

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Assistants whispering in Rajiv's ear.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  That's a power play.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  That's a power move.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  You gotta respect that, for sure.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  See, that's a post singularity job right there.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Come in, whisper into the person's ear. It's good.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Some of the most fascinating questions ever asked in Tokyo. Masa starts the meeting with, you have 10 minutes. We flew like 20 hours.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  See, that's just a great way to get to the...

• 29:27John Coogan?

  You just got a power play, Tyler. Sorry, buddy. You got, I think you just got a power play.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  I think that's just a great way to get, really get to the meat, right, quickly.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching TVPN today. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Give us five stars on our podcast on Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, TVPN. Goodbye.