X is Absolutely Printing, The Tale of Temu, Promoted Reviews, Larp as a Size Lord

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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?

  Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Today is Thursday, February 6th, 2025. Jordy, we got some breaking news. A Technology Brothers exclusive, really. Yeah, X, the everything app is now profitable. Let's go.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Yeah, we, we, we didn't scoop this, but we scooped it from the timeline. Shkreli has a fantastic post here. I'll get into it. Julian had shared earlier, he says, X also reported to investors, 2024 adjusted earnings before interest taxes depreciation and amortization of about 1.25 billion and annual revenue of 2.7 billion. Investors said that was a better picture than they had expected and that X's finances hit inflection point a few months before the November election. In 2021, Twitter reported adjusted EBITDA of about 682 million and about 5 billion in revenue. That was the last full year before

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Musk took the company private. So Shkreli basically calls out X's worth around the purchase price right now, which is 44 billion. If revenue keeps growing, $100 billion valuation is not unreasonable, crazy turnaround. So many people, you know, were trying to, at some points, dance on X's grave, said that Elon was running it into the ground. They did face, you know, the turnaround of Twitter was always going to be a challenge. It got exponentially more challenging as every major advertiser left the platform. And so.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  They are coming back in a big way. We're going to cover that on the show.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll cover that soon. A lot of heavy hitters are bringing their ad dollars to the platform again, which we love to see because it's more money in every poster's pocket. Yeah. And overall, we love this app. You know, we built our careers on it and it's great to see it win. It provides an exceptional amount of joy and value to us here on the show and many of our listeners. So I love to see this. I. They had marked down, you know, the major investors had sort of marked down their positions at some point last year to around $20 billion. And now, looking at this, if you have a business that's doing 1.25 billion in EBITDA, that's like the place that the most important conversations in the world are happening live

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  every single day. It's easy to see how that business, especially with its, you know, potential, having these advertisers come back to the platform, launching a bunch of new features. I agree with Shkreli, it's easy to see how it gets to a $100 billion company and goes public again, probably on the Texas Stock Exchange. And I look forward to, hopefully, we can, we can buy some, some X shares, you know, prior to then, but I look forward to, to owning it in the, in the, in the public market.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Public.com portfolio, baby, yeah.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, when this news hit, everyone was saying he overpaid, which it was, I mean, unequivocally, it was a rough time in the market because he bought it right at the end of the zerp and it probably would have been cheaper if he'd waited. But he got the deal done and all that matters is that it's, it's an extremely important app with a really, really strong network effect. And, and he's an operator and Elon posted, you know, hey, maybe I'm actually good with money, which I love. And, and there was a question about, you know, unfortunately, the previous team at Twitter, it turned over, there were multiple CEOs, there were lots of people trying things, but it clearly just needed a more aggressive approach.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  And a take private is like the, this is the quintessential example of when you want to do a take private, because this would never be allowed to happen in the public markets. The, the stock would be all over the place. So instead, you take it private, you do some crazy reimagining of the business, even change the entire business model. People were saying, maybe they should just charge for APIs, or maybe they should just do subscription, maybe they should subscription gate the entire app so you have to pay to even view. There were so many proposals and they all, and Elon got a chance to try them all and then see what works and clearly, he's on to something here. What do you got, Jordan?

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the end of the day, he bought what in many ways at that price was somewhat of a toxic asset. Right. It's not making a lot of money, but inside there was this nugget of potential. And I think that, I think that he found it and he's now, you know, giving it, you know, even more life. And yeah, there's been a lot of complaints from certain posters over the last year because their reach has dropped. But guess what else has dropped, John? The quality of their posts.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Can't just, you gotta work, the algorithm will work for you, but you gotta work for the algorithm. And I'm sick of, of, of, you know, sloppy, low effort posters, thinking that they have 100K followers, that they deserve 100K impressions on a post. You gotta earn it every day. And, uh, you know, the platform will work for you, but you gotta work for it. So, uh, congratulations to the X team. I mean, we had to cut the episode short yesterday because of Tyler and Jacoby. Uh, but, uh, but we got a lot cooking with X that we're super excited about. And we're very excited to take this live show to X, uh, hopefully starting next week. I think we just want to be back in the studio for it. So, um, so yeah.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Best app ever. Uh, worth, worth a trillion dollars in my heart. And, uh, and now probably around 44 billion, uh, you know, mark to market.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  I agree. Uh, well, moving on, let's talk about some breaking news. Eric Gleiman at Ramp has bought an ad for the big game. Let's go.

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  The big game.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Tune in on Sunday, the big game. I'm not exactly sure what that is. I, I, I know the Super Bowl is on Sunday. The big game sounds like maybe related to the big game, related to the Super Bowl. But they're running an ad and they got Saquon Barkley, uh, in the studio, shooting, uh, a beautifully directed ad. Very funny. Uh, go check it out. Uh, Jordy, can you break us down on what this means for Ramp? What this means for the future of advertising at the big game?

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  So I gotta be honest with you, John. We got a little, we got the scoop on this, uh, last week. And they said, you know, we're running an ad with, with Saquon Barkley. I go, amazing. I love ads. You gotta tell me who that is. And then they go on to say, you know, future MVP, future Hall of Famer, he's, you know, he's playing in the big game. I said, what's the big game? They said the Super Bowl and I said, I will be tuning in now because I'm excited to see this ad. But no, I think it's, I think it's amazing. It's, it's, you know, there's evolutions, right? You go from posting a couple of posts on X, then you maybe run some, some, you know, meta ads and then maybe you, you know, do a little organic TikTok

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  and then you do some out of home ads and then eventually you're running Super Bowl ads. And so I think it's just the evolution of the, the ramp advertising engine. And I'm excited to see it. I, I love the, I love the constraint of Super Bowl ads. You have so little time. You have to deliver a message that is going out to all of America. It's like, it's the best channel to, to reach a truly diverse audience. It's, you know, football shouldn't be politicized. There's, there's people from all walks of life and industries, from employees that'll be users of Ramp to business owners that'll, you know, sign up for it themselves, to CFOs that are already using Ramp and are just excited to see Ramp, you know, running ads on the big game. So, great moment.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  It, it really hits the core value proposition in just 10 seconds. Like, you know, everyone's, everyone in business has been in the position of finally expense reports. It very clearly shows how much that sucks and how much of a distraction that is. And it gets the message across very quickly.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the line, you know, basically, would you pull Saquon Barkley off the field to file expense reports? Perfect analogy for your team. Your team you're hiring, you're paying all these amazing people to do work on your business. You're going to take them off the field doing the real work and have them file expense reports? Bad idea. Run on Ramp, save them time. And it's awesome that he's. An investor now in Ramp and actually aligned with the future of the company.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Really cool.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  I see many more Ramp ads in the future with Saquon, so I'm excited to see how this plays out.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I'm really excited. Obviously, Ramp markets to CFOs and I think this will be a very interesting case study for Ramp to share with their audience of CFOs. You know, obviously, this is a very top of funnel, very broad brand marketing strategy here. But the more interesting thing to me is I want to hear how much they spent. Did they get the ROI? How'd they track it? Because I think a lot of companies look to Ramp as a high-growth company and they say, I want to be efficient. I want to grow similarly. And if Ramp can put together a really great case study on, hey, we took this big swing and here's what happened. Here's how we tracked it. Here's how we think we did. And yeah, we think we got positive ROI.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  And this is a proper Super Bowl ad. You can go and spend six figures to get slotted in in some tiny county in Nebraska and you got a Super Bowl ad. And if you're tuning in at that moment, people will see it. But this is going to be a national ad. Everybody's going to be seeing it and you're going to want to be locked in for this one. We might have to do a live stream during the show and just wait for the ad to go. And then maybe a little champagne, you know, it's a big moment.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  I think of Sunday really just as a showing of this Ramp ad. And then they're playing some football around it to help promote the ad.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Super Bowl is really to promote the advertising.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Exactly. That is the intermission to me.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well said.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to another size gong moment from none other than Cursor. They just hit 100 million in ARR. Let's go.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  I wish I was there to hit the gong for you, John. It's not the same, but you know, you can do a little self-hit there.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  It's a mess. It's a mess. We're working the size gong and the slides and the mic. I'm doing the best I can.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Usually, usually, we hit the size gong for M&A fundraises, but this is even more special. One to 100 million in ARR and I think it's like 1.9-ish years.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Very fast.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  Crazy number. And developers really love this tool. They, I feel like in many ways, already say they can't. Can't live without it. So love to see it. Incredible progress. This was a painful one for me. When Cursor started blowing up, I clicked to the founder's profile. He had been following me since like 2021. I didn't realize, wasn't there to invest.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Punch in the air.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  You know, every once in a while, you leave a hundred bagger on the table. So.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Live and learn, baby. Live and learn.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Live and learn. But the funny thing, so the funny thing here, somebody quote posted this and and said, actually, Pumped Up Fund got to 500 million of of of actual net, you know, revenue in in a year. So, you know, you have Cursor, Wiz, Deal Together, CoreWeave, OpenAI, DocuSign. All all taking a victory lap and then Pumped Up Fund, America's, you know, favorite illegal online casino. Doing 500 million in a year with, you know, a fraction of the team.

• 11:56John Coogan?

  I mean, we really got to do a deep dive on market map on the these new coding agents because I I don't know that this is a winner take all market at this point. I know there are a number of other companies that are doing really well. Cognition is growing a ton in a very different segment, going for enterprise, the super up market. And it'll be interesting to see how these all play out.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  There's, you know, Devin is building agents, Cursor is building a code editor. There's also, what set other one is it? Is it called Tailwind?

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yep. You know, Tailwind's a CSS thing. I it's Windsurf.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Windsurf, Windsurf, you got Poolside.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Poolside. Yep. I actually read a thread. There's a whole breakdown on all these different ones and they're all slightly, they're all good for slightly different things. Some of them are focused on designers, front end. Some of them are focused on backend stuff. Julius Rahul Ligma's company, Rahul Sunwalker is building kind of a cursor for data science. Right. It lives right in an iPython notebook. Obviously, there's things that you can do right within ChatGPT. And so this market's evolving really fast, but it's it's super clear that if you're paying a developer six figures.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Getting them the best possible tools to amplify them and make their work go harder, faster, and just more enjoyable. Like, everyone, everyone's always raving about, oh, like, it's so nice not to have to write boilerplate code because I have the agents now. And you're getting to that Andre Karpathy mindset of vibe coding, just kind of steering the AI. It's beautiful. And I think this is going to be a trend, not just in code development, we're going to see these AI agents roll out for everything. We saw this with OpenAI, Deep Research. We're going to see this in docs and spreadsheets and all sorts of financial modeling tools. And I'm just super excited to finally have some, some, some software that just has a really tangible impact. So, congrats to the Cursor team. Get out there.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  The one thing, you gotta give DocuSign some credit here. Out of these companies, I think they're the first company to 300,000 employees. And so.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Every time you mention DocuSign, you add another 50K employees.

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  I add a zero. I add a zero.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Add a zero every time.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  DocuSign has amazing milestones. It crossed 10 million employees today.

• 14:20John Coogan?

  It's so good. Okay, well, let's move on to our deep dive for today. Temu, we got cut off earlier, but we got a solid hour to break down Temu for you. It's a fascinating story, and it's one of the sloppiest apps out there right now. It's the cream of the crop. It's the slop of the slop.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  It's the slop of the slop. We'll get into why it's the slop of the slop. Let's start, uh, let's go back in time first and talk about the founders. Incredible, you know, sort of history getting, getting to this point because he's really, he's really an absolute dog. Even though he's making slop, he's a dog, right?

• 14:58John Coogan?

  He's a dog.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  So, you want to, you have a somewhere you want to start, or you want me to dive in?

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I wanted to start with these tweets just to kind of set the table. Uh, the first one is from L3 Tweet Engineer, MegaBase Chad. I think he's been on the show before. He said, "Just downloaded Temu. New users can sign up with Twitter. You're immediately greeted by a $250 coupon scam likely. The homepage is showing me fake sneakers, BDSM stuff, and a gun."

• 15:29John Coogan?

  I love it. This is from 2023. He was early. So Temu is a spinoff of Pinduoduo PDD, which we'll break down the whole history here, but Temu was brand new. They launched in 2022, and then they rocketed to massive numbers very quickly. But I had the exact same experience where I opened up Temu to look at something and it was like, you just won everything in the store for free. And it's just prices are suspiciously low.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  To put this into perspective, I think a lot of people started to, Temu hit their consciousness when they ran a Super Bowl ad.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Early 2023, they ran this terrible ad that just said, shop like a billionaire. And it's just all these like slop products. And so, so yeah, I think he posted this because around, so this is, you know, probably 10 months after the initial Super Bowl ad, but they had gone, gone number one in the App Store again. So a lot of people signing up for the, for the product when this was shared.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we'll go through the full, the full history, but the Temu explosion is crazy. So they launched Temu and it's, it is a subsidiary. So the business is already going, but they launched it in September of 2022. I think the headquarters was in Boston, interestingly enough. And then they run a Super Bowl ad and they're just spending billions of dollars advertising Temu. And by August of 2023, so less than one year, they had reached $18 billion in gross merchandise sales for the full year. Isn't that insane? 50 million active users.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  We are going to absolutely, we're going to be dunking on this slop for the next hour, but I'm not here to take away from the execution. What they've done, they're selling absolute garbage, but what they've done is extremely impressive.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  You gotta hand it to him. The founder's an absolute dog. And if he were in America still, we would be popping Dom Perignon for him. This guy is one of us. He just happened to be playing for the wrong team. So get back over here and we'll break it down because this guy was in America for a while and should have stayed here, should have built the slop apps for us. Send him over there. So the reason this is at the top of everyone's news feed right now is because.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Recently, there was a change in tariff structure that could put Temu and Shein and these Chinese drop shippers effectively out of business. They've been exploiting a loophole. Let's break it down from Melissa Chen, who is quote tweeting Ryan Peterson. Ryan says, "Day minimus entries from China shut down effectively Tuesday." Melissa Chen says, "Winning. This is huge. Temu, Shein, and all these tacky, fast fashion companies that sell mostly crap have long relied on an unfair and unwarranted trade advantage. They have long been beneficiaries of what's called the day minimus loophole. This loophole allows goods to be shipped directly from overseas to American consumers, so long as the value of each package is under $800, without any customs declaration. It's cheap, direct, untaxed, and unregulated.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  It's a law that existed since the 1930s, long before the internet and the existence of e-commerce retailers. Last year, the US received a billion packages from China through this loophole. CBP cannot possibly inspect items at this scale, so things do slip through the crack. Unsafe items, knockoffs, products made with forced labor from Xinjiang, and yes, chemicals that can be used to make fentanyl." Wow. To put things in context, in 2022, Gap paid 700 million, while H&M paid 200 million in import taxes, Temu paid zero. Free trade, once again, is not free. It's flooding our markets with cheap, crappy, potentially toxic goods, gutting our own retail markets, and allowing unsavory foreign competitors

• 19:20John Coogan?

  to exploit loopholes and gain unfair competitive advantage over retailers who have to play by the rules because of geography. Now, we have closed this loophole for goods coming into China. And Sean McGuire is there to say, "Great tweet." So, we love to see breakdowns like that. But let's move on to the history of Pinduoduo, PDD, and Temu, and how we got here. So, 2015, Colin Wang, who is working at Google, establishes Pinduoduo-

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  And let's give a little bit more backstory, because he wasn't just working at Google. He went to college in the US, joins Google the year that they IPO. So, he literally joins-

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  At an incredible time, probably one of the best, the best pre-IPO company probably to join in history. Incredible timing, right out of school. And, and yeah, so he benefits right away. He gets, he basically immediately gets a bag from that, which ends up helping him start his entrepreneurial journey. He then goes on to actually launch, launch Google in China. And so this was from, you'll look back at my notes, from 2006 to 2010, his, he's the lead on launching Google in China. And it absolutely goes terribly. It doesn't really get adoption. There, I'm sure they're fighting a lot of sort of, sort of

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  regulatory stuff internally in China. China didn't want US tech products to get real market share in China. And so by the end, he basically, in 2010, they just give up, Google pulls out of China. And he, and, and so in many ways, I'm sure he did well personally from that, but it wasn't exactly a huge win. But it did give him, you know, I'm sure high quality experience in terms of building the most scaled consumer products, you know, of all time.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  I mean, the guy seems like a great engineer, master networker. Somebody said, you know that Jeremy Giffon tweet that's like, if you're, you can basically post your way on to a private plane, if you're a good poster, like, the most elite in the society, like, the absolute aristocracy will just pluck you out of obscurity. And it seems like that's what happened. He, he was posting something, or cold emailing or something, and gets linked up to the, effectively, the Warren Buffett of China. And that guy becomes his mentor. And then, and then that guy pays like 250K to have dinner with the actual Warren Buffett. And so there's a picture of Colin, this

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  And brings Colin, brings Colin, the T-Mu founder

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  To this dinner.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so very quickly, Colin is moved out of, you know, Rank and file at Google, obviously early, obviously doing very well, but it's a huge organization. He's not really going to be able to steer that that giant cruise ship to networking with both the Warren Buffett of America and the Warren Buffett of China. And that sets himself up just to immediately raise tons of money and just do, you know, amazing things.

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so around this time, he had built, this is prior to actually incorporating PDD in 2015, he had built, he had built some mobile shopping apps. So his time at Google had got him excited about shopping. He did all right from those. He had a couple exits and then he starts a gaming studio, which is sort of foreshadowing for all the gamification of Temu and PDD that comes later. And the gaming studio is just throwing out absolute slop too. So if you ever remember being a kid and getting ads for like Mafia City, that was a game that his game studio created, which was like an early version of one of these games that was meant to be highly addictive, that you were meant to come in and a lot of people would just come in and pay, play for

• 23:13Jordi Hays?

  free briefly, and then they'd get certain whales that would end up spending a ton of money. And he also had some less, less savory apps on there where you could build a harem of girlfriends that you could then go around and fight other people with. So you could build, it was like an app that you'd build your harem and then you'd, you'd take them out and go on the attack. So Colin, Colin's an absolute dog for that one.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  And, but I'm sure he found some, some users and that, that company ended up getting

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  acquired and then changed hands a couple of times. And Mafia City is actually still a game that you can download in the App Store and, and use.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  So go check it out.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everything about this story is just unbelievable evidence that Colin plays hard-nosed, smash mouth football on the business gridiron.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  He's the Saqwan Barkley of business in China.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  100% and you don't become the richest man in China, even for a small amount of time without being absolutely the most aggressive you can be and just maxing out every single loophole. There, there's a whole bunch of things in here about, about like importing like gambling style mechanics and gamification and, and financialization. And it's just like, let's do all of the most extreme business practices. What, what's the tariff loophole? How low quality can we go on the goods? Let's add gambling and, and, and pay it by now, pay later. It's just all the most extreme like dynamics to absolutely squeeze out every penny of performance from the business.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  So let's go through the timeline here. We'll, we'll focus just on PDD. So former Google engineer Colin Wang establishes Pinduoduo in Shanghai as a social e-commerce platform focused on agriculture and group buying deals. Early angel funding of approximately $8 million is provided by Wang and other investors. And so the, the idea here was you, you, if you're in China and you're in like the middle or lower class, you want to buy a whole bunch of mangoes. They would focus on just, hey, you're going to buy 12 mangoes. Two of them might be rotten, but it's going to be so cheap that we're basically not going to invest in quality control at all.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  And also they're, they're bringing in this like social mechanic where group buying, basically you, you click on the item you want and then, and then you send that link to everyone else in your social network on WeChat. And the more people that buy, the lower price, the, the, the lower the price goes. And this makes sense. I mean, in America, there's plenty of times where you buy one T-shirt. It's $30. You buy 10 T-shirts, it's $20. If you're buying a thousand T-shirts, you can get the price down to 10 bucks. But it's like, what if you could do this for anything on Amazon immediately, just with your social network? And that creates insane growth. It's like this insane viral growth mechanism.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  Shopping has historically and in the West, it still is primarily the single player experience. You go on, you buy the product. He turned it into this multiplayer experience that had this crazy. Viral loop of just building out these networks where one person wants mangoes and suddenly 20 people are buying mangoes. And one thing that, um, one thing that they did, you can think of what PDD early on is, is similar to what Amazon did with books. Amazon picked books for very specific reasons. They onboarded sellers, which were bookstores and individuals that had books they wanted to sell. And what PDD did was, was, you know, at the time in China, there were a ton, super, the sort of agricultural production in China was super fragmented.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  And so you had tons of individuals and small farms that would be producing goods and they had to sell through distributors. Uh, which would then go into actual like retail stores and other markets that you could purchase them. And what PDD did was similar to Amazon where they said, hey, why don't you just come on and list your product for sale? And we'll find you the customers and you're going to make more money than you would if you were selling through this distributor. And, and they were basically like cutting out the historical middleman that was, there was two middlemen, basically. There was the distributor, the sort of rep, and then the actual retail store. And so PDD took over both those roles in terms of bridging, uh, the farmers and producers and the end consumer.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that PDD benefited from is that, uh, there was, uh, mobile devices had penetrated into the agricultural regions of China. And so farmers would start selling their products on social media using like videos. And I remember during this time, some of these videos would start going viral. It'd be like, you'd be scrolling and you'd just, it'd just be some guys like, I, you know, like showing his mangoes off or whatever. You'd be like, all right, I'm on the wrong, wrong side of the internet. But, uh, but anyway, so this was like basically benefiting from social commerce. Uh, the influencer explosion, the explosion of, of, um, you know, mobile device usage all across China, not just in, um, in cities. And so the timing here, he really, you know, benefited from.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. Like product led growth, innovation, like a lot of trends coming together and just wedging more and more things. And then just like rolling them out in the app super, super fast. Like when, when, when there's an exploit, he capitalizes and that's, uh, and that's what fueled the growth so quickly.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  And another thing they did, they, they basically sold the product at cost. And so they raised eight million bucks to get this thing off the ground and they were fine if they didn't. Make any money on the on the direct sale. They just wanted market share.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  And they also took a more sort of asset light approach than some of the other players that actually owned logistics. They owned warehouses and stuff like that. And so PDD was was fully focused on like enabling the sort of direct to consumer model where, you know, producer would put would list product on the platform. They had their own social presence. They had these group buying experiences, but then third party logistics and warehouses would actually do all of the fulfillment. And so PDD could afford to basically sell products at cost without taking massive, massive losses that, for example, Amazon had to take, you know, really aggressive losses for for quite a long time.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the the the Amazon versus Temu or PDD comparison is crazy. Uh, take a look at this. So you can think about Amazon right now versus PDD. Amazon's almost 20 times the size, but in terms of net income in 2023, Amazon produced 30 billion, PDD produced eight and a half billion. And so the margins are just the net profit margins at at Amazon, 5% versus 25%. And and a lot of that comes down to just super asset.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Temu looks more like a software business and Amazon looks more like a grocery store, right?

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Profile standpoint.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. And and massive revenue growth. Interestingly, I wanted to answer the question of like, is Temu actually putting pressure on Amazon? Has there been a like a market change in Amazon's business because of the Temu threat? And what's interesting is that like I found like 95%, 98% of Temu shoppers also shop on Amazon. The Temu, like the slop that they're buying is actually additive. It's more like gambling money than actually shopping money. Because if you want just, you know, if you're actually in the market for like, I want Kleenex and I want it to be good and not fall apart and give like give me allergies or something. Like, you're gonna go to Amazon, buy the name brand and you're gonna count on that.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  But if you're just want like, oh, yeah, some random thing that's like a funny joke, like, yeah, I'll buy that on Temu.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I. My biggest frustration with Amazon is I wish that I could shop on Amazon by sorting only for brands that have existed for more than

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good. Lindy filter, the Lindy filter.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Because one of my, yeah, the greatest annoyance on Amazon is like I'm shopping and I want something as simple as like a paper towel holder.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  And then I order it and I get it and it's like the worst product that I've ever gotten. Like this should just be a piece of metal into another piece of metal and it should be solid.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  And because of the hyper optimizations and all these sellers competing and things like that, you end up having to dig through pages. You might, it might take you four pages to find a product that costs marginally more, but is going to last for 20 years versus, you know, the Temu version, which will last for a year and not even function well.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Dude, so, so Amazon has, has been forced to launch Amazon Hall, which is their Temu competitor, and they have price caps for items that you list on Amazon Hall because they want to be competitive. And the price caps are shocking, like $13 is the max price you can charge for a guitar. I think if a guitar is like a several hundred dollar purchase at least, couches, couches. I think if a couch is like, you know, to get in the game, it's like a thousand dollars. Maybe you go to Ikea, a couple hundred bucks. The max price for a couch at Amazon Hall is $20, $20. That's just like scarily low. I don't want to sit on a couch that's only $20.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  I know that there's people that are running Airbnbs right now that are like, this is amazing for my margins. Like I gotta just buy this $20 couch. But it's like at that, at that price, it's like, it feels dangerous. Like, how can you possibly make a couch for $20? Like, you're not even using wood at that point. Like, what are you making it out of?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the, the dark side of this story is that many people have accused PDD and Temu of using slave labor. So if you trip out all of the labor costs.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  But even then, it's still hard to kind of conceptualize how the actual

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Material costs would be less than $20 for something as significant as a couch or a guitar being you know, $13. So anyways, let's get back into the timeline.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they raise, uh, they, they raise a bunch of money really, really quickly. They incorporate in 2015 with that $8 million round 2016. They raised series A, series B, 110 million, uh, Galron Capital, formerly Banyan, does the seed stake. They get a 7% stake. Now it's worth 10 billion. Nice. Tencent Holdings comes in and becomes a strategic investor. They get a 16% stake. That's 20 billion bucks. Sequoia Capital China gets a 6% stake pre 2022, multi-billion dollar value. Uh, and then there's a couple other founders and early executives that all made hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  You already know from listening to this, but like this guy didn't come out of nowhere. He was a, went to college in the U S.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Goes and works at Google, actually leads an entire, you know, go to market into China while at Google. Then has a couple smaller successes in mobile shopping, then launches a successful mobile game studio. And so by the time he's doing PDD, he is very well set up to take on this much capital in this short of a time because he's a savage operator, right?

• 34:28John Coogan?

  Savage.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  And the actual performance really backs it up. And so they're raising all this money, but it's on the back of just taking a ton of market share with a product that was very early for its time, right? We didn't see, you remember in 2021, 2022, every Western VC was talking about social commerce and live streaming and all these things.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  All of that was because that PDD was just dominating in China.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  And they didn't really, it's not that live streaming with, with T, uh, T, it's T-Mu, right?

• 35:04John Coogan?

  That would be the respectful way to call it. I, I call it T-Mu.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  T-Mu. Uh, we'll stick with T-Mu.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  Your disrespect. Um, what's crazy is I was actually, so I was in, um, I was living in China like during this era in 2016 and I was working at a startup accelerator that was and helping a company that was taking a bunch of international vendors specifically in shopping and sort of luxury goods and trying to sell into China.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  And they had raised some funding. It was fine, but the CEO and the CTO and the COO were based in Israel and they absolutely hated living in China and their entire business was based around China. So they would come in for like two weeks and then like bounce. And I was like, guys, like this is

• 35:54John Coogan?

  unsustainable.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  I was just an intern, but I was like, yeah, this is if you shouldn't probably hate the country that you're trying to sell into. But anyways, meanwhile, Timo was just focused, you know, just absolutely dominating.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're just ripping. So established in September 2015, they've raised over a hundred million dollars by 2016. Series C comes in early 2017, less than a year and a half. They raised 213 million in a series C round. And by late 2017, their gross merchandise volume, their GMV, reaches $15 billion just two years after launch. And so even with super slim margins, they're well over 100 million in ARR. And this is one of the fastest growing companies and businesses in history. And of course, that's going to rocket the stock. So they do a pre-IPO funding in April of 2018.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  They raised $1.2 billion, Series D, led by major investors. They're valued around 15 to 20 billion dollars. And then July 26, 2018, they go public on the NASDAQ, raising $1.6 billion. The IPO values the company at $24 billion and marks its rise to over 340 million active buyers in under three years. But then things get tricky. There's a counterfeit crackdown shortly after the IPO. PDD faces scrutiny over counterfeit and pirated goods. So you just go on there and you get some complete knockoff that was just made in a fake factory that wasn't actually made by that company. Of course, companies are going to be upset.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  At one point, Amazon, Amazon has a price match.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Like service where if you are selling on Amazon and then you and then you open, you go over to Walmart and you undercut Amazon, Amazon will not give you the buy box. They won't let you win the top slot if you're not price matching on Amazon. But Temu or Temu was so aggressive and so sloppy that they couldn't, they couldn't basically implement this process and they were like, look, we're not even going to enforce it with Temu, Temu products because it's just, it's just slop. It's not even close. And so a lot of stuff was just, just absolute junk and that was kind of the model. And also everyone kind of knew that.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Those products were widely available when I was in Shanghai. You could go to, there were specific markets that where they would have retail stores. It'd be like the Nike store, the Adidas store, the Canada Goose store. And everything in them was 95% less than like the traditional retail value.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  And about 60% is good.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  But the demand you can imagine for sort of name brands that are 95% off effectively. It's insane. So they're just.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  And so the super funny thing here is that it's not just American companies versus Chinese, versus PDD in China. There's actually Chinese companies that are like, hey, we're Foxconn. We make iPhones for Apple. Like, don't make fake iPhones here. Like, like this is, this is screwing us and we're a Chinese company. And so Chinese companies are accusing PDD of counterfeiting and pirating goods that they're making and selling on Amazon. And so there's an investigation by China's market regulator. And this leads PDD to purge 4.3 million suspect listings and tighten its policies. But of course, like, how long would that last? And so in January of 2019, there's this security incident where hackers exploit systems,

• 39:22John Coogan?

  a systems loophole to steal tens of millions of yuan in discount vouchers. This always happens whenever there's like some referral program or some discount program. I remember there was some guy on Twitter who's bragging about basically defrauding Uber eats with like all these referral tokens, just getting people on Mechanical Turk to sign up and get him money. And he was like, I have free Uber eats forever. And I was like, you shouldn't publish about this. This is a violation of the terms of service.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Also, it's just wrong. Also, it's just wrong.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  It's also just morally wrong to steal. How have we gotten so lost here? And so PDD cooperates with authorities to apprehend the perpetrators and patch its systems. They continue to expand their markets in 2019. The gamified team purchase model drives explosive growth, making PDD's China's third largest e-commerce site by GMV and active buyers. So it's Alibaba and then JD.com, which I don't think is related to JD Vance, but it's certainly a big beast over there. By the end of the year, the platform approaches over 500 million active

• 40:25John Coogan?

  buyers, so they are on a tear. Then, early 2020, the agriculture focus and COVID response amid the pandemic, PDD doubles down on its agricultural roots by launching programs to help rural farmers sell produce online. This is huge because China had insane lockdowns. Everyone is ordering online more than ever, especially produce, especially groceries. People need to get food more than anything else. And so it's another explosive growth period for PDD. They just can't miss. Then, in 2020, Colin Wang steps down as CEO, appointing Chen Li as the new chief executive while remaining chairman to focus on long-term strategy and research. And I think there's something going on where the pressure is starting to build. PDD is becoming

• 41:10John Coogan?

  a more controversial company. And Colin's like, yeah, I'm gonna dip before I get Jack Ma, you know? Because like, yeah, when you scrape the heavens in China and you become the richest man, you get a little bit of a target on your back. So you gotta just pivot into, you know, teaching English somewhere and resting on your laurels.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Little bit, little bit. It's a dangerous, dangerous position.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  It's a dangerous game. Over there, you become the richest man. You don't exactly get to be the right-hand man of the person who runs the country, unfortunately. America's just built different, you know?

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Over here, you get a .gov email address.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  And so economic challenges in late 2020 drive more consumers to PDD for affordable essentials with annual active buyers reaching 585 million by year end.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have this, they have this interesting demand dynamic where if the economy is doing well, then people have like a bunch of extra cash that they're willing to just blow on basically

• 42:13John Coogan?

  slop.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  PDD is like slop, you know, gambling on consumer goods. Hey, I'm buying this product for $3. Maybe it's, maybe it's good. Maybe it's actually fine. You don't know. And then simultaneously, if the economy is not doing well, there's also an increased demand because people are saying, I don't want to, you know, it'd be like saying, I don't want to go shop at Target. I'm going to go to this like discount store and, and because I can spend $50 and get a lot more for my money. So same dynamic as somebody might be saying, I'm not going to go on Alibaba or, or some, or the Chinese, you know, target equivalent. I'm going to go on PDD and just, and get more for my money.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so in January 2021, there's this work culture controversy. This is terrifying and very sad. The deaths of two employees within a short span sparked public outcry over the brutal 996 overtime culture in China's tech industry. And I believe someone affiliated with the company made some callous comment being like, yeah, like we work hard, people are going to die, which is obviously way too far, way over the line. And, and, and the founder eventually steps down. Colin Wang resigns as chairman and leaves the board to pursue research in food and life sciences while CEO Chen Li, or Lei assumes the chairman role after Wang relinquishes super voting rights.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  That's the Chinese equivalent of, I'm going to go spend time, you know, long overdue time with my family is I'm going to pursue research in life sciences.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is crazy to work people to death. That's unacceptable and something that only happens in China, unfortunately.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's not, that's not true. We just had that, we just had that issue. I forget which bank it wasn't.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did see that.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Jeffrey, and it wasn't Jeffries.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  No, I've been seeing that.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  But no, there, there was, you know, a

• 44:01John Coogan?

  investment banker.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  A young investment banker that was being worked, you know, basically 20 hours a day for a long period of time and was telling his friends like that he wasn't doing well. And then just died from basically overworking.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, yeah, and in that case, the investment bank had slides that said that we're basically promoting the fact that their associates were available around the clock.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  And so that, again, it's not, it's not just a China thing, but, but yeah, work, it's possible to work too much.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, it's like we always say, you gotta, like Naval says, work like a lion. There are days when you should be working 20 hours a day, but if it's 20 hours a day for years straight with no days off, you're going to burn out. And that's not good.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Or even four weeks in a row, right?

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Not sustainable at a certain point.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Sprints here and there, super important.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  We are working up to, we are working up to 140 hours of content a week.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Our goal is to get there. So thank you. Thank you, everybody, for your patience for trying to just ramp up to it.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so in May of 2021, Shanghai's Consumer Council criticized PDD for issuing fake products, false advertising, and poor after-sales service. Regulators ordered the company to rectify consumer rights problems, prompting PDD to pledge stronger merchant oversight. In late August of 2021, PDD posted its first ever profitable quarter. So from 2015 to 2021, just six years, now they're profitable, 2 billion yuan operating profit and an 89% year-on-year revenue jump. So they're still basically doubling six years into the business. Just fantastic growth. Instead of taking the profits as cash, the

• 45:48John Coogan?

  company announces a $10 billion, 10 billion yuan agriculture initiative to reinvest in agri-tech, farmer support, and rural development. And so in 2022.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  One thing that that might sound strange to some people, but we think of Temu as just like slop consumer goods. In China, people are still using it very actively to buy produce and things like that. So they're invest, they want to invest in the actual agriculture industry in China because PDD's China business specifically is have, is a grocery store alternative. It's not just these, you know, ultra-low-cost consumer goods.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so they are continuing to grow. The platform.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Is now handling 4.9 trillion yuan, about 590 billion in GMV and generating annual revenue of roughly 14.7 billion US dollars, solidifying its profitability. And with all this money, they come to the United States and they launch Temu. The parent company, now PDD Holdings, launches Temu, a discount shopping app targeting overseas markets because it's specifically taking advantage of that tariff loophole. Temu goes live in the United States, offering ultra-low-priced goods shipped directly from China and quickly climbs the download charts. And I think this is so interesting because it like I've been in e-commerce for, you

• 47:14John Coogan?

  know, 15 years or something now. And, and, and the, and the, the, the wisdom has always been you got to get on Prime, you got to be faster with shipping. Everyone cares about page load speed and shipping time and Americans are willing to pay for that. And Colin just realized that there is a contrarian position here, which is, hey, maybe there's certain products and certain segments of the American market where people are more than happy to trade fast shipping for lower prices.

• 47:49Jordi Hays?

  It comes down to a value, it comes down to a value exchange thing. I'm happy to pay slightly more to get a product tomorrow with zero effort on my side. And then on the other end, there's people that are happy to wait a week to get something if they're going to get 10 items for the cost of two items, right?

• 48:06John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  So it's a value exchange thing.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But it was really, really overlooked in the e-commerce market. And so with the launch of Temu, the company reorganizes under PDD Holdings, a new holding structure encompassing both PDD and Temu. In December, fast fashion rival Shein initiates legal action against Temu, marking the start of a high-profile legal tussle. And I didn't know this. Do you know where the name Shein comes from?

• 48:35John Coogan?

  It's she in and it's like she's in.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  She's in.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like, like she's.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  They were, they were sitting in Shanghai being like, yeah, we got the name. This is it. This is so cool. And this also, by the way, just to reference an earlier point. So this is around, this is like right around the time that they lot, they launched the Super Bowl ad that we mentioned yesterday. And I do remember the, uh, not yesterday, sorry, earlier in the show. I do remember when that ad dropped and I remember seeing it live, thinking to myself, this is the worst ad I've ever seen. It's like very, it's not westernized at all. This is obviously a Western audience. It has this tagline that says shop like a billionaire, which felt, felt super out of touch.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately I wasn't the target audience for it. I've never purchased anything on, on Temu. And, um, and if you think about that, that, that concept of shop like a billionaire, some people are thinking, okay, billionaires are just buying like, you know, infinite amount of goods at all points and not caring about the price. And that is the experience that they provide, right? You can go on there and buy 30 items and it'll cost you, you know, the same price as, I don't know, a small like grocery.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  The funny thing is if you ever go over to billionaire's house, like it's always like the most sparsely populated house. Like it's not just junk everywhere.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's because their items are spread across like at least five homes.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  I guess, but even then it's like, you know, most, most super rich people are pretty, pretty discerning with like, do I really need another kitchen aid? No.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Like, no, it's, it's the Kanye, it's the Kanye thing of, of, I was sleeping on the plane and I woke up next to this water bottle. And it's like, great. Now I have to look after this water.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  What do I do with this water bottle? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, and, and really it's like, we talked about this before, but like the thing with the billionaires is like, when you're, when you're like middle class, like you have an item and you do it yourself, like you cook for yourself. When you're become a little bit wealthier, you have an app that, you know, DoorDash brings you the food. And when you're a billionaire, you have a guy and it's your chef. And so you know, a billionaire does not buy any kitchen, cooking equipment ever, because the cook handles that and they don't even think about any of those items. And there's that for every single item in their life.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  You have a personal shopper who brings you 50 items. You try them on, you keep. Seven of them.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  You know my size, just make sure that there's clothes in my, in my closet in every house.

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  And that's the lifestyle. And so, did you see the SNL spoof of the Super Bowl ad? We got to stay on the Super Bowl ad because one interesting fact is that Super Bowl ad was not shot for the Super Bowl. That was the ad that they had been promoting on YouTube to millions of people. That ad before it aired on the Super Bowl had millions of ads. So in one way, they'd kind of A B tested it and knew that that ad worked. But at the other way, it's like soup, it's still just super lean culture. They're like, oh yeah, we got a Super Bowl slot, we're paying millions of dollars. Like, we don't need to shoot something special for this or get a celebrity. Let's just run the ad that we've been posting on Facebook for the last like.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in many ways, it's very counter to the approach again, that many, many of their competitors, which would take, which is, hey, Amazon is going to spend, is probably planning their 2027 Super Bowl ad now.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's this multi-year thing and they want to try to win awards. And Timo is just like, shop like a billionaire, baby.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. Budweiser is going to shoot a new Clydesdale ad, probably three of them for this, for this Super Bowl, and it's going to tell a story and it's going to be heritage and it's going to be very cinematic. And Timo is just like, yeah, like what's working on Google right now? Oh, okay, like just throw that, oh, it's new, a new ad slot, throw it up. Yeah, no problem. Again, kind of beautiful. I don't know. I think it kind of worked for them. I bet they got good ROI on that. But the, the SNL spoof is hilarious. They, they call it, uh, uh, uh, it's like some, some portmanteau between Temu and Shein. It's like, it's like Shimu or something like that.

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  And, and it's like, dress, $10, shoes, $5, working conditions, fine, don't ask about it. And they're just like, how is it so cheap? And it's like, now with no lead. And they're like, that makes me feel like there might be lead in here. Like, the whole idea of like suspiciously low prices is so funny to me. I just can't get enough of it. It's like, at a certain, at a certain point, like $20 couch raises more questions than it answers.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And to be honest, there's a very real scenario where Colin realized that he was going to be the fall guy for China would say, actually, there's so much evidence that China uses slave labor and they have labor camps and, and, you know, it's very dark. But Colin would have been the perfect guy to pin it all on for the CCP to be like, oh yeah, actually this was happening. And like, here's the guy. He was the guy selling all these cheap products and like, it was on him. Even if they had fully endorsed it. And so I think, uh, yeah, he, he so far it seems like he properly avoided being jackmod. But, um, I haven't seen him on any podcasts lately. So, you know,

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Let's get him on 20 minute VC.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Colin, Colin, come on X, go on 20 VC.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  I'll have you on the show.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, we'll get to the bottom of this.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  It might be a little contentious, but.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  So they, so they launched in September of 2022. By February of 2023, six, six months later, Superbowl ad, number one shopping app in the, in the US, uh, massive growth. They expand their market presence. They launch in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in March. Uh, then they launch in all of Europe and, uh, they also relocate their, uh, their headquarters, I think to, to Dublin, Ireland. And then in March of 2023, shortly after the Superbowl ad, they get suspended from the Google Play Store due to malware found in off store versions. Although Temu is unaffected, the incident raises security concerns

• 54:54John Coogan?

  and the app is later reinstalled after reinstated after necessary fixes. Uh, and so they were, they were doing some sort of exploit with like, you know, the APIs and the app and, uh, everyone's like, man, these guys are playing dirty.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, across the board, across the board, this is a company that undoubtedly.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Does not care about anything other than flooding the market, gaining market share and growing, right?

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  Of course, many American companies at the end of the day are like that, too. But they're a little bit less blatant about this. Like, the entire history of PDD and Temu is issues around counterfeiting, supply chain practices, labor practices, data privacy. Like, this is a company that probably is battling like a thousand to 10,000 lawsuits at once continuously. So while they're not making US ad agencies money on Super Bowl ads, I'm sure their legal bills back home are steep. And I'm sure they're a good client to some US law firms.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  And again, they're fighting other Chinese companies. So Temu and Shein are in a legal battle in July of 2023. Temu filed an antitrust lawsuit in the US accusing Shein of market abuse while Shein secures a temporary restraining order against Temu over alleged copyright infringements. Legal actions are sued.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  This is.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Across multiple jurisdictions. What do they call this?

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Slop on slop violence.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  I love it. And it's so funny because like, yeah.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  The great slop wars of the 2020s.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  The great slop wars. It's so funny to me because like, even though like, we're looking at this through a business context, through a geopolitical lens, and obviously, we have, we have the take that, you know, this is exploitative, this is a loophole, it's destroying American businesses, etc. But there are tens of millions of Americans that to them, Temu is just, oh, cool, I get stuff for cheap. Like, I like it. And no, I don't run a competitive company. I don't, I don't have an e-commerce business, so it doesn't affect me. And the number of people, the number of constituents in the American democracy that are being negatively affected by Temu is, in, in absolute terms, much lower. Because if you're like, the number of people that are competing and getting their lunch

• 57:18John Coogan?

  ate by Temu is probably a million e-commerce people that work in e-commerce or, you know, dropshipping or something like that.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  But the number of people that benefit is in the tens of millions. And so it is the same thing, like popular thing.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, I gotta push back there.

• 57:32John Coogan?

  Please.

• 57:33Jordi Hays?

  It is more complicated than that. If somebody, you know, is shopping for, they, they decide, hey, I want a water filter and they, they look at, they go to Aurora.com. They're like, this looks great. They've got all the certifications and then they look on Temu and they see, you know, a similar water filter. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, but it's, it's 90% less. And then they buy that. That is dollars that could have gone to an American company that supports, you know, a bunch of other American businesses and manufacturers that supports, you know, a team here in the US. And so it is very complicated. And so we have no idea how many billions of dollars of Temu's GMV would have just gone to America, you know, it would have bought in less products.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Has a bunch of downstream effects.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree. I'm, I'm merely making the statement that, that for a lot of Americans, they are addicted to consumerism. They're addicted to shopping and, and they don't think about the second and third order effects of, hey, if I'm, if I'm really supporting this app and buying, yeah, yes, I mean, I am getting these really cheap products, but maybe it'll make it harder for me to find a job or maybe my town will be hollowed out because they're, because the, just the economy is not there anymore in the US because we're just purely an import-based society. So I think that's the backbone of the tariff renegotiation is, is this a fair deal for America?

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  What were you saying?

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, well, if we eliminate Temu and Sheen and we just get every American addicted to buying cheap stocks.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Potential there.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Massive, massive.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  Buying early.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  And so in 2024, they're in 50 countries in 16 months. On January 17th, Temu officially launches in South Africa, marking its 49th country since debuting in the US. Its footprint now expands over North America, Europe, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Latin America and the Middle East. So they are willing to ship anywhere. And it, and the reason they can do this is because it's so asset light. They, all they need to do is just allow, there's just a software platform that allows factories in China to ship as, as soon as they can get those packages to the ports, they can really go anywhere. So they just need to localize the website and they're good. It's not like Amazon where they have to set up a local distribution center, hire local drivers. There's, there's

• 59:56John Coogan?

  really nothing. And, and it's, it's, you know, it's not really building up the local economies. It's actually hollowing it out. And so in February of 2024, they do another Super Bowl and they hit user records again. They offer $15 million of giveaways at the Super Bowl. And early in 2024, the platform announces it has surpassed 100 million active users in the United States and over 130 million app downloads globally. So yeah, 100 million people in the US have shopped on Temu and that is a big constituency. What I'm, what I'm getting at is like, it's similar to TikTok where the number of people that are negatively affected by TikTok are the people that are thinking about, you know, security, cybersecurity, geopolitics, thinking about competitive dynamics with American companies. But there are still

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  100 million people that are just like, TikTok is where I go for entertainment. Don't turn off my TV channel. And so it is this complicated, there is a constituency there. They're not highly politically active. They don't donate to politics in that way. But if you just, if you just polled the American people, should you ban Temu? A lot of people would say, no, I like, I like cheap stuff. It's fine. It's where I spin a wheel and get free stuff. Like, why are you banning my fun thing? And that's it.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's in the same way that.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Pump fun is a, is a digital casino.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  You could see, you know, PDD or Timo is like a carnival, right? Where it's just like, oh, I'm spinning the wheel. I'm winning. It's entertainment. It's social. It's, you know.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, uh, uh, the company refines its logistics model to manage scale while PDD Holdings faces increased regulatory scrutiny over counterfeiting, supply chain practices and data privacy. And the legal battles between Temu and Shein have continued into 2024. Today, in less than a decade, PDD's parent company has become a global e-commerce powerhouse, uh, which includes Pinduoduo in China and Temu abroad. Reported $34.7 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in net income in 2023. I'm sure it's higher in 2024. I don't know if they've done earnings yet, though. PDD remains one of China's top online shopping destinations with over 800 million users. That is staggering. That's what it's a billion person country.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  So, uh, that's like massive market penetration. While Temu's low prices and viral marketing have captured significant international market share. The company continues to navigate rapid growth, fierce competition and regulatory challenges as it looks to the future. And so we will be staying on top of that.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's interesting.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  So they have the benefit of, uh, so Temu at some point, do you have the, the specifics? But I believe they rolled back in Temu, which was independently listed into the main PDD Holdings. And so the original Temu that went

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  public on the NASDAQ is now just a part of PDD Holdings, correct?

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so the, the benefit of that is like, even under all this scrutiny lawsuits, all this stuff, you're going to be shocked. I'm on public right now. The stock, the stock is up.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  How much is it up? Give me the data.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  I mean, so, so they're sitting at a, the PDD Holdings is sitting at $111 right now.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  And it was in March of 2022, it was sitting at like $40 a share. So

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  They, they're still like a juggernaut and have done tremendously well, just again, under fire from all of these lawsuits and things like that and, and being, but they just steamrolling the market. And I think that's really, in many ways, because of that, you know, they truly are a software company. They're not a, they're not a retail.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  100%. Let's go through, uh, who got rich off of this? I think that's always an interesting question to ask. Obviously, the early team made a ton of money. There was an interesting transaction where the, uh, where the, uh, uh,

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  as in 2020, Colin Wang transferred $7.7 billion worth of shares to the partners, effectively giving slices of his fortune to the top lieutenants. I thought that was very interesting that he did that after the fact. Like they'd already grown. Obviously they had stock grants early on, but he was just like, I've made so much money. I'm just gonna hook up the boys.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  He's either, he's either an absolute, you know, brother of the week, Chinese brother of the week potential, or he, or they were all gonna throw him under the bus so hard that they said, if you don't give me, if you don't, if you don't give us billions of dollars, like you're gonna be the fall guy for all of this and we're gonna, you know, drag you through the streets.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Jack Ma style.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. The dynamics over there are very, very hard to, hard to get, uh, get right. So, uh, Gaorong Capital, formerly, formerly Banyan Capital, uh, was an early VC, uh, investor. It's a Beijing-based VC firm. They led the Series A round and Zhengzhong Gaorong's founding partner, first back Colin by leading an $8 million investment round when PDD was just an idea. This gave, uh, them an 8% stake pre-IPO. It was probably a, a, a higher round and then got diluted down a little bit. Uh, Tencent came in. And they were able to leverage WeChat as to fuel PDD's growth. Tencent joined in the Series B and later led a huge $1.4 billion Series D in early 2018.

• 1:05:30John Coogan?

  And so they had 16% at IPO. Sequoia Capital China, led by Neil Shen, they've since rebranded to Hongshan. By the time of the IPO, Sequoia was principal shareholder, even agreeing to purchase 150 million shares at IPO to support the listing. Sequoia's stake post IPO was on the order of 7, 6% to 7%. In March of 2021, Sequoia Capital still held 6.4% of PDD. And so they are just printing over there. Sequoia Capital, Sequoia China is really the Sequoia of China. You can't make it up. IDG Capital is one of China's oldest VC firms. They were investors during the growth phase.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  They participated in the Series C round. New Horizon Capital was a PE fund that went in the Series B. And then Lightspeed China also got a bite of the Series B, which was 110 million. And there's a couple other investors here. So massive wealth creation event for Chinese VCs and American VCs that had Chinese arms at the time. So it's a very fascinating story.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Completely crazy story, incredible execution.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  They will talk about the slop wars of the 2020s for, you know, decades to come. And open invite, Colin. Come on the show anytime. We'll put you in the, we'll put you in the truth zone a little bit on the data privacy, labor, supply chain crises, things like that. But if you're ready for that.

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  You want to take some heat.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. But we will also sing your praises for massive wealth creation. We'll pop a bottle of Domper on with you.

• 1:07:11Jordi Hays?

  We'll hit the size gong. It'll be a mix. You'll come out, it'll come out positive.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it won't be a puff piece. It'll be hard nose, but.

• 1:07:18Jordi Hays?

  We will, we will ask you about the Uyghurs.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  We got to know.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  We'll also ask you what kind of car you drive and what

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  And what kind of watch?

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  What kind of mansion you're building?

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  And how many watches you bought on Bezos?

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'll probably be the best interview you'll ever do. It'll be great. Come on. Well, let's move on to the timeline. Thanks, everyone for sticking around for our team who deep dive. We got another, oh, we got a solid 40 minutes of timeline today. This is great. Very excited. Let's kick it off with this post from restructuring day in the life of an investor at US sovereign wealth fund. Hate to admit it, but sometimes Wall Street Oasis has some hilarious content. Jordy, you threw this in the feed. Why'd you like it?

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, so backstory, they, they, they did an executive order to create a US sovereign wealth fund. Trump signed this, I think a couple of days ago at this point. A lot of people are speculating on what's going to go in it. A lot of people, you know, a friend of this show, Jack Rains said, we already have a sovereign wealth fund. It's called SPY. But, but anyways, I just thought this was hilarious. So I'll read it. So this is somebody who's an analyst in private credit. He says, "At 7:00 AM, I wake up in my Georgetown apartment to a text from my MD. Need a deck on strategic lithium reserves by noon. Use the DOD template. I have no idea what that means, but I nod, sip my government subsidized coffee and I get to work.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  By 8:30 AM, I'm at my desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, surrounded by former Goldman guys who rebranded as patriotic investors. Our mandate, deploy 1 trillion of taxpayer money into high priority national interests. In reality, we're LARPing as PE bros while writing checks to companies with more lobbyists than revenue. By 10 AM, I have an IC meeting. The Secretary of Commerce dials in, asking why we aren't buying up more farmland. The MD replies, sir, we already own 15% of Iowa." And then I get cut off there, but um.

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  We nod solemnly, "America first." I'll keep reading. Lunch is catered from the White House mess hall. I sit next to a guy from the Pentagon's AI readiness task force. He assures me that investing $500 million into a surveillance drone startup run by a 24-year-old Stanford dropout is critical for national security. I write "synergies" in my notes and take a bite of my taxpayer-funded steak. By 3:00 PM, we're structuring a bailout for a failing EV battery company. Treasury wants it to be a loan, but the MD insists on pref equity with board seats. We're not just capital, we're strategic. Everyone nods, except for the one career bureaucrat who still thinks this is about fiscal responsibility. At 6:00 PM, I'm working on a term sheet for an emergency lithium mining JV with some guys in Wyoming.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  The deal terms: equity upside, mineral rights, and a direct line to the Fed for liquidity. Somewhere Larry Fink sheds a single tear of pride. By 9:00 PM, the interns are arguing whether we should issue high-yield bonds backed by military surplus. Someone jokes about tokenizing social security. Everyone laughs, but someone writes it down. At 11:30 PM, I close my laptop and stare at the framed photo of Teddy Roosevelt in my office. I realize I'm no longer just a finance guy, I'm a statesman. This is the most prestigious exit. This is paradise.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  This is paradise. Yeah, so anyways, this would be a point, you know, if tech is Doge, the sovereign wealth fund is going to be all the, all the PE brothers just, just having a heyday. I think it's cool, I think it's cool to think about. We'll see how it plays out. Obviously, the BTC maxies say that the sovereign wealth fund should just be a trillion dollars of Bitcoin. And I would, wouldn't be surprised if that kind of stuff got in, but it is funny how these, these, if there was a sovereign wealth fund, I imagine that it would ultimately be Trump as playing Masa, where people come and pitch him crazier and crazier, bigger and bigger ideas and then, because that's what happens in many ways, that's what happens in.

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  If you're going to try to raise, you know, a billion dollars from Saudi Arabia for some project, MBS will, at that ticket price, MBS probably has to like verbally sign off on the deal, right? Maybe he's not taking the pitch meeting, but you know, these, anytime you're raising money from what's effectively a kingdom, the king's got to sign off, or he's got a guy who is, you know, responsible for making sure that they don't do anything silly, but then when you're playing with dollars of that size, you end up doing, you know, he's jokes about giving a 24-year-old $500 million, but you know, it's only 50 basis points of the fund, you know, why not just, or no, even, even less.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, even less.

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  This is so funny to me because like the idea, I'm very pro the idea of a US sovereign wealth fund, but our country is in massive debt. Like, we don't have a surplus right now. We don't have money to, to put into a sovereign wealth fund, I think. I don't know where it would come from. We need to pay down our debt first, right?

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  World runs on leverage, so.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I don't know. All the rules have been thrown out. It's a new day. Anything's possible. But good to see some analysts having fun on Wall Street Oasis. Let's move on to Lulu. Lulu writes, "A good slogan is critical for starting a movement. Make America Great Again. Yes, we can. Time to build. No taxation without representation. Keep calm and carry on. Move fast and break things. Just do it. Workers of the world unite. Think different. The best slogan is one that gets stuck in people's heads and represents one central idea." And this is quote tweeting Emmett, former CEO of Twitch, says, "The way you influence large language models or a bunch of humans is not by writing persuasive prose, but by coining new words or phrases which are useful and also make it easier to think

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  certain thoughts over others." And she actually tagged me in this. She said, "This is Coogan's Law." And I was super excited to see Coogan's Law going viral on the timeline once again. I'm very, I'm very proud of that coinage. I stand by it. I think it's extremely valuable. I need to coin some more. Jordy, give me your take on this and then I'll riff a little bit more.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't have much more to add here. I think, you know, we're just big proponents of coining, you know, coining constantly iterating, you know, attempt to coin things. You're not always going to be successful, but um, you know, when you hit something, when you hit it like Kugan's law, I mean, that's a, that's a billion dollar coinage right there.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  And I was actually giving this, I was giving this advice to

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  a GP who reached out to me and said they were writing a piece on the intersection of these three trends. And my primary advice was you need to condense it down into five to six words max so that you can, if that, if these trends play out in the way that you think they will, that you will get credit for sort of creating that and sort of encapsulating that trend in something that is memorable and something that can sort of live on. And so Brody here says, you know, calls this out. Well, Brian Johnson has done this incredibly well with don't die, two words that, that sort of encapsulate his movement and everything that, that he stands for. So always be coining.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Always be coining. I mean, Peter Thiel did this with zero to one, but also he popularized the idea of the power law, which was really like, it's obvious he didn't create that, but he popularized that in the venture term. And, and owning a coinage and popularizing a coinage is super valuable. I actually looked up all the different ways you can coin a phrase around your name. So Kugan's law is out there already. We're working on Hayes law, Jordy's law.

• 1:14:58Jordi Hays?

  The Hayes paradox.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  His paradox is coming soon, dropping soon.

• 1:15:02Jordi Hays?

  That's when you find something so funny. It's so funny that you're, you're literally laughing at your own joke and then no one else finds it funny.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta post that. I think that's good. I think that can live on. But there's, but you have multiple shots on goal. So we can get Hayes law, Hayes paradox, Hayes effect, Hayes principle, Hayes razor, the Hayes trap, the Hayes critique, the Hayes, Hayes syndrome, the Hayes equation, and the Hayes wager.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Cause Lulu didn't put going direct on here, which is her.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Her.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Well, she didn't coin that.

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  She popularized it. And this is another thing about the Coogan, Coogan's law. There's also Coogan's paradox, which is that oftentimes the person that popularizes the coinage accrues more value than the person who actually does the coining.

• 1:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's funny. I always thought she created it.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  No, no, I think it might have come from biology or someone else.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  She also gets credit because she helps so many companies now do the thing, which is going direct.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  Totally. And yeah, and coining truly is not, coining is not just coming up with the phrase, it's also doing the work to popularize it and beat that drum. And I can tell that people are, people are circling around Coogan's law ideas. And if I don't stake my claim with a banger every week or every month, reasserting my ownership over that meme, it will get twisted and repopularized and I will lose it. And I've been talking to Solana about this with Moon Should Be A State. He has a great phrase. And you can see that as this gets bigger and bigger, this movement could move beyond him and someone else could take it. And all of a sudden, he's no longer the moon state guy. And that would be a huge loss. I want to keep it in the Solana.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the risk, the risk for him is that, is that there's two people that could really take that Elon and Trump.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Positive thing is if you get your, your phrase taken from one of those people, you still, you still get to be infamous for, you know, creating, creating a movement. So.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. And so, did you see this mattress drama? We have to cover it.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Mattress drama on the timeline.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Mattress drama on the timeline.

• 1:17:12Jordi Hays?

  To me, the drama here was that it was an air mattress and not an eight sleep. She wouldn't have caught this kind of shade if she was showing off her, her pod four ultra on the floor. But I think San Francisco's so normalized to the fact that high performers sleep on eight sleeps, that you can't really be taken seriously in San Francisco if you're not on an eight sleep.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm very excited to launch, officially launch our eight sleep partnership very soon. But on that note, I thought it was funny because she clearly.

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it was like one person that just like dunked on her and then like kicked off this entire firestorm. I thought her original post was totally fine. She said-

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny. She's clearly joking.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, she's, she's joking and like she's having fun and she's like playing into the culture, but um, but I think people saw it a little bit as stolen valor, you know?

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  It's like, uh, you're a VC, the mattress on the floor has been reserved for, you know, the, the struggling founder, the John Coogan in, in 2010, you know, sleeping on a mattress with 200 bucks a month to spend on, you know, food. Uh, so anyways, day, she says, day two learnings, VCs are hated in SF and people think that their junior VC job is a lot more glamorous than it is. It's not lol. Another great reminder to focus on what you love versus being concerned with external validation. Uh, I don't think the second point, I, I think she kind of missed the point. I don't think VCs are hated. Um, I think that, I don't think, I don't think anybody thinks that junior VCs are so glamorous. It's more so that,

• 1:18:50Jordi Hays?

  unless you're working for the world's smallest micro fund, like, uh, you're probably making an okay income and you don't have any risk of, am I going to run out of money, you know, in three months? Um, and so, uh, anyways, Megan, Megan dunks under again, uh, and says, VCs are hated in SF, LMAO. You guys need to get-

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  This is a, this is a call to action for, I don't know exactly what firm Monica works for, but, uh, if you're the GP of that fund, uh, get Monica an eight sleep immediately. Uh, and then also maybe get her a Cartier crash to show off in, when she's at a partner meeting, you know?

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, loaner Cartier crash would go a long way to, to establish-

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  And why not a company car while we're at it? I mean, uh, you, you, you know, something nice that she can take, you know, maybe a McLaren F1. It has two seats. You can take the CTO and the CEO on a, a little drive. If you want to save some money, go with the I8, the doors still go up, you'll still be respected.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Don't LARP, don't LARP as a bootstrap founder, LARP as a size lord GP.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Get her, get her, get her a Bentley, uh, get her a crash, get her an eight sleep. Get her a $50,000 a month, you know, let's put those management fees to work.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Let's do it.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  It's not meant to be just pure net income for the partners.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:09Jordi Hays?

  Moving the firm forward.

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you have the, you have the proof on the timeline. I think this is an indictment of, of, of austerity at VC firms. We need GPs kitting their associates out and their principals out and their junior VCs out with the absolute best, the creme de la creme. Let's move on to promoted post. Wait, what you got?

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  After we do this, I got some promoted reviews. So let's jump in with.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Let's do this promoted post. I'll read through this. This is the job I expect is a dream come true for many software engineers. We're hiring for engineers to join the internal AI team here at Andurall Tech, where you will build agentic tools that power damn near every work stream across the company. If you want to have access to the biggest foundational AI labs as your partners and work on enabling everything from sales to marketing to internal comms, to manufacturing, to hardware design, to field sustainment, while being part of the leader in defense technology, apply. And so go to Andurall's job website on Greenhouse. Check out the job that Psy has posted.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  He is in a, he's in a massive war with Luke Metro over at Andurall to be the top poster at Andurall. And so give him a follow, go apply for this job. Seems like a dream job, honestly.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Company's ripping and it's exciting place to be.

• 1:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the tag, Psy. Go apply. Go DM Psy. This is an insane opportunity. You'd be stupid not to take it. Go work for America, work for Andurall and defend our national interest.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Let's go to some promoted reviews because we've been getting five star after five star review on this podcast. They don't stop coming. And as a reminder, if you leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, we will read your review live on the show and we encourage you to include an ad in your review. It's free real estate, folks. Take it.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  This, uh, this block of promoted reviews is sponsored by Adquick.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  One way to buy out of home ads for your startup. They make it programmatic. They make it super easy. We're planning some of our own out of home campaigns on Adquick right now for TV as well as PMF or Dye. So they're amazing. You can just go to adquick.com and sign up. They've got some great, uh, sales reps over there that'll walk you through it. Or if you need some campaign ideas, hit us up. We're happy to support there and I'm going to jump into some ads now. This is from Dr. Brian. He says, "Technology Brothers is a wonderful podcast. Just like my 2020 vision, I don't take a single episode for granted. This five star review is brought to you by Gray Talk Family Vision Care. For over 30 years, Dr. Mark Gray Talk has been dedicated to providing exceptional eye care to families in Western Pennsylvania

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  with locations in Greensburg, Legionnaire and Harrison City. And now with the recent addition of his son, Dr. Brian. I love it. Keeping it in the family. Our commitment to your vision is stronger than ever. As a father, son team, we believe that eye care means we care because your vision deserves the best. We offer comprehensive eye services, including dry eye treatments for the 10x engineers who are glued to their screens all day, creating shareholder value in products such as blue light blocking glasses for terminally online X posters who seek banger archive acclaim. Don't let poor vision prevent you from seeing the next big trend in tech. Call now or book online. Gray Talk Family Vision Care, where eye care means we care.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  That's a fantastic review. Fantastic post, fantastic ad. Thank you for sharing that.

• 1:23:47Jordi Hays?

  We gotta.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Love promoting family businesses.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Go to the eye doctor in a long time, thankfully. But, uh, but I would, I would love to actually be treated by them. They, they sound amazing. Thank you for the review, guys, and for listening.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  I can read the next one. If you want.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah, hit it.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Sounds funny. It says, it's mewing for the brain. Five star review creatine and raw eggs castle equals calcium cannons blueprint slash Brian Johnson equals YB stiffs. I don't know what that means. Oh, I think I know what that means. Actually, technology brothers equals a fully rocked up brain. If you want to beef up the brain matter, all you need to do is take some creatine and put on these two citizens of the world. Current events, deep takes in a style sense that would make the ice queen and a winter quiver. Babe, wake up. Just found some good old fashioned ear candy. Everyone that matters.

• 1:24:40Jordi Hays?

  Dude.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Stu, thank you.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Dude, absolute dog. What if I was no ad in there? I would have liked to promote something for you.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you always get a second chance because you can review us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You get two shots on goal, guys. Should I read the next one too?

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Next one, next one. I got one from SC. He says, and this is from Blaine Davis. He says, business thrives on deals and deal makers thrive on technology brothers podcasts. Those who love, who love leverage and luxury, listen daily. Take it from us, a pair of passionate listeners who like you, love business and decided to do something about it. We're building a platform to pay homage to deal makers like Emil Michael and Michael Ovitz. So today, before allocating capital, allocate your network, make a new connection for a new company to help them land a customer and we'll wire you capital the same day. We want to build a business platform of the future where connections you trust could be the new customers for the companies we trust. We are super connector.com and we approve this message.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  Great ad.

• 1:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Connector is an amazing company. I would think of it as like, almost like an expert network, but for helping you find customers. So if you're trying to sell into healthcare, they have healthcare executives and people that are hyper connected in that industry that you can basically hire and just pay on a per lead basis. And so, super cool platform. Love the domain too, super connector.com. Just ripping through these. You want to hit the next one?

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, tech bros for the win. If you've ever wondered what happens when two angel investors with LinkedIn level enthusiasm and Chad like confidence get behind a microphone, look no further than Technology Brothers. A world where AI isn't just a tool, but a co-host and blockchain is the answer to every question, even the ones you didn't ask. Five stars. This review is sponsored by Jay Kramer Corp. Transform your dream home into reality with Jay Kramer Corp., Southern California's premier general contractor. This is extremely relevant for us.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  With over 30 years of experience, we specialize in luxury new constructions, intricate remodels, and innovative designs. Our award-winning projects have been featured in Architectural Digest and Dwell, showcasing our commitment to excellence. Whether it's navigating tight coastal spaces or building on challenging terrains, we handle it all with precision and care. Visit jaykramercorp.com and let's build your future together. I mean, we gotta build a manor for TV.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  Our new studio will be looking like Louis XIV.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  Jay Kramer, we were gonna just lease a studio, but I feel like now we gotta build one ground up. To be honest, John, nothing, like, reading these reviews literally makes my heart sing.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  One of the, it's just so fun. Everybody gets into character. I absolutely love it. Thank you, guys, for the support and for listening.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  We really love the community.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's the least that we can do to, to add, you know, to run ads for your incredible businesses. So absolutely love it. Let's get back into the timeline.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Okay, so Connor says, "Number of early-stage founders I know who are not struggling to hire? Zero." And Monica, from an earlier post, says, "What's the bottleneck? Is it, it's an employer's market, isn't it?" And Connor says, "The best talent have many options to choose from. Very hard to find the right cultural skill and expectation fit. You can hire people more easily by lowering your standard in some capacity, but there's no free lunch." And this is real. Everyone says, "Oh, AI is gonna kill all the jobs and everything," but it hasn't happened yet. There's still a very tight labor market. And with Cursor and Devin and all these extra tools, it's gotten a lot more fun to work at a startup. It's gotten a lot more productive. And so, great engineers and great product builders have the pick of the litter. What do you got for me?

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I am. I mean, to me, this is playing out. A lot of people said that that have been saying, you know, that the job of the software engineer is going away. And we've got another year, maybe, but it's, you know, it's going to be gone. And who knows really what's going to happen, but one thing is clear as these engineers, as engineers get more efficient with tools like Devon and Cursor and Windsurf and Poolside and the whole list goes on. It seems like there's just an even bigger and bigger and bigger demand for engineering talent, because then companies say, okay, we're more efficient now. Let's build even faster, right? And so you see these companies that are hitting these incredible revenue milestones and building these really full-featured products in record time.

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  And so, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a great time to be talented and looking for opportunities. It's a tough time to be hiring. And every single one of the company, you know, we talk, every company that we talk about on the show is actively hiring, right? And even they're, they're hiring and, and OpenAI themselves is hiring engineers, right? And I'm sure they, they are frustrated with, with, with how competitive the market is right now. So an awesome time to be joint, you know, in the market to join a startup.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I always think about that Pavel post about, oh, software engineers are cooked. No, everyone is going to be competing with software engineers because the tooling is so advanced now that, I mean, you see this at Ramp. Their marketing organization has tons of technologists in it. And there's every problem that you have, whatever your business is, whether it's sales, like having programming skills or being able to think like a programmer.

• 1:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, look at, look at this, right? So deep research is, does PhD level research now? And that is software engineers building that to compete with not other software engineers, but.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  People that would have just been manually putting together that data and information and summarizing sources and things like that. So, you know, look, even Tyler Cohen, which who's been, he certainly hasn't been an AI bear, but he's been more so, I, you know, he was on Dorkesh and basically talking about how, yes, it's going to be transformative, but it's not going to eliminate all jobs in 10 years, right? Like these trends are going to take quite a long time. So why don't you get into this?

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Alex Stapp says buckle up folks. And he's sharing a screenshot from Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen writes, I have had deep research write a number of 10 page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to a having a good PhD level research assistant and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, maybe more, except deep research does the work in five or six minutes. And it does not seem to make errors due to the quality of the embedded O3 model. And what I've realized is that I've gotten better at prompting deep research and now I'm having fun with it. I asked it, when we did the deep dive on Temu, Temu, I specifically asked it, who made money

• 1:31:24John Coogan?

  from Temu? And it was very good about citing very specific articles to figure out who the investors were. And then I also asked it, write in an analysis of Temu's effect on Amazon. And he was able to look at the financials of PDD and the financials of Amazon and really compare those. It was a little bit, it was a little bit boring when I asked it just like, tell me the whole story of Temu, because it doesn't really know what I want. But when I ask it very specific questions, and, and questions that I don't know the answer to, or I can't just Google and actually require some analysis and some piecing together, that's where it really shines. And, and that's where it would take a long time to pull up the financials, get maybe get into Excel, compare them. So I am loving it. And I think it's a big advancement. What do you got?

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One other note, I saw Michael McNano from Lightspeed posted. He's been on the show before we covered his blog post, I think on Monday or Tuesday. He said, deep research marks the first time I've been convinced that AGI is already here. The discussion is over. I agree. I think that people are realizing that, we've talked about this on the show before, right? Everybody was saying, you know, we're building AGI, you know, it's almost here. And then everybody kind of looked around and said, hey, what we already got, you can already sort of say is artificial general intelligence. And so the goalpost just got shifted out to artificial superintelligence and agentic systems and, you know.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  Well, it's that is that AEI concept, the artificial economic intelligence in my mind. It's like, at a certain point, these evals mean less than just how much money are these AI systems making? And that's a real, that's almost a measure of the unhobblings, like the PDF upload we like to joke about. But really, the question is, can deep research integrate into a system where it's creating real value? And, and is that measurable? And then really, it's just, it's just, what's the revenue of the application layer? And that is a metric. And once that gets really, really high, well, yeah, we've crossed some sort of quantitative threshold. And these, and these questions about like, is the system human level intelligent or not? It's almost

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  less relevant than is GDP moving up? Are we at 5% GDP growth instead of 2%? That would be amazing. That's what Tyler Cowen's a little bit worried about, because he thinks that there's a lot of jobs and a lot of roles that are just completely like hardened against AI, at least in the short term. But, but they certainly, certainly the ideal is that, is that all these, all these systems get better, they create more value, values captured by the shareholders, by the consumer, by the user, by everyone. And it's just, you know, a new, a new American boom, which I would love to see. Let's stay on this topic, move forward a few slides, Ben, to Juwan

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  over at Ramp. He says, "Front-end engineers equipped with AI/ML skills will be the most desirable employees by the end of 2025." Thought this was an interesting post, because a lot of the, a lot of the backend and the actual instantiation of the idea of software is becoming commoditized and becoming easier to do with these AI tools. But you still got to know what to build, how to design a product, and how to make it usable to a human at the end of the day. And so that's why I think he's saying that front-end engineers, designers, people with product sense, might be uniquely poised to benefit from advances in AI. But what do you think?

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  I just got to do a golf clap for Juwan, because it feels like just yesterday. He came out, started asking for raises on the timeline.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Been on a tear.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  At this point, I think he's beyond earned it. The guy's been on a tear. He's getting millions of impressions a month, putting Ramp on the map, making them a target for super smart young engineers to go and join Ramp. So I think he deserves a raise. I'll go on record and say it. Maybe I'll even text Eric and Kareem. But anyways, congrats on the run.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  We got a promoted post from Emmett, Emmett Shine. He is looking for a designer to collaborate on branding and product design in this style, metallic chrome, grain detailing, Americana. If interested, DM Emmett on X or email him at [email protected]. And we're big fans of Emmett on the show. If you're not familiar with him, he was what, Gin Lane?

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, quick summary. So Emmett started Gin Lane like probably 15 years ago. One of the most impactful branding agencies that led the charge on D to C. So they work with all these different companies from like Warby Parker to, I think they did Harry's to Sweetgreen, things like that. So absolutely incredible human and creative mind. He's also a coach for PMF or Die. We got a big announcement for PMF or Die coming tomorrow. So he'll be on that show and just a pleasure to work with. He did the Aurora branding. You can see it in the back left there, John. So we work with him there, but incredible opportunity for the right designer to go in there and get to work with the GOAT.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  Well, let's go to another promoted post, not from Bezel, but for someone that should be shopping on Bezel because Brody, fan of the show, asked the question, what should I put in these empty watch slots? He has three watches. He's got 10 slots, seven to fill or eight to fill, or actually that's 12. That's a 12 watch case. So he's got plenty of options. What would you put in there, Jordy?

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, he actually has one more. He should have circled that Apple Watch and you can get that out of it.

• 1:37:02John Coogan?

  You're not going to see Apple Watches on Bezel.

• 1:37:05Jordi Hays?

  I think that watches are such a considered purchase that I highly recommend if you're interested in getting one, not impulse buying anything because a watch that you think is cool today. And if you just start watching YouTube videos on watches for just 30 minutes a night for a while, by a month in, you'll all the watches you thought were cool in the first, you know, the first week suddenly are, you know, you're beyond them. And so I think it's a journey. There's no rush to fill it up. And anyways, I would say like work on building up your wishlist on bezel before you do, before you make any, you know, specific purchase.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Also, Brody, Brody launched a cool, he launched a marketplace yesterday. That's a marketplace for startups to offload their startups to offload. Like, you know, if you're moving offices and you have extra chairs or you bought monitors that you don't need. I don't think, I don't know if we have it listed here, but, but either way, check it out. I think it's vcsubsidized.com. And, you know, potentially get some Herman Miller for 90% off.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of options. So download the bezel app, start scrolling and watch some YouTube videos and watches. Let's move over to another somewhat promoted post and then we'll wrap up the show. Patrick O'Shaughnessy posted today his fabulous conversation with Graham Duncan. And we wanted to highlight this because we covered this on the show because the interview with Graham Duncan was on the cover story of the first Colossus review, which we highly, highly recommend going and subscribing to. It's a fantastic publication. We have it somewhere here in the, in the studio, but.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  We wanted to highlight this because previously this conversation was only available on the paid Colossus RSS feed, but now in a great turn of events, it's available in an ad sponsored format. And so Ramp has partnered with Invest Like the Best. They are the presenting sponsor, and you can go and listen to Patrick's conversation with Graham Duncan for free on the ad-supported Invest Like the Best RSS feed. And so go check it out. He breaks down starting an investment platform, sourcing, compulsion, grip, and levels of investing, of the investing game and evaluating

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  people. So if you don't know Graham Duncan, he is the guy who picks the guy. He seeds new investment and asset managers. And so if you're, if you're starting a new hedge fund or a new, a new investing firm, you go to Graham, if he likes you, you're going to get a lot of money for your fund, and he's done very, very well. And he breaks down how he thinks about talent. The guy spends three hours a day on LinkedIn. He's an absolute beast.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's very broadly applicable to just everything from picking, you know, founders that you want to angel invest in to picking, you know, friends and business partners. And anyways, his, his lessons are tremendous. So definitely check it out.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So thanks, everyone for tuning in. That's our show for today. We'll be back tomorrow. We have tons more stories, tons more news, and I'm sure we'll be breaking stories and getting exclusives like we always do on here.

• 1:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  So don't forget to leave us a five star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave an ad in your review. Send us any questions, DM us, submit, bang or archive posts. Just engage with us everywhere on the timeline. We'll be on X all day long, all day.

• 1:40:44Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you on the timeline.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  We'll see you on the massively profitable X, the app, the everything app.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching, everyone.

• 1:40:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, folks.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Have a good day.