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- [00:00]
John Coogan
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:02]
Geordi Hitch
Today is Thursday, January 8, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I wrote about Cha Ching, the Apple card. Minor news yesterday. We have to.
- [00:23]
John Coogan
Oh yeah, please, you have to ask. Somebody sent us a bunch of weights. Yeah, and this one is a ten. There's a question. Quite a few of these. Are you trying to say something? Is this, you think the upper limit. But either way, whoever sent these, please let us know because there was no card. We don't know who to thank.
- [00:42]
Geordi Hitch
We're just bumper plates. They're very nice, very nice. Nike bumper plates.
- [00:47]
John Coogan
What a funny thing to do. Big sign of respect in our culture.
- [00:49]
Geordi Hitch
It is, it is, it is. Anyway, there was a minor headline, breaking news. Actually learned about it from the chat. We discussed it right after we talked to Pat and Ravi from Sequoia that the Apple card program is moving from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan. Nothing's really changing about the Apple card yet. It's merely the bank backend that's always been sort of behind the scenes, behind the fold. But even though it's a minor headline, I think it's an interesting story of just how Apple got to the point where they have a credit card, what that means, what the decisions, what the trade offs were. I wanted to go back all the way to the Steve Jobs era and think about would he be down? With credit cards, you're giving leverage to your customers, you're giving credit, you're in the debt business. It's a different business. How did he think about it and how did we get here? The headline is that the Apple card program has millions of cards issued. There's $20 billion of debt that's accumulated across all the cards and the portfolio is not doing well. So normally if you have a co branded credit card, like a J.C. penney or Macy's credit card, and it's aligned with the brand, typically those get paid off pretty well. They have strict underwriting rules. And so when those trade hands, other banks will typically say, I'm buying a $10 billion portfolio and I'll give you 8% on top because most likely I'm going to be able to recoup all of that from the creditors. And also they're going to pay interest. So they're going to pay 15% interest, 25% interest. Now there will be some defaults. But in general, you typically make money off of owning a portfolio of consumer credit card loans. Not in this case. Goldman is like we got to get this off our balance sheet. They've already lost $1 billion. Their consumer bank overall, which includes Marcus, has lost 3 billion. Like they're not doing well over the last year.
- [02:39]
John Coogan
So is this a repayment issue or just an operational issue?
- [02:44]
Geordi Hitch
There's a little bit of both. A lot of it is the.
- [02:47]
John Coogan
Do you think this is potentially because Apple has made it more difficult to, to actually have Morgan Stanley like go after the clients? Like is that, is that Apple making certain decisions? Because I don't know. I have to imagine something like their underwriting criteria was wildly different than any other credit card.
- [03:06]
Geordi Hitch
It wasn't category wildly different. But I'll get into some of the, some of the pitfalls that led to this place. So the, the, the $20 billion card balances, that's trading, JP Morgan's acquiring that at a $1 billion discount. Instead of an 8% prem that they would pay 21.6, they're actually paying 19 for this. And then they're going to have to go and recoup some of it. It's not by any means a disaster. And Goldman's a large company.
- [03:33]
John Coogan
J.P. morgan Stanley. I said Morgan Stanley.
- [03:35]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah. But it's interesting to figure out the history here. Before we do, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. You can see we have our consoles here branded on the laptops. Very fun. So Steve Jobs actually thought about launching a credit card at Apple at least two times that we know of. There's two key stories about Steve Jobs thinking about getting in the credit card game. The first was in the late 1990s. He met with Capital One to create a joint credit card that would have worked a lot like the Apple card. So but the main problem, and I think the fourth or like there's a lot of things where Apple has a particular brand. I want to talk to you about Apple's brand and what it means, like how it fits into the consumer credit card, consumer financial landscape. But the North Star that Jobs laid down was always amazing customer service and no rejection. So I tend to think of most high end brands as beneficiaries of exclusivity. You can't just buy an Hermes Birkin bag. You can't buy a Ferrari SB3 Daytona. You have to be invited. You need relationship, you have to get an allocation right. Apple. For some reason I feel about Apple the same way I feel about Ferrari and yet it is a wildly different experience.
- [04:59]
John Coogan
It's a premium brand.
- [05:01]
Geordi Hitch
It's a premium brand. But because of the design and because of the value of the technology and how innovative they are, I put them in a different category than Equinox, which I would put as like a premium thing. I've thought of them as luxury and they've done a good job with the materials that they use. In general, it's all always felt like a luxury brand to me. Even though I agree with you, it's technically not. It doesn't really fit in there. They don't run their business like they're a luxury brand. They're not trying to say, oh, we only have 10,000 new iPhones in gold, so who knows what the market price will be on those. They don't run that like that. But Jobs wanted Apple to be a no rejection company. So anyone can walk into an Apple store, buy the most expensive iPhone that they make as long as they have the money for it.
- [05:48]
John Coogan
People want to give us money. They can, they can.
- [05:50]
Geordi Hitch
Which is, you know, it's a standard business practice but not always in luxury goods.
- [05:56]
John Coogan
Which is why I said it's premium, it's luxury. Even though Apple often presents itself as a luxury brand.
- [06:04]
Geordi Hitch
Yes, yes. Quickly, let me tell you about Linear Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Let me also tell you about the linear run of show today. The linear lineup. We got Delian Asper. Uhof. He's back on the show.
- [06:19]
John Coogan
He's back.
- [06:19]
Geordi Hitch
We're going to dig this last year. Yeah, 18 and he's starting strong in.
- [06:24]
John Coogan
The 180 this year.
- [06:27]
Geordi Hitch
We're going to dig into sticker box, this viral kids toy that was tearing up the timeline. Very cool use of AI for you know, a consumer product. Then we have Julie Bush at Valinor and a bunch of other folks, Harvey and Josh Wolf from Lux Capital is coming on. So it should be a fun show anyway, continuing. So because because of credit risk and underwriting, every credit card has to have an approval process and not everyone can be accepted. That's just the way it works. You cannot underwrite everyone or else you'll just have massive losses. So it was surprising. So Apple when they launched the original card, they actually set the credit score requirement fairly low. And even though it launched in 2019, it felt like a holdover from the Jobs era. That Jobs philosophy of even though we're Apple. Even though it feels it's going to have the patina of an Amex, it's going to have this premium look and feel. And we'll get into the design of the card in a minute. But it really was accessible to a lot of people. I think you needed a credit score of around a 600, which is pretty accessible. And so that philosophy carried through even from the 90s. The second time Apple was really thinking about doing a card was in 2004. And I will tell you about this after I tell you about figma. Figma make isn't your average buy coding tool. It lives in figma so outputs look really good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build create code back prototypes and apps fast. So they actually staffed this guy, Ken Siegel, who is the creative director on the Think different campaigns, like one of the most iconic marketers in history, in tech history certainly. And they came up with a name. Jobs said, if we launch a credit card, it's going to be called the Apple card. And they actually wound up using that name. But it had a weird twist. So most credit cards, they'll give you airline miles or cash back. There's Diners Club. It's usually you get points and then you can spend those points on travel.
- [08:27]
John Coogan
And you've always been a huge points guy, right?
- [08:29]
Geordi Hitch
I'm actually not a points guy at all. I usually meet whoever the most elite management consultant in my friend group is and just ask them because every management consultant is obsessed with credit card points maxing and I just ask them which one should I get? And then I just get that one. And then five years later, 10 years later, I still have it. And it's probably a bad deal then because it's always a great deal in the first couple of years and then it gets worse and worse and worse as they like retain you anyway. So instead of airline miles or cashback, this proposed Apple card from 2004, you would get points and you could only spend the points at the itunes store to get free songs. What a funny.
- [09:09]
John Coogan
I mean at that moment in time that was pretty cool.
- [09:11]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of a cool idea at the same time.
- [09:14]
John Coogan
I mean I was a child at that time, so 99 cents was somewhat of a considered purchase. Sometimes I'd just play the preview of the song.
- [09:23]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, I'm good with the 30 seconds for sure. This is enough.
- [09:26]
John Coogan
Just rocking out.
- [09:27]
Geordi Hitch
This is enough.
- [09:27]
John Coogan
Play it again.
- [09:29]
Geordi Hitch
But it is somewhat genius because there's sort of zero marginal cost on music, certainly on the distribution of music. Now they do have to pay royalty fees, but there's already a built in margin there. So that 99 cents, a lot of that went to Apple. Remember they take 30%. So they're. So they're giving you psychologically a dollar worth of value. You go and spend $100, you get, you get 100 points. One point is one cent. You buy the 99 cent song, but they are taking home another 30% on top of that. So the economics would have been really, really good. But it is sort of gimmicky because people want to spend points on a lot of things.
- [10:04]
John Coogan
Like I'm happy to get free flights and. Yeah, and hotels.
- [10:08]
Geordi Hitch
I think there's something psychological about having, you know, a credit card that you spend money on for a couple of years. You get a whole bunch of points and then you're like, wow, I got a free flight to a vacation that I'll remember forever. That's a very good association with whatever credit card brand you had as opposed to, okay, yeah, I bought a bunch of my favorite music and then four years later Spotify came out. And actually my itunes library is basically useless.
- [10:31]
Winston Weinberg
Right?
- [10:31]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [10:31]
Delian Asprooha
Tyler, I was just gonna say it's like same thing. Cause it's like instead of a trip, it's like, oh, I bought this Chief Keef album off my Apple card. I'll always remember that.
- [10:38]
John Coogan
And now my life is a movie.
- [10:40]
Geordi Hitch
I will remember that. I hate being sober. We gotta watch that clip. I need to pull that up. So they were gonna use, they called them I points and you'd be able to redeem them at the itunes store. Seemed like crazy timing considering that Spotify was about to launch four years later in 2008. So if they'd actually done this in 2004, launched the iPoints program, when did.
- [11:04]
John Coogan
Apple music actually launch?
- [11:06]
Geordi Hitch
Much later, Much later. I want to say like 2016 or something.
- [11:09]
Delian Asprooha
2015.
- [11:10]
Geordi Hitch
2015. Boom. Got it.
- [11:11]
John Coogan
Wow.
- [11:12]
Geordi Hitch
Gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and hr built to evolve with modern small and medium bit sized businesses. So the other key feature that Apple always wanted, and this went back to Steve Jobs that they always wanted with the Apple card, which you don't often think about with credit cards, but is amazing customer service. And so most people, their credit card just works. Apple did a couple of unique things where it integrated with the wallet, but mostly they just wanted extremely high levels of customer service. When you have a problem with your iPhone, you go into the genius bar. There's someone who's friendly, they are very good about Getting you in at the right time.
- [11:51]
John Coogan
Imagine one of the people at the Genius Bar breaking your kneecaps. They have a room where they're just like, okay, we're very customer friendly here, but you need to pay your bill and we have to break. Your kneecaps are going to take you back. Yeah. You know how Apple, they have like the back of house.
- [12:08]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
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John Coogan
It's like almost invisible. Right. It was like built in behind, like the big. Just get taken back there and they're.
- [12:13]
Geordi Hitch
Just like nicely just like pay your Apple card bill. Well, I mean, that was another thing. They want to be so customer friendly, they didn't have any late fees, no application fees and no international fees. No fees at all. That was the whole pitch. No fees, which sounds really nice, sounds really delightful to just be like, okay, I don't even have to think about fees or whatever. But the fees exist to incentivize people to pay on time. Because not only does the interest start accruing, but when you pay late, if you're not paying the balance, the minimum balance to maintain the card, then you get a late fee, which increases also the yield on the debt. But it also just attracts like a lower quality customer who's maybe just on their fifth credit card and is just like, oh, this one doesn't have fees and I need an extra 500 bucks this month. I'll just grab this one. And it's a less considered decision to bring into their financial life. So the customer service thing was really an issue because with Apple they have years and years. I mean, since, I don't know, probably the 80s, like the Christmas time was when people would gift each other MacBooks or Mac computers. And they built up, built up, built up. And so they have a whole workflow for how do we hire a lot of people, people around the Christmas time. How do we staff the Genius Bar? How do we educate people? How do we pay them? They're in the tier one cities so they can have great people working there. It's a very high dollar revenue per square foot in those Apple stores. So the whole model works and they've built it up very slowly. Goldman didn't have experience in consumer banking. The default customer service experience is I'm calling my banker, my Goldman banker, and I'm like, I need to sell my company for a billion dollars. Get your M and A team ready or I need to go public potentially on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Whether you use Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Whoever's lead left, make sure they're ringing that bell with you at the New York Stock Exchange. But seriously, Goldman, like, it's a trading, it's the highest finance, it's the most premier, it's the most elite. And so when you call them and you're like, yeah, I got billed for $25 and it should have been $23, can you fix this? Well, they need a new team for that and they need to build up that team. And that's not rocket science. I do think Goldman should have been able to figure that out. But Apple also wanted another consumer friendly feature. They wanted all of the bills to drop on the first of the month, every month. And normally credit cards will stagger it out. They'll be like, your bill comes on the 10th, Tyler's comes on the 15th, mine comes on the 20th. We don't really care, we don't really know. And so if you have a problem with your credit card, you check the statement and you're like, wait a minute, that's not the right charge. I gotta call and sort this out. You're calling on the 10th, Tyler's calling on the 15th, I'm calling on the 20th.
- [14:59]
John Coogan
They do it intentionally.
- [15:00]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, they do it intentionally because if they have a customer service organization, I.
- [15:04]
John Coogan
Always assume, I stupidly assume that it was just sloppy and annoying. No, I'm like, oh, you're just genius.
- [15:10]
Geordi Hitch
Trust the process, trust the process, trust the process. Never lose faith. So Apple insisted, hey, everyone's got to get their statement right on the first. That's the best customer experience. But what that means is that you need like 10,000 people ready at the phones because you're not just doing, oh, you know, send us an email and we'll have some automated system get back to you and do this. Like Apple customer service, that level that Goldman wanted to bring was very high. And so you need a ton of people staffed on the first of the month and then they're not really doing anything in the back half of the month. And while you can maybe do temp work at an Apple store in December and say, hey, we're going to hire you from November 1st to January 15th, you're going to deal with some of the returns. It's a three month gig. People sign up for that. No one's saying, yeah, I'm good to work at Goldman Sachs on the 1st of every month and the first week of every month, and then I'll just find something else to do on weeks two, three and four of the month. That doesn't make any sense. So they ran into a bunch of problems there. Obviously more cost. And all of this was just making the actual program less profitable for Goldman. Less problems. And we talked a little bit about the fees of any kind. Now there was an opportunity. Goldman was the whole reason why they jumped at the opportunity to work with Apple. And they kind of bent over backwards because Apple had tried this with. They went to a whole bunch of other banks, remember going back to Capital One and every bank had said like, now are you crazy? You can't do this. You can't give everyone in the world a no free credit card. With great customer service, you're gonna lose money. Apple and Apple, they're like, no, we.
- [16:44]
John Coogan
Want to give everyone a free lunch.
- [16:47]
Geordi Hitch
Exact. And so what Goldman should have done with the customer service is they should have got to Fin AI, except it didn't exist in 2019 but does now. And Fin is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. Maybe Goldman should become a client. Maybe JP Morgan should become a client. It might already be, but so the Goldman, they were making a push into Consumer. They built Marcus internally, which was always sort of a funny name to me. I don't know if it resonated with you.
- [17:18]
John Coogan
I don't know. People names can either be so good or so bad.
- [17:24]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [17:24]
John Coogan
And I don't know, I have a childhood friend, a family friend named Marcus.
- [17:28]
Geordi Hitch
His name.
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John Coogan
Marcus? Yeah, it's a great name. He's a great dude. Do I want to trust him with all my money? I don't know.
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Geordi Hitch
Oh yeah, it's funny, you might be like, yeah, my smartest friend is Marcus. I love this brand. Or it's like.
- [17:41]
John Coogan
Anyways, I texted a buddy who has some context on this whole deal and so I. He is in a meeting, but he fired off some notes. He asked him like, why, why did, like how did this happen? Basically he says GS effed up the plan. DJ D Soul was told to shut down Marcus and Consumer or get out.
- [18:02]
Geordi Hitch
That's David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman.
- [18:04]
John Coogan
Or get out of the job. So he cut all of Marcus except for savings. Then GS had a multi year process to find a bank that Apple would approve. Right. They're not just going to say like we're out of some, some smaller, not systemically important bank, et cetera. Then they had to figure out price, which includes opportunity cost of selling for a discount compared to running out the contract to 2030. GS effed up because they probably couldn't because it's a transactional org, not a longitudinal org. And really thought they were smarter but never focused on the fundamentals of running the business.
- [18:40]
Geordi Hitch
So the questions like what happens next? JP Morgan obviously has way more consistency here. The other hard part for Goldman was that they were trying to build their consumer facing brand. So they wanted the Goldman name in more places and the Apple card would have been a great co branding thing. They were fighting to get like the front of the card which would be the prime real estate next to Apple. Apple. Goldman would have been really cool. They didn't.
- [19:06]
John Coogan
They got relegated to the absolutely not.
- [19:08]
Geordi Hitch
And the card looks awesome. I was reflecting on it. I don't know if you've actually seen it. Maybe we can pull up a picture. But I don't know if it's still the case. But originally it was CNC milled from a single sheet of titanium alloy. The same way they make these MacBooks they would use to make the cards. So it didn't have those laminated layers. I don't know if you have a Chase Sapphire reserve but those things kind of fall apart after a couple years because there is a metal piece and the metal card is typically more prestigious but they add laminate on either side. The Apple card went a different direction and it had. And I think they delivered on the branding side. They just didn't quite deliver on the, on the, on the financial design.
- [19:54]
John Coogan
Did you ever have one Apple card?
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Geordi Hitch
No.
- [19:57]
John Coogan
And it's so, so interesting because I think that if you were trying to do an analysis on the Apple card, you were like every high value credit card customer in America. Not every, but the vast, vast. Maybe 99% has an iPhone.
- [20:12]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [20:13]
John Coogan
Apple is going to put this everywhere.
- [20:14]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [20:14]
John Coogan
This is going to be one of the biggest credit card business lines of all time.
- [20:18]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [20:18]
John Coogan
And it just, it's been interesting to see, you know, this entire saga because it hasn't really turned out that way. Even though, even though. How many times has Apple kind of promoted to you in some way or another? Right. So many different ways to open up the wallet app. And still I'm just like I have, you know, I have a credit card. I don't need another. Right.
- [20:36]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, totally. Well, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Well that it'll be interesting to see where this goes. I think it's always been sort of like a minor business for Apple but some opportunity. I do think that There was an interesting opportunity to make it more exclusive, more of a status symbol, more of something that you pull out and it says something about you, has some badge value. But that would be in a lot of circles.
- [21:11]
John Coogan
An iPhone doesn't actually say anything about you.
- [21:13]
Geordi Hitch
No, no, no, no. It's too generic.
- [21:15]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [21:16]
Geordi Hitch
And then also there's just the fact that people don't pull out credit cards anymore.
- [21:21]
John Coogan
I do. Yeah. I really wonder how the. How people know people using Apple Pay will affect the premium people put on different credit cards. Right. When you're just like, I'm gonna just pay this bill at this restaurant.
- [21:35]
Geordi Hitch
The true points maxers do care about using the right card for the right time. Cause some cards will be better for dining, others will travel. Others, like the Apple card, gave you 3% off if you're buying Apple stuff. And then 2%, I believe, if you paid for something with Apple Pay using the Apple card in Apple Pay, like, you open up Apple Pay and you select the Apple card, you get 2% back and there's 1% on everything. Everything else, if you pull out the card and you just pay for gas at the gas station. But then there's like the Costco card that gets you a better discount at Costco and the Amazon card that gets you better discount at Amazon. And so a lot of the points maxers and the card maxers will get the specific card. And they're like, when I'm at Amazon, I use this card. When I'm at Walmart, I use this card. I never got.
- [22:17]
John Coogan
Gabe says this is a project for Billy McFarland to lead. Remember, he had like a members.
- [22:23]
Geordi Hitch
I saw his Agnesis. I saw his latest Instagram reel or something. He's just walking down the street talking about doing some event.
- [22:32]
John Coogan
He's still new festival.
- [22:33]
Geordi Hitch
New festival or something along those lines. I don't know. Good luck to him.
- [22:37]
John Coogan
In other news, US venture capital fundraising falls 35% as firms stay private longer. Of course, Josh Wolf is not letting himself be a statistic. He's coming on later today to talk.
- [22:51]
Geordi Hitch
About the massive fundraiser, the biggest one ever.
- [22:52]
John Coogan
1.5 billion in new funds for Lux Capital. But Kate Clark in the Journal says money is flowing to the most trusted investment firms as startups stay private longer.
- [23:03]
Geordi Hitch
And before we read this, let me tell you about vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales.
- [23:14]
John Coogan
Just like on Meta, fundraising for US venture capital firms dropped 35% in 2025. The most anemic stretch in at least six years. With money flowing primarily to the most trusted investment firms as companies stay private longer. The $66 billion raised last year represents a 70% drop from the 2022 record. The slowdown reflects a continuing liquidity crunch. Startups have been flush with venture funding. Startups that have been flush with venture funding have opted to remain private rather than exposing themselves to public market scrutiny. A prolonged IPO drought that has returned little cash to investors, now complicating efforts to raise new capital. And there's a graphic here that we can pull up. You can see the chart. The fundraising climate is challenging, said Beezer Clarkson, a partner at Sapphire.
- [23:58]
Geordi Hitch
I invited her on the show. We got to get her at some point. She's great.
- [24:01]
John Coogan
Focused on investments in venture funds, investors are concentrating capital on the most trusted VCs.
- [24:06]
Geordi Hitch
Rather look at this chart.
- [24:10]
John Coogan
Hate to see it. It is funny that over the last 18 months, two years, it felt like, I feel like a lot of people were looking around and being like, wow, our industry can exist in a high rate environment. And you look at this chart, I.
- [24:25]
Geordi Hitch
Don'T know that that's actually what's going on. I mean, it does coincide with the interest rate thing perfectly. I think the bigger piece of the narrative is just the IPO market. The fact that a lot of these funds are sitting on massive nav, massive gains, but not a lot of liquidity. And so if you are an allocator, an lp, and you've put a bunch of money in a fund and you're like, yeah, I'm ready to double down as soon as you give me the money back, I'll give it back to you. But like, let's give it back to me so I can reinvest it until, you know, oh, okay, you got 10 billion over there. Like, show me the money and then I'll.
- [25:00]
John Coogan
And this is the year the IPO window's open.
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Geordi Hitch
Yes.
- [25:02]
John Coogan
There's a bunch of names that we're expecting to go out if it starts to close. You and I will do our best.
- [25:09]
Geordi Hitch
We're going to hold it open, hold it back to back.
- [25:11]
John Coogan
I'll push one door back to back.
- [25:15]
Geordi Hitch
Well, it's going to be an exciting year for anyone on public.com investing. For those that take it seriously, stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more.
- [25:23]
John Coogan
Back to the article. As a result, the largest firms are becoming more powerful. Anthropic investor Lightspeed Venture Partners secured more than 9 billion across new funds in December. That was an organic soundboard in one of the year's largest raises, while PT's Founders Fund closed 4.6 billion in April. New fund managers, by contrast, are facing an increasingly tough fundraising environment. The drop in fundraising helps explain why cash intensive AI businesses are looking beyond traditional venture firms for capital, such as the deep pocketed sovereign wealth funds, family offices and hedge funds collectively. The venture market doesn't have the firepower to do this investing, clarkson said of the largest AI rounds. It must be coming from other sources as well and kind of left out the hyperscalers too, out of this, which have been a key player in some of these later rounds. Funding for USAI startups reached a record 222 billion in 2025, more than double 2024 level. So we have 66 billion in new funds raised, 222 billion actually going into startups. And of course a lot of that again is non venture capital firms.
- [26:36]
Geordi Hitch
Still seems like still seems like a good time to build a company. Still seems like there's plenty of always.
- [26:41]
John Coogan
A good time, always a good time.
- [26:43]
Geordi Hitch
Should we talk about there's some interesting concentration dynamics that are happening because you often see that chart of the decline in venture funding raised with also the decline in new venture fund formation. There just aren't as many new funds getting spun up. Obviously we talked to some folks that are getting new funds off the ground, but a lot of it's not 2021 anymore where there were like a new fund every single day. The top 30 funds secured 75% of fundraising, with Andreessen Horowitz alone capturing roughly 10% of the year's entire year's capital. Mega rounds of $100 million or more accounted for about 70% of venture funding. So you have this bifurcated market. Elite funds and sovereign wealth are doing huge AI deals while the broader VC ecosystem, emerging managers, seed funds, Series A specialists are getting CR it's the best time for tech ever, is real, but concentration is maybe in 20 to 30 companies. Everyone's just riding their winners.
- [27:44]
John Coogan
Well, speaking of deals, Reuters has an exclusive they say Trump admin mulls payments to sway Greenlanders to join the U.S. greenland says they're not for sale. European leaders are standing behind Copenhagen, but Greenland talks in the White House have intensified in recent days. U.S. officials have discussed sending lump sum payments to Greenland stimmy time stemmy time to Greenlanders as part of a bid to convince them to secede from Denmark and potentially join the United States. While the exact dollar figure and logistics of any payment are unclear, U.S. officials, including White House aides have discussed figures ranging from 10,000 to $100,000 per person. Doing the math. Even at $100,000 a person, Greenland only has like 57,000 residents. So we're talking about basically a seed round five, 5.7 billion. That's doable. That's an AI. That's actually like three AI researchers.
- [28:46]
Geordi Hitch
Three AI researchers in Greenland. For all of Greenland. I mean, I get that they have a ton of natural resources and whatnot, but I wonder what. I wonder how much like this would actually sway them. Because I doubt that you can just actually buy the votes. You probably couldn't make the payment contingent on them voting. They would have to, like, either vote and then they get the payment because we promise or the payment happens and then whether or not they vote, you.
- [29:11]
John Coogan
Know, I think just start planes with cash.
- [29:14]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [29:14]
John Coogan
You know, just dropping it out of the air.
- [29:16]
Geordi Hitch
Because then wouldn't they. Wouldn't the game theory be just that they hold strong. There's going to be another plane.
- [29:22]
John Coogan
Here's my thing. Here's my thing. If I'm a citizen of Greenland.
- [29:26]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [29:27]
John Coogan
Or resident, I'm sitting there being like, you're okay. We know they're willing to. We have an idea that they're willing to spend up to around 6 billion. We think we're worth 60. Let's let them keep the Paramount, Skydance, the Ellisons. They'll just bid and then say, well, it's not our best and final offer. And what does Warner Brothers do? They, of course, again, they rejected another bid or recommended against it.
- [29:51]
Geordi Hitch
Greenland's Prime Minister, Jens Frederick Nielsen wrote in a Facebook post.
- [29:56]
John Coogan
Facebook, let's go. Okay.
- [29:58]
Geordi Hitch
They are really a decade behind over there. He says enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. He's not a fan. You gotta get on reels, buddy. You gotta do a front facing video. Use some AI, get some vibrio music in there. You gotta.
- [30:15]
John Coogan
Yeah. Get the Sigma male, you know, grind set.
- [30:19]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. It's just his statement, enough is enough. No more fantasies about annexation. And it just cuts to like the joker and stuff.
- [30:27]
John Coogan
Leaders in Copenhagen and throughout Europe have reacted to comments by Trump and other officials asserting their right to greet their right to Greenland in recent days with disdain. Disdain particularly given that the US and Denmark are NATO allies bound by a mutual defense agreement. On Tuesday, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Britain and Denmark issued a joint statement saying only Greenland and Denmark can decide matters regarding their relationship. So this is.
- [30:55]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, but they can, you know, Trump can make his case. Hey, if you alone, on your own, decide to come over and hang out with us. We got some cash for you. Apparently it's wild. Let me tell you about graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Trump has long argued that the US Needs to acquire Greenland on several grounds. One, it is rich in minerals needed for advanced military applications. He's also said the Western Hemisphere broadly needs to be under the geopolitical influence of Washington. While internal deliberations regarding how to seize Greenland have occurred among Trump's aides since before he took office a year ago, there has been renewed urgency after his government captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in a daring snatch and grab operation. Not an invasion, apparently, according to sources familiar with internal deliberations. One source said White House aides were eager to carry over the momentum from the Maduro operation toward accomplishing Trump's other long standing geopolitical goals. It feels like wildly different scenarios though. Like they're not going to go and send in Delta Force.
- [32:04]
Winston Weinberg
I don't know.
- [32:05]
Geordi Hitch
Maybe they will.
- [32:06]
John Coogan
I don't know.
- [32:06]
Geordi Hitch
We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and Denmark isn't going to be able to do it.
- [32:10]
John Coogan
So average gross income in Greenland is 40 to 45,000 USD. So people could be looking at that 100k saying I'm going to retire a couple years early.
- [32:21]
Geordi Hitch
100K is big. Yeah, I don't know. Among the possibilities being floated by Trump aides, a White House official said on Tuesday, is trying to enter into a type of agreement with the island called a Compact Free Association. Compact of Free Association COFA the precise details, which have only been extended to small island nations of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palauig Palau interesting vary depending on the signatory, but the US Government typically provides many essential services such as mail delivery and military protection and Amazon prime from us. What else can we offer you in exchange? The US Military operates freely in COFA countries and trade with the US Is largely duty free. No, no tariffs. I wonder what Greenland is exporting these days. COFA agreements have previously been inked with independent countries, and Greenland would likely need to separate from Denmark for such a plan to proceed. In theory, payments could be used to induce green lenders to vote for their independence or to sign onto a COFA after such a vote. While polls show an overwhelming majority of Greenlanders want independence, concerns about the economic costs of separating from Denmark, among other issues, have kept most Greenlandic legislators from calling for an independence referendum. Do you have stats on Greenland or.
- [33:42]
Delian Asprooha
Do you know I was just gonna say Tyler Cowen had a good piece on this yesterday in the Free Press.
- [33:46]
Geordi Hitch
What do you say?
- [33:47]
John Coogan
Read it, Tyler.
- [33:48]
Delian Asprooha
He's. Well, it's pretty long. I don't want to read the whole thing, but.
- [33:52]
John Coogan
Okay, then. Sing it.
- [33:55]
Delian Asprooha
He doesn't want us to actually, like, buy it. Right. It's like, bad. You need to convince them to come over. But he does, like, I think he wants Greenland to become in possession or the US to become in possession of Greenland.
- [34:09]
John Coogan
Right.
- [34:09]
Delian Asprooha
Maybe like a Puerto Rico situation.
- [34:11]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [34:12]
Delian Asprooha
So it's like a little bit above Palau. Yeah, it's above Palau. It's not a state, though. It's not like, you know, and we're not getting the military in.
- [34:20]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, we were pitching, so.
- [34:22]
John Coogan
It's such a tough. I mean, it's such a. It is a tough sell. As much as I love this great country.
- [34:28]
Geordi Hitch
You mean to live in Greenland or.
- [34:30]
John Coogan
Yeah, just if you're in Greenland and you're kind of looking over at the US with binoculars, I want that crazy stuff over here. Yeah, it's just massive, massive infighting. Governors, you know, going to war with Washington constantly. Right.
- [34:45]
Geordi Hitch
It is interesting. The US Is like one of the most entertaining countries. It feels like a lot of people are obsessed with our national politics. People don't really follow our local politics or our state level politics or global politics. They mostly follow American national politics. So I don't know, maybe they get it on it. I have another idea for Greenland.
- [35:05]
John Coogan
You're saying maybe they're just bored out there and they want to get in the arena.
- [35:11]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, get in the box. Get in the label box. Deliver you. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the label box. So Puerto Rico famously has just a 3% tax rate on income. So a lot of people go there.
- [35:29]
John Coogan
And this is why when Jake Paul fights for $90 million, he's actually fighting for base. Think about that number.
- [35:36]
Yotam Sierra
Wow.
- [35:36]
John Coogan
He's president. He has one of the few jobs that you can actually do very well from Puerto Rico, which is just train and boxing.
- [35:43]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [35:43]
John Coogan
You know, a team that you build yourself. So, yeah, he. His, like Jake Paul will actually be a billionaire just from box fairly quickly simply because he's going to do a handful more fights. I imagine then he needs about a 2x from there and he'll be good to go.
- [36:00]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [36:00]
John Coogan
Because he's like keeping, you know, 97%.
- [36:02]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. So when you see those headline numbers for boxing events, $100 million, is that to the winner who?
- [36:08]
John Coogan
No. And then someone actually Gets Jake Paul, Anthony Joshua fight. I think Jake got 90 something and Anthony Joshua got just under that around the same. But you know, I think Jake was a bigger draw.
- [36:21]
Geordi Hitch
So it's more about how much you're drawing. It's like starring in a movie almost. So you know your star power dictates how much you'll sell. It is crazy that, that I mean obviously very dedicated to the sport, but it's just crazy to me that you could be such a big celebrity that you can go and do a one night event and draw that much economic opportunity, that many ads and that many pay per view sales. That's a lot of money. That's remarkable. Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So my proposal, Puerto Rico, 3% tax rate. Greenland, we do a 97% tax rate.
- [37:03]
John Coogan
Why would anyone go grandfathered in to the puerto rico the 3%. I don't think.
- [37:08]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. For a long time you could just go.
- [37:10]
John Coogan
But now I think it's going to be there. I think they close it. I'm still, I'm sure it's still solid.
- [37:14]
Geordi Hitch
It was still probably away.
- [37:15]
John Coogan
Not what it was.
- [37:15]
Geordi Hitch
But Puerto Rico, famously people go there because it has a low tax regime. You'd pay just 3% of your income. Greenland, 97 taxes. That's what they should do. Why would anyone go there? It's cold and now you have high taxes.
- [37:29]
John Coogan
Well, but a lot of people want, desperately want to raise taxes. Yeah, basically. I mean I'm assuming some people actually want to take it to 100 and so if you could create go there.
- [37:41]
Geordi Hitch
You 0 and then, and then you're.
- [37:44]
John Coogan
In favor of ultra high taxes. You could go to Greenland.
- [37:48]
Geordi Hitch
That's a good idea. I like this idea.
- [37:51]
John Coogan
You just land in the country.
- [37:52]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [37:52]
John Coogan
And then you lose all your money, all your accounts with plaid but everyone knows throughout everything. And then zeroed out.
- [37:59]
Geordi Hitch
And then Tyler, you had a different proposal. What was it?
- [38:01]
Delian Asprooha
Well, so the bull case for just 97 is that like it's a flex, right. I can live in Greenland. I'm so I make so much money.
- [38:09]
Geordi Hitch
That yeah, Yeah, I have 3% left and I'm still balling. It is hard.
- [38:13]
Delian Asprooha
I can still afford.
- [38:13]
Geordi Hitch
Every billionaire has a plane. They all have boats. It's like who's really got money? Well, if you can go to Greenland, lose 97% of your wealth and still be flexing, it's like, okay, that's actually really rich.
- [38:26]
Delian Asprooha
Yeah.
- [38:26]
Geordi Hitch
But then really made.
- [38:27]
Delian Asprooha
But then if you're, if you're not.
- [38:28]
John Coogan
It's the new Lamborghini, you're.
- [38:30]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah.
- [38:31]
Delian Asprooha
If you're not Uber. It still makes sense if you basically just have the 97% tax rate the first year.
- [38:36]
Geordi Hitch
The first year.
- [38:37]
Delian Asprooha
So then maybe it's. Maybe it's. If you look at a 10 year increments. Right. So first year you're basically zeroed out.
- [38:42]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [38:42]
Delian Asprooha
But then you got, then you got a super low tax rate. Then you, then you zero grind for five years.
- [38:46]
Geordi Hitch
So you lock it.
- [38:47]
Delian Asprooha
It's almost like you get dropped on an island and you got to fight your way out.
- [38:50]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. Sort of Lord of Flies situation. Greenland.
- [38:52]
John Coogan
Do you see? Jensen came out yesterday and said he doesn't care about California's proposed billionaire tax. Is it. I don't know.
- [39:02]
Delian Asprooha
He's just. He's lowbrowing David Sack.
- [39:04]
Geordi Hitch
He's lowbrowing everyone. It's funny.
- [39:05]
John Coogan
Jensen Huang said he wasn't worried about a potential tax on billionaires in California breaking from a cadre of ultra wealthy residents who have spoken out against the first of its kind proposal. We chose to live in Silicon Valley and whatever taxes I guess they would like to apply, so be it. This is, I'm going to say it, it's kind of a pick me behavior for a beaner. He says, I'm perfectly fine with it. It never crossed my mind once. I mean, does this mean you should be even more bullish? On Nvidia, they go to 40 trillion for sure the ballot.
- [39:36]
Geordi Hitch
Initially he's like, actually definitely do this right now. And then stop because he's like, I got another 10x in the bag. I want to pay this now and then move on. Lock the rate.
- [39:48]
John Coogan
Now let's head into the comments section and put a hazmat suit. It's not really relevant what he thinks. According to Jeff, it's a question of what the policy effect impact is. If all the billionaires want to stay in the state and don't mind giving up 5% of their wealth each year or whatever nuts that thing the state cooks up, the state government will certainly not invest the money as intelligently as the average billionaire. It will largely go to fraud, waste, lazy government employees, et cetera. So Huang can have whatever opinion he wants. It's a free country. But that doesn't make it a wise policy. I agree.
- [40:20]
Geordi Hitch
Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning. Next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.
- [40:28]
John Coogan
You see, Larry dumped his place in sf.
- [40:30]
Geordi Hitch
He did he's moving out?
- [40:32]
John Coogan
Well, I don't know if he's getting out entirely.
- [40:36]
Geordi Hitch
Definitely making.
- [40:37]
John Coogan
He still has plenty of homes in Malibu.
- [40:40]
Geordi Hitch
In a somewhat related story, there's now a salary cap in defense tech. You saw this? So apparently this is from President Trump. He said that. What was the actual quote from Trump? Because Palmer had a clip.
- [40:57]
John Coogan
Let's head over to Truth Social.
- [40:59]
Geordi Hitch
I think you actually do. He said, I've been informed by the slowest. He's talking about. Okay. So also, if Raytheon wants further business with the United States government, under no circumstances will they be allowed to do any additional stock buybacks where they have spent tens of billions of dollars until they are able to get their act together, our country comes first. And can you find the actual Trump quote about the salary cap? He said, what? 5 million per year per executive at a defense company. He also said that. He said, I have determined for the good of our country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 trillion, but rather $1.5 trillion. That is a huge increase. 50% increase. But obviously there's a question of where that money comes from.
- [41:51]
John Coogan
Okay. Yes. Yeah.
- [41:52]
Delian Asprooha
So the.
- [41:53]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, I have the quote here. Yes.
- [41:54]
Delian Asprooha
Okay. Well, executive pay packages, they're exorbitant and unjustifiable. So they should be limited to 5 million or less.
- [42:02]
Geordi Hitch
Okay. Limited to 5 million or less. So I. So Palmer actually sort of agreed with this. Let's play the clip of Palmer Lucky on Bloomberg the Close digging into this.
- [42:14]
John Coogan
This is clip they were at the Consumer Electronics Show.
- [42:17]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, I think he was there for Mod Retro, but they got him to comment on defense technology.
- [42:23]
Palmer Lucky
So my motivation is to try and build in the biggest thing possible. I will say people are barely critiquing, but Palmer, you know, are you really a neutral party here? Are you really in a position to comment given you're competing with these companies? I'd say two things. One, these measures do apply in equal measure to me. I now cannot pay dividends. I now cannot do stock buybacks if I'm not investing in new plants, if I'm not doing these two things. The other thing is it's always tricky when you want it.
- [42:43]
Yotam Sierra
You.
- [42:43]
Palmer Lucky
I'm in defense because I wanted to help solve these problems.
- [42:46]
John Coogan
Right.
- [42:47]
Palmer Lucky
It's actually the same thing with, like, mod retro in the gaming space. Like, oh, of course Palmer would criticize these other game companies. After all, he's in the gaming space space. It's like. But, yeah, but I'M in the gaming space because I want to solve these problems. It's kind of this, like, catch 22. Like, like if you're outside of it, they'll say, well, why don't you do something about it then? And you do something like, who cares what you're doing? You're just part of the problem. It's always been emotionally difficult for me.
- [43:10]
Geordi Hitch
We also have posts that President Trump is thinking, more than a trillion should.
- [43:14]
Julie Bush
Be invested in the area of defense.
- [43:17]
Yotam Sierra
The budget should grow.
- [43:19]
Palmer Lucky
Anti defense or anti defense company. That's not for sure. That's for sure.
- [43:22]
Geordi Hitch
What's interesting is your company is, dare I say it, considering going public.
- [43:26]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [43:26]
Geordi Hitch
Would your CEO.
- [43:28]
Julie Bush
Do you think the CEO that leads.
- [43:29]
Geordi Hitch
The business when it's gone public should.
- [43:30]
Julie Bush
Be under these sorts of restrictions from an executive order?
- [43:33]
Geordi Hitch
Do you think that.
- [43:34]
Palmer Lucky
I think that when you are on the dole and when you're effectively run on the public's wallet, that the public should be able to impose whatever restrictions they want on you. I think you're not asking whether it should be like, like, you know, if I am getting paid by taxpayers, they should have the ability to elect people, elect representatives, elect, you know, who will then nominate people who can hold me to account in any way they wish. If they want to say that I only pay myself $5 million until I'm caught up with my schedules, they should be allowed to do that. If they say that I'm not allowed to pay myself $1 until I get caught up, I think they should be allowed to do that. When you are working on the. When you are working on Taxpayer nine, there is no level of oversight or intervention that I am against conceptually. Now, I think some of these might be bad moves. They might not necessarily help the defense base. But in concept, I think everything should be on the table. And I think it's even good maybe to scare some people sometimes. You don't necessarily go to people and say, this is the way it's going to be forever. You say, this is how it's going to be until you get your act together. You remember being a teenager. Your parents say you're grounded until X, Y and Z bring up your grades, solve your problems, and then we will talk about altering the deal. You say, but this deal has so many problems. If it's like this my whole life, if I'm grounded for the rest of my life, that means I'll have to associate. And your parents are not necessarily looking to ground you for life.
- [44:54]
Geordi Hitch
It's so funny.
- [44:57]
Palmer Lucky
I think that that's what you're seeing right now. It's not.
- [45:01]
Geordi Hitch
That's great.
- [45:01]
John Coogan
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think using it as an incentive to get these companies to hit the schedule that they agreed to as part of these contracts could be effective. Right. Especially, especially if it's, especially if it's temporary. You know, you can see this, you can see this kind of executive order setting a precedent that could over time be abused or have a bunch of negative effects. It's hard to say now. So this kind of thing is concerning. But you know, I was talking to a defense tech founder the other day who's trying to take over a program from a big prime where the prime had gotten like a multi hundred million dollar contract years ago and had actually not even set up a space to make the things that they had signed up and were getting paid to make.
- [45:48]
Geordi Hitch
They're being lazy bones.
- [45:49]
John Coogan
Lazy bones. Lazy bones behavior. And so yeah, you can't be a.
- [45:53]
Geordi Hitch
Lazy bones in that situation.
- [45:54]
John Coogan
If you have a management team that is just like printing regardless on if they're actually delivering on what the government is asking and paying them to do, that's inappropriate. And so I think, and I think.
- [46:05]
Geordi Hitch
Palmer is sort of wrestling with, you know, libertarian ideas. How much should private companies be able to do? And that's a separate issue. It's like a private company, if you're just selling to normal customers, you can do whatever you want. But it's different when you have a contract with government. Then who decides the government's claim? Well, it's the people, it's the democracy. And so that's what's happening.
- [46:26]
John Coogan
Yeah. And Palmer in another clip was talking. They asked him, how much do you make? He's like, I make $100,000 a year. Right. That's my compact. And he also said I have a bunch of stock because I started this company. Now the concern is like if you actually ended up in a situation where defense executives, anybody that works for the government cannot make more than $5 million and you're factoring in comp packages later. You could be in a situation where a company says, well like we can't hire the best people because they have an offer to make $10 million a year over here and we can only pay them 5 million.
- [47:00]
Geordi Hitch
I mean the AI researcher thing is crazy because I don't know that this is a dynamic that's actually happening. But it would be very tricky if, if Anduril could not compete against anthropic OpenAI, Google, DeepMind. If they need a super talented AI researcher. And maybe they're not paying him a billion dollars, but they're just like, yeah, like the market rate for this role is 15 mil. And like we can't hire them right now because we didn't check some box on the level of deliveries on this thing. And that would be a little bit tricky. Really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. Then we'll go to Tyler1 livestream 30/destinations. If you want a multiple, go to restream.com.
- [47:38]
Delian Asprooha
I was just gonna say you can already see this phenomena, you know, in some ways. You know Tim Cook?
- [47:43]
Geordi Hitch
Yes.
- [47:44]
John Coogan
He.
- [47:44]
Delian Asprooha
It's not a salary cap. Right. But it is.
- [47:46]
Geordi Hitch
It feels like there is a cap.
- [47:47]
Delian Asprooha
It feels like something's going on. He should be paying paid way more.
- [47:51]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. What does he make, 75? Yeah, it's barely scraping it.
- [47:56]
Delian Asprooha
Imagine if he was only five.
- [47:57]
Geordi Hitch
I mean it'd be terrible. He would have no incentive to shoot any of that.
- [48:01]
John Coogan
One of the greatest operators of all time can barely make a buck more than a guy who throws and hits balls. Yeah, right.
- [48:08]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. I think instead of a $5 million individual cap on defense tech executives, it'd be much better to do a team based salary cap because then that injects an interesting dynamic. Like instead of 5 million per executive, how about 20 million for the entire executive team? So then you have the idea of team construction. Where do you have cap room? Okay, okay, we got an all star. We're bringing in Brian Schimpf as the CEO. He's the CEO of Anduril right now we're poaching him. We're getting him 18, but his team is gonna be mostly interns. Or you go and you get, okay, we got four people, they're all making five. They're all decent operators, but you create much more of a sports like dynamic.
- [48:50]
Delian Asprooha
That's the way we can't get Brian Schimfield, but we can recreate him in the aggregate.
- [48:53]
Geordi Hitch
In the aggregate, exactly.
- [48:56]
John Coogan
Dodd in the chat says the best way to force them to deliver what they promise is to choose another vendor. I agree. You can could fix a lot of this at the contract level. If you sign a contract with somebody and then a year, in year, two years, three years, et cetera, they're not delivering. Making it so that the government can more easily reallocate those funds and actually make these companies have some accountability. More importantly, near before we move on.
- [49:20]
Geordi Hitch
I think this whole thing is very interesting because you have this dynamic where very clearly it feels like Hegseth went and gave Trump some sort of update. And then he just like, posted on Truth Social and like, kind of crashed out. And there's a weird thing where it's like, why is this happening like this? This is not. It's not even an executive order at this point. It's just like this entire news cycle around the new defense budget and this is all just Truth Social posts. Just like Trump's thoughts, his shower thoughts, basically. But this stuff does actually have an impact on the.
- [49:50]
John Coogan
I know, it is funny. You see a long Truth Social post and you just assume it's an executive order.
- [49:55]
Geordi Hitch
It feels like law. It feels like, oh, okay, this is law. But it's. But it does have an impact and it brings people to the table. And we saw this play out with intel where he was saying, like, lit, Bhutan's gotta go, and basically calling for the firing of this guy who just got hired to turn around Intel. And then a few days later, he's like, lit Bhutan's amazing. I love this guy. I'm actually gonna Invest. I own 10% of the company now, and now the stock's my boy.
- [50:18]
John Coogan
Absolute boy.
- [50:19]
Geordi Hitch
And so these things are, like, aggressive, but it's this whole, like, taco chickening out. But that's part of the plan. Art of the deal. I don't know. It's a very weird, interesting dynamic and I wonder how much it'll carry forward in the next administration. But we will see. It's certainly entertaining at the moment. Before we move on, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling and monitoring and security built in.
- [50:46]
John Coogan
That's right near says the term carry in venture capital actually comes from video games. You just need to find one good one founder good enough to carry your entire career.
- [50:57]
Geordi Hitch
That is fantastic.
- [50:59]
John Coogan
This is a banger. And it's a banger because it's so true. When I look at across 60, 70 different investments at this point, if you take out two or three of these founders, it's just like much like being.
- [51:14]
Geordi Hitch
On Rust with an absolute killer with your absolute 360, no scope while you're still figuring out how the sticks work. But you're getting carried.
- [51:24]
John Coogan
You're like, we watch 2v2 on Rust and you're just in a corner and the game's over.
- [51:29]
Geordi Hitch
You load into counter strike on dust 2, and one random guy you're queuing with just knows all the smoke lineups and you're just ready to rock. You're getting carried. Get carried to the top. Did I ever tell the story of how I got my Overwatch account carried to, like, the absolute top? My account was like ranked one of the best in the world for a little bit, but it was very interesting. It was me who was so Ivan. I played the first season of Overwatch. Then my password was included in some sort of hack or some sort of leak from another maybe like, you know, some other company had my password, leaked it, and I'd use a generic password on Overwatch. And so some hacker figured out how to get into my Overwatch account, which is not important because, like, what are you going to do? You're just going to like, my credit card information isn't there. You can't do anything with it. You just play Overwatch. But Overwatch was like a $60 game or something. And so. So if you were hacking, you didn't want to buy $60 every time you got banned. So this hacker played on my Overwatch account for like multiple seasons and ranked way up and was like a sniper. I think he played Hanzo Main and was like, really, really good. And then years later, I got back in with my friends and I'm like, oh, let's play some Overwatch. And we queue up like, John, what.
- [52:40]
John Coogan
Are you up to?
- [52:41]
Geordi Hitch
And I'm like, oh, I need to do placement matches. And so I do the placement matches and I'm just like, losing because I'm playing with all these, like, incredible, like the top tier. And everyone's like, why are you guys. We know you're good. Why are you sandbagging? Why are you trying to derank your account? And I'm like, I'm not. I'm playing as hard as I can. I'm doing my best. And they're like, no, we can see that. You're one of the greatest Hanzo players ever. Like, you're the greatest sniper in Overwatch. We've seen your account history. You're amazing. Why are you playing poorly? And I was like, I don't know. And then I finally figured it out that my account had been stolen and then rocketed to the top of the rankings. And then the game remembered that and was putting me in these really high tier games. So finally I had to make up a lie because whenever I'd hop on a game, everyone would be like, you're terrible and you're supposed to be good. And I'd have to say, ah, I broke my hand. So I just. I'm not as good as I used to be. Like, please go easy on me. Like, I'M relearning everything. Give me a break. Anyway, before we move on Applovin, profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.
- [53:51]
John Coogan
Jordy, one more thing that was funny about this truth social saga from yesterday. So he starts dunking on the execs, talking about salary caps. Lockheed Martin stock was like falling off a cliff. Raytheon, et cetera. I think this was right after the close, in after hours. But then immediately after that, Dodd in the chat says, the funny thing is that the one and a half trillion dollar announcement came after talking down on them. So then just a little bit later, Trump said, after long and difficult negotiations with senators, congressmen, secretaries and other political representatives, I've determined that for the good of the country, especially in these troubled and dangerous times, our military budget for the year 2027 should not be the one trillion, but rather one and a half trillion. This will allow us to build. This will allow us to build the, quote, dream military that we have long been entitled to and more importantly, that it will keep us safe and secure. And so anyways, you can imagine what happened to prices after that if it weren't for the tremendous numbers being produced by terrorists from other countries. And then keeps ranting talks about Sleepy Joe. I think it's time to retire Sleepy Joe. Just let him be retired. Just Joe. Anyways, over to Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers has rejected Paramount's latest $108.4 billion hostile bid and remain committed.
- [55:20]
Geordi Hitch
I called it loyal. I knew nothing about this deal, but I just randomly said that I think Netflix is going to run away with it. But we'll see.
- [55:30]
John Coogan
In the Journal. Paramount defends its hostile bid for how.
- [55:33]
Geordi Hitch
High can they go? Can they go to 200 billion? It seems like Paramount has.
- [55:39]
John Coogan
They're holding out for the 1 trillion.
- [55:42]
Geordi Hitch
Endless coffers, I don't know.
- [55:44]
John Coogan
But Paramount continued pushing its $77.9 billion bid for Warner Brothers Thursday, a day after Warner said it plans to stick to its existing deal with Netflix.
- [55:56]
Geordi Hitch
The photo really did it for me. The aura farming together of the Warner Brothers team with the Netflix team on the lot. On the lot. It feels like these guys are absolute dogs. They're ready to partner up. They're adding a new brother to the Warner Brothers. And so they're having fun. And it feels like unless the price gets really crazy and they appeal directly to shareholders and the shareholders go crazy or something, it feels like it's in the bag.
- [56:26]
John Coogan
And meanwhile, Paramount has traded down almost 15% in the past month. So.
- [56:33]
Geordi Hitch
Well, still making some moves in CBS and stuff. Still making waves with Barry Weiss at the helm. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces.
- [56:46]
John Coogan
And now with AI agents, anthropic raising 10 billion at 350 billion. Target about this a little bit yesterday.
- [56:55]
Geordi Hitch
We'll get into it more GIC, Singapore's sovereign wealth fund and CO2 plan to lead the.
- [57:02]
John Coogan
Spencer. You absolute dog, Spencer.
- [57:05]
Geordi Hitch
Get in the ultra dome. Explain this to us. This is great. The funding round in the third megadeal in the past year follows a 13 billion investment in September that valued the company at 183 billion. So they're raising less money at almost twice the valuation. Good for dilution. The round's expected to close in the coming weeks. The total amount of the deal could change. The new financing kicks off what is likely to be another banner year for AI startup funding in 2025. We're going to the Axon.
- [57:43]
John Coogan
We're still warming up this new mallet.
- [57:46]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [57:46]
John Coogan
Kind of splintered.
- [57:47]
Geordi Hitch
Okay.
- [57:47]
John Coogan
I don't know if you've noticed this.
- [57:48]
Geordi Hitch
Maybe. You know what we need? We need some athletic tape to wrap around gloves, too. Batting gloves. I do. I. I would like an even longer mallet. Like a full baseball.
- [58:00]
John Coogan
Like a staff.
- [58:00]
Geordi Hitch
There's something about a baseball bat that's just the platonic ideal for swinging things. Maybe. Maybe big bigger mallet. Maybe some. Maybe some athletic tape on there. Wrapping it like it's. Like it's a baseball bat that's hit 1,000 home runs.
- [58:16]
John Coogan
Do you think they. Do you think they end up doing another round before the ipo. It's hard to imagine this is actually the final. The actual pre IPO round. Just because there's so much incentive to just raise again in a few months.
- [58:29]
Geordi Hitch
I saw a couple people doing polls on Would you rather own OpenAI at 1 trillion or anthropic at 350 or XAI at. At 220 or whatever. Whatever the valuations were. And at least a lot of the small polls that I saw, people were very excited about Anthropic's valuation relative to the magic that's happening in Claude code and all the glazing that's happening. Finally, we have a second AI glaze gate, but this time the AI is getting glazed by the humans instead of vice versa. It's a triple glaze, but cursor is not getting glazed. Shaquille says he's Bearish on Cursor says that Cursor's not feeling the AGI. We'll have to talk to Michael Truel about whether he is set the record straight on how AGI pelt he is. But this is from Bree Wolfson on Dialectic with Jackson Dahl. The context, Shaquille says, is Wolfson is the newish head of employee experience at Cursor and much of this interview is about how to build great companies and how this is changing in the AI era. She's written a good blog about Cursors culture specifically. It sounds fantastic over there. All of this is very interesting and there are some good insights here. Wolfson started working, worked at amazing companies and has lots of interesting lessons to share from them. But when it really comes to thinking about the future, there is a failure to really engage with what advanced AI capabilities will mean for the future of work. All the hypothesized changes are incredibly minor from Brie. She's not telling this fast takeoff, crazy, total disruption story, and Shaquille doesn't like that. And I think this goes back to what we've been talking about, about the narrative. What is the right tone to match? Should you just be financial maxi and just be like, look, it's just autocomplete and it makes money and we sell tokens profitably? Or should you be like, it's gonna cure cancer? Or should you be like, it's so important that if we don't do it right, we're all gonna die? Like. Like there's so many different narratives that you can tug on and a lot of people have been tugging on a bunch of them and it gets confusing. Some people play one note consistently and sometimes that can work, sometimes I can't. I'm kind of down with Cursor. I like this. I like that. Michael is just like, he's a builder and he tells a good story about that. And like there are other AI leaders that are telling the doom story or telling the fast takeoff story. I don't think the Cursor needs to necessarily tell that same story, but Shaquille disagrees. But we'll have to dig into this more. What do you think tomorrow?
- [60:54]
Delian Asprooha
Yeah, I mean, it is interesting because anthropic, they make such an emphasis on coding. They're like, of the big labs, people think of them probably as like the most AGI pilled. But it's like Cursor is. I mean, all they do is coding. And there's a very different, like, people see them very differently aesthetic.
- [61:09]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, well, it's much more of a centaur adoption and much more of a copilot. Much less of this drop in replacement for labor.
- [61:19]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah, that's true.
- [61:19]
Delian Asprooha
But I mean you've definitely seen a lot of the recent Cursor features are getting more and more agentic.
- [61:23]
Geordi Hitch
Totally, totally.
- [61:24]
Delian Asprooha
Like the actual product isn't so completely different, at least ideologically. Right?
- [61:29]
Geordi Hitch
No, no, no, I agree, I agree.
- [61:31]
John Coogan
Yeah, there's something Cursor has an advantage which is they have tens of millions of active developers using their product and so they have a data source on a lot of this that people that are just kind of speculating and on X and reading science fiction essays about takeoff scenarios. It's like, like there's something to just like playing playing the game as you see it on the field. And I think that trying to obsess too much over what the world could look it's very important to try to plan and build your business around what the world's going to be like in one year, two years, five years, et cetera. But at the same time, if you're building and your business is accelerating and customers are using your product more and more and more like that doesn't it's hard to just say, oh, I'm bearish on this company because they're not of this one podcast interview.
- [62:29]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. Well, let's move on to some generative AI traffic data. But first, let me tell you about 11 labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with eleven Labs, the makers of our theme song so Rehear Jark says you can feel the code red here. Google is absolutely crushing it with Gemini 3. Gemini's market share is now at 21.5%. Three months ago it was at 12.9%. Twelve months ago it was at 5.7%. And I remember a year ago when it launched, it felt like a lot of the numbers that we were hearing out of Google were big, but it was because they were including generative AI snippets in Google search or they were sort of bending it into other products that already had big DAU numbers. And it was not people going to Gemini, installing the app really daily driving it. It was more demo, more testing. Will this similar web data seem to show that Gemini has been growing and taking share?
- [63:29]
John Coogan
Yeah. It's also worth noting that this is just like site visits. So not every visit is created equally. Right. Somebody can land quickly on a site that's very different from them being in the app multiple times a day. So this is not Looking at app traffic.
- [63:45]
Geordi Hitch
Well, that's what I love about the Semianalysis chart that shows you have users or accounts that are signed up, then you have the active users and then you have how many interactions those users have, like how many new chats do they actually kick off over the course of a day and then also how many interactions, how long are they spending time. And so ultimately the value that's created will probably be more of a proxy for time on site know attention at the end of the day. And so there is a little bit of a gap there where when they ran, when Semianalysis at least ran the, ran the numbers maybe six months ago, it felt like while there were other AI apps and chat apps that were maybe taking a little bit of share on DAUS or maus in terms of total tokens, total interactions, total back and forths, OpenAI was really, really dominant. And so maybe the narrative's overstated, but it's still some interesting data and it does show that the code red is real and it shows that Google's been taking the distribution of Gemini very, very seriously. And they've gotten more traffic, which is good.
- [64:57]
John Coogan
NIR is back.
- [64:58]
Geordi Hitch
Yes.
- [64:58]
John Coogan
L Amarina has raised a valuation of 1.7 billion. Coming in with a Michael Burry shot. We're going to have the founder of LM arena on hopefully in the next 24 hours.
- [65:11]
Geordi Hitch
We have to respond to this viral. A thousand likes on this. Why do people not like Ellen Marina? It seems like fantastic business.
- [65:17]
John Coogan
I don't know. Well, yeah. How much revenue are they doing?
- [65:23]
Geordi Hitch
Sure.
- [65:23]
John Coogan
What kind of products are they releasing, can they get? If you're.
- [65:27]
Geordi Hitch
I'll tell you this right now, you build up a huge reputation. The sterling example of what is the. The best LLM, the best benchmark possible, can't be gamed. And then you go and you hold an auction and you sell the best arena, the best LM award to the highest bidder and for a billion dollars, for $10 billion. And you return all the money to shareholders after you do that. And you can, you give them good vibes for one week and then you burn your entire credibility. No, clearly there's some like model routing, some infrastructural level. I think we've talked about this before, but increasingly I think the bull case is not just deciding which model is the best in an Ella Marina, it's which model is better for this specific type of marketing copy. You're going to Nike and you're asking them which one aligns with that particular business process. How do they Evaluate how do they bring in those models and then how do they measure uptime, how do they measure all these different things that could result in a pretty significant business decision. And if you can take a cut of that, that could be valuable. I don't know, but we'll have to talk to the founder about it. Do you have any take on LM arena fan?
- [66:36]
Delian Asprooha
I don't have a take on the business side, but as a product it's very useful. It's always cool to look at. I mean because they always get the new models before. So you can always see like whenever a new image model comes out, it's always there first. So you can kind of see what are the vibes. But yeah, it's a good. I enjoy the product a lot in the vibe economy.
- [66:52]
John Coogan
It's potentially dramatically undervalued in the leaderboard economy.
- [66:57]
Delian Asprooha
Yeah, I think the vibes, I think over the past few months you've definitely started to see like okay, this exonon is like likely being paid by a lab. I think you're starting to see that.
- [67:08]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, it definitely happens. Anyway, they probably, I don't know, there's a bunch of stuff here. Do you use Tailwind?
- [67:17]
John Coogan
Yes.
- [67:18]
Geordi Hitch
Have you heard about the Tailwind drama? This whole thing? Tailwind laid off 75% of their team.
- [67:23]
Delian Asprooha
I read the post.
- [67:23]
Geordi Hitch
Pretty rough. Yeah, the post. The reason is so ironic. Their CSS framework became Extremely popular with AI coding agents. 75 million downloads a month. That meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings resulting in a 40% drop and in traffic and an 80% revenue loss. And people are really really upset about it. Very sad. It feels like regressively figure out some other way.
- [67:45]
John Coogan
The founder posted a video or basically a mini podcast yesterday. He just said he went for a walk and just was talking for 30 minutes. I listened to half of this morning. Sad story. They have a small super talented team. He had to lay off a number of their engineers. So now it's the three owners of the business plus one, one other engineer. There's four of them now trying to maintain it. He's optimistic but he basically was saying he was just looking at his revenue go down a fixed amount every single month which means that it was a greater and greater percentage revenue. And so he was like we're just going to be dead in us in a year.
- [68:21]
Geordi Hitch
Because a lot of what they did, I think, I think their paid offerings were like selling components pre assembled code and all of the chat, all of the LLMs can just one shot a component. If you need a pop up or a modal or a button, you don't need to pay.
- [68:37]
John Coogan
Balaji was saying it'd be great if like a big lab just said like, hey, these are talented teams.
- [68:41]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, that's a good idea.
- [68:42]
John Coogan
You know, join in an anthropic. Yeah.
- [68:45]
Geordi Hitch
I mean, I don't know much about the founder, but it does feel like time to go into deals guy mode and find just a completely different mode of operation. I have to imagine that these folks are talented and I imagine that if they landed at some big corporation doing front end transformation of a massive surface area.
- [69:06]
John Coogan
Yeah. Or going to place like Lovable or.
- [69:08]
Geordi Hitch
Figma, that would be great too. But even just going inside of like, you know, a salesforce or some sort of like, you know, some product where they have a ton of surface area and they're working on modernizing it. But you have this new team that comes in and they.
- [69:20]
John Coogan
Yeah, but I'm sure they want to keep building.
- [69:22]
Geordi Hitch
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. So maybe inside.
- [69:24]
John Coogan
But yeah, the saying lays off 75% of their team is dramatic. They did lay.
- [69:28]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, they laid off just three people. Okay, okay.
- [69:30]
John Coogan
Out of a four person team that were not the owners of the business.
- [69:34]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of laws, small numbers. Sounds more dramatic than maybe it is.
- [69:40]
John Coogan
But still, I'm optimistic that they'll find a good outcome here. It was, it was. The founder was upset. Apparently. People were just like commenting.
- [69:50]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, people were really mean to him.
- [69:51]
John Coogan
Mean to him. Being like, hey, I can't prioritize this feature right now because my business is dying.
- [69:57]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [69:57]
John Coogan
And they're like, you're going against, you know, the philosophy of open source.
- [70:01]
Geordi Hitch
He's like, John Ludig wrote this in his piece on open source AI like, the open source community is beautiful in many ways. It gives these, like incredible technologies that people can build on. But people also like freebies and they get very mad when you take them away and they get mad when they don't get them. Everyone loves free stuff. Everyone loves a free lunch. And everyone loves plaid because Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely. Connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI.
- [70:32]
John Coogan
Dylan, wait, wait, really quick.
- [70:34]
Geordi Hitch
Ryan in the chat recommended that we have Mike Vining on the show, which I would love to have Mike Vining on the show. Do you know who Mike Vining is?
- [70:43]
John Coogan
I do not.
- [70:44]
Geordi Hitch
Well, guess what? He inspired the guy who you just saw in your new favorite movie, Sicario.
- [70:51]
John Coogan
Wait, he works for X?
- [70:52]
Geordi Hitch
No, he's on X. No, no, he joined the platform, but he does.
- [70:57]
John Coogan
I'd read that.
- [70:57]
Geordi Hitch
But he's an incredible, incredible military hero. He has fantastic stories. I've listened to him on a few podcasts. Very, very interesting fellow. And he's very viral because he has these iconic images of him on Delta Force missions. But he's wearing like what looks like an IT guy outfit. So it's like a starched white button down with a pocket protector and he has these big glasses and he's walking.
- [71:25]
John Coogan
Out of the Blackhawk.
- [71:26]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, exactly. So he's not wearing the normal military camo with the bulletproof vest. He's just there to clean up and stuff. It's crazy. So he's a personal hero of mine.
- [71:38]
Delian Asprooha
All time aura farmer.
- [71:39]
Geordi Hitch
All time aura farmer. That is for sure true. Would love to have him on the show. He's done other shows, so it would be very interesting to hear from him.
- [71:48]
John Coogan
This company Flip said Flip is hiring. We're hiring posters, engineers, product growth ops designers, interns and roles that do not yet have names. And then 24 hours later they quoted their own post and said, you've just deleted half the applications at random. We do not want unlucky people working for Flip.
- [72:09]
Geordi Hitch
Well, they already have a poster on staff because that is very funny. Wait, it says it's the lucky company.
- [72:14]
John Coogan
So I'm assuming it has to do with gambling.
- [72:16]
Geordi Hitch
Of course.
- [72:19]
John Coogan
Yeah. So I think the product, what they're trying to to do is basically you pay more for a product or get it free.
- [72:26]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, it's that meme. I've seen people joke about that. And then I saw there's this poster.
- [72:32]
John Coogan
They're bringing gambling into credit cards.
- [72:35]
Geordi Hitch
Yes, yes, I saw a poster who.
- [72:37]
John Coogan
Bringing gambling into debt.
- [72:38]
Geordi Hitch
There's someone who like vibe codes, different UX mockups for funny concepts. There's that famous one by Aidan of like the Google Maps with. With a fog of war. So as you move around the map, it shows you where you've been and you unveil the map like it's a video game. There's a whole bunch of these and one of them is like the double or nothing on your checkout, which is a crazy idea. I don't know. On the topic of luck, at one point very early in my career, I wanted to create a direct to consumer product called five hour Luck. And the whole concept would be like, it'd be a five hour energy shot. But the promise, the pitch was that it would make you lucky, it would increase your luck. Just because people, you know, Energy is a stat. Why not increase luck? And I was gonna formulate it, have some vitamins in there, have some things that could potentially increase luck. Was not thinking about the gambling application placebo element.
- [73:32]
John Coogan
Yeah. I mean that product would crush in Vegas.
- [73:34]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. Imagine just taking it, being like, okay, I have the stat boost. I'm left feeling.
- [73:38]
John Coogan
Maybe you could put snake oil in it.
- [73:40]
Geordi Hitch
Yes, yes. Well, Brian Johnson, he sells a product, it's olive oil. It's literally called snake oil. Sort of riffing on that concept. Before we move on, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose a database built with flexibility and scale in mind. With best in class embedding models and re rankers, MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next. So moving on to Citrini. Asking someone, asking someone, asking someone long.
- [74:06]
John Coogan
Whose long memory?
- [74:07]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, whose long memory? If they got any new ideas for 2020 26, it's already rich. Yes, memory has been on a tear.
- [74:14]
John Coogan
Yeah, Bubble boy on over on X had had some pretty great calls late last year. I'm going to try to pull pull one up.
- [74:24]
Geordi Hitch
Well, you do. Let me tell you about crowdstrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We can also pull up. I want to watch the this intro from this week in startups. Can we move on to this?
- [74:39]
John Coogan
Pull it up.
- [74:40]
Geordi Hitch
Pull up the video of Jason Calacanis finally answering the question we all had. What is his dream purchase? I saw this clip on this week in startups, Jason's ultimate dream mega purchase. And I clicked instantly. This is on this week in startups. His co host asks him and the best part about this show is that I was expecting it to be like they tease it in an intro and then they make you listen to and then they cut just short of him saying, oh, the one thing I want to buy is. And then boom, the start of the show and then 20 minutes later he gives you no, watch the clip. Now that you're doing so well financially, what is a purchase that you'd like to make but can't bring yourself to do so because it feels too extravagant? Answer this honestly. Tell the people what you even Jason Calacanis will not break out the checkbook for.
- [75:27]
Winston Weinberg
It's definitely private aviation.
- [75:28]
Geordi Hitch
Let's go. I've been trying to hold off. You deserve it.
- [75:32]
Yotam Sierra
He deserves it.
- [75:33]
Winston Weinberg
Justifiable expense of spending, you know, $50,000.
- [75:37]
Yotam Sierra
Going somewhere or 100,000 on a round.
- [75:39]
Winston Weinberg
Trip that seemed absurd to spend that.
- [75:42]
Yotam Sierra
The other one I would Say that.
- [75:44]
Winston Weinberg
I sometimes sweat is buying a really expensive sports car.
- [75:47]
Geordi Hitch
I love Corvettes. He's a Corvette guy. Get a ZR1 like a big open fancy barn that's kind of like a man cave.
- [75:55]
Yotam Sierra
But do I buy this ZRX one.
- [75:59]
Geordi Hitch
For $250,000 or do I do it JC50,000 Corvettes collection.
- [76:06]
Arun Gupta
I like that things become cognitive load.
- [76:09]
Yotam Sierra
This week in startups is brought to.
- [76:10]
Geordi Hitch
You shout out to their sponsors for making it possible. I love that. I love that he's a Corvette guy.
- [76:17]
John Coogan
Jake Howell deserves it.
- [76:18]
Geordi Hitch
He deserves it. He's worked really hard. One of the greatest to ever do it. Been in the media business for decades.
- [76:25]
John Coogan
One of my welcome to was doing TVPN like in the early 2000s.
- [76:30]
Geordi Hitch
You know who his first guest was ever? David Sacks. It's the craziest thing and they go and they do calls from entrepreneurs and you can actually track what those entrepreneurs do now. It's very interesting and my first welcome to Silicon Valley moment was I flew to Silicon Valley. I went to the launch festival, his conference. Heard a bunch of tech people talk, met a bunch of YC founders. It kind of introduced me to Silicon Valley. Went to the some bar on Silicon Valley and in Palo Alto next to Stanford. It was a lot of fun. He was very nice.
- [77:02]
John Coogan
Also in that era, Sam Altman went on Charlie Rose. You were talking about this.
- [77:08]
Geordi Hitch
We gotta watch this.
- [77:09]
John Coogan
Should we pull this clip up?
- [77:10]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, do you have it ready to go?
- [77:11]
John Coogan
Yeah, it's on charlierose.com.
- [77:13]
Geordi Hitch
It is. It's not on YouTube, which is fascinating. I saw a clip of what looked like Sam Altman on Charlie Rose and I was like we gotta dig up the actual footage. While we do, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So do you have it?
- [77:35]
John Coogan
Let's pull this up.
- [77:36]
Geordi Hitch
Where is it?
- [77:37]
John Coogan
I put it in the team chat.
- [77:38]
Geordi Hitch
Okay, well while we pull that up, let's look for what's next unintended AI close. I can do another ad read while we do that. Let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Banta is the leading AI trust management platform.
- [78:00]
John Coogan
How are we doing.
- [78:03]
Geordi Hitch
Pulling it up? Nikita Beer finally met.
- [78:07]
John Coogan
Oh no. Charlie Rose. The video actually does not load.
- [78:10]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, it doesn't load? Oh no. Well, you know what we can do? We can export it and we can play it tomorrow on the show. Let's make a note to do that. Let's move on to the real biggest launch, the biggest tech news in years. There's a new monitor out from Dell.
- [78:28]
John Coogan
Big and I love this.
- [78:29]
Geordi Hitch
So Michael Dell said, big news. The world's first 52 inch 6K monitor is here. If you love big displays, this is for you. Jordy. Did you ever have one of these elite multi monitor setups or were you always like a sort of do business by phone? You've never been an iPad guy, have you ever been?
- [78:46]
John Coogan
I've got an Apple monitor at home. I find it hard. I mean as like a guy who has been building companies and investing, you're basically an email phone.
- [78:58]
Geordi Hitch
Email zoom. It's not, it's not code over here, this and that, monitoring situations. You're an amateur when it comes to monitoring situations, what you're saying.
- [79:06]
John Coogan
But I do enjoy. I have an Apple monitor at home. I enjoy it. But it's nothing like this.
- [79:10]
Geordi Hitch
This is incredible. So it's much bigger than the Apple Pro display xdr.
- [79:14]
John Coogan
Is it curved?
- [79:15]
Geordi Hitch
It is curved. It has to be curved at that size because you're basically sitting right. Your face is right up against a TV. 52 inches. And it's a very, it's funny in many, many ways because let's. So first let's play the clip from Rob Moore where he says Dell just released the product that Michael Dell and David Senra alluded to in the David Senra podcast episode. After 42 years, Michael Dell's enthusiasm coming.
- [79:42]
John Coogan
Out of the thing that we're most excited about is just a bigger screen.
- [79:45]
Geordi Hitch
It's awesome. It's awesome. So let's play this.
- [79:48]
Yotam Sierra
That obsession has not dulled. We were just in your office and you were showing me one of your new unreleased products that we can't film or photograph. But you were like, I was like, this is like a kid on Christmas.
- [79:59]
Geordi Hitch
Like you're still super cool product. Yeah, I'm very excited.
- [80:03]
Yotam Sierra
I told you I'll buy one. I think it's cool too. I'm gonna buy one as soon as it comes out. But I just love this enthusiasm that is just not, not dulling. That obsession has not dulled.
- [80:12]
John Coogan
That's great. Heartwarming.
- [80:15]
Geordi Hitch
And what's really, really funny is that. So there was that sort of like tease. Michael Dell just posts it and says it's out here. You can just buy it. And then this poster. Ben Bajarin, CEO and principal analyst at Creative Strat, says this monitor from Dell is amazing. And I have had one for a few weeks. Easily the best monitor I've ever used and even at 120 hertz, still capable to game on. So it's like, when did this thing release? Like, it doesn't have the fanfare of like a normal product release cycle where there's like pre orders. But it's very fun and it's been very hyped and I think we should get some because we have a whole host of screens arrayed randomly and it's not very aesthetic. And you have the opportunity to simplify. You can actually display four different full computers, I think at fairly high res, just tiled on one screen. So you can run four different displays separately.
- [81:13]
John Coogan
It's $2,900.
- [81:14]
Geordi Hitch
Not bad. I thought it was even less. I don't know. Anyway, Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card.
- [81:24]
John Coogan
We have major white pill.
- [81:26]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, we do.
- [81:27]
John Coogan
Drew Tooma is reporting. For the first time in 25 years, not a single square mile of California is dry on the US Drought monitor. The rain is back. Thank you, Augustus. Have to go back to December 2000 to find a similar situation. If you're 25 or younger, you've always lived in a world where California has been entering or recovering from drought. So we are incredibly, incredibly back.
- [81:52]
Geordi Hitch
Yes. We should talk about the title of the stream. Julia Black's TVPN expose in Vanity Fair just dropped today. If you go to vanity fair.com we're right there. And it's been a lot of fun working on this piece. We got to do a very fun.
- [82:12]
John Coogan
To be clear, there wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't a lot of work for us.
- [82:15]
Geordi Hitch
We got to hang out with her, getting interviewed. Hanging out with her. And I mean, it was. We had to go dress up and get photo.
- [82:21]
John Coogan
Dress. It was definitely the most, by far the most intense shoot we've ever been a part of.
- [82:28]
Geordi Hitch
Two cameras, medium format. Medium format film.
- [82:31]
John Coogan
Well, I just mean more like the team that actually went into it. Right. So many different people working on it was extremely professional, as you would expect out of Vanity Fair. And I like that Julia still called us the technology brothers. She's not fully rebrand.
- [82:48]
Geordi Hitch
No, it doesn't.
- [82:49]
John Coogan
Keeping it alive. Yeah.
- [82:50]
Geordi Hitch
They call us the J Team.
- [82:52]
John Coogan
John Coogan and Geordi Hitch, the J Team. A bunch of funny moments in here.
- [82:57]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. What'd you like? What'd you like?
- [82:58]
John Coogan
I like the. She said, there are no saints. One of them runs a nicotine company. But they have not.
- [83:04]
Geordi Hitch
Not just any nicotine company. What kind of nicotine is.
- [83:07]
John Coogan
It's addictive nicotine that I Personally am addicted to. But they have drawn certain lines in the sand. They don't swear on air, they try to avoid vulgarity, and they don't promote alcohol or drug use, mostly because they're not big drinkers themselves. It's cool that we get credit for not promoting alcohol use, even though in the early days, the doubling episodes. But it was funny because we actually really didn't enjoy it. Yeah, the show works. It was funny. But I remember I'd tell my wife, oh, it's a dom day today. I gotta go drink a bunch of champagne at 11am I'm not looking forward to it. And then Julie says, perhaps most importantly, and then a quote from me, the show is never gonna promote Burning Man.
- [83:55]
Geordi Hitch
I can't believe you said that.
- [83:57]
John Coogan
I mean, it's factually true.
- [83:59]
Geordi Hitch
It really is so funny when you are talking to a serious journalist where everything you say, even the jokes were gonna get written down and recorded and printed. So some of the odd little stylistic flourishes, you.
- [84:13]
John Coogan
Yeah, I'm just riffing. I'm just doing bits.
- [84:15]
Geordi Hitch
And then it gets written down and it looks way different in that context. But it's good, it's real. It's the actual beliefs.
- [84:22]
John Coogan
There was a funny moment. So we were getting breakfast with Julia at our usual spot, and she says, while in line for coffee that morning, Hayes dashed off an expost. This was right after the Coldplay saga. I said, Startup CEOs can't even hug their chief people officer at a concert in this country anymore. And Julie says, as he watched the likes pour in, he predicted they would top 10,000 or so. When I checked the next morning, there were over 70,000. And you were saying, imagine, imagine if it flopped, it would be in here. It would be like. He said he predicted it would 10,000 and only got 200. Yeah, but wow, lucky day.
- [85:00]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, it was a good day to come see the show. It sort of took us all over the place. I think at the end of the show, I sort of stood up and said, you know, what was that? Are we journalists? Are we analysts? Are we comedians? I don't know, but we're gonna figure it out, and we're not going anywhere.
- [85:13]
John Coogan
Over the next decades. It was funny. We were blasting Coldplay's Fix youx in the studio that morning, which is a. Is a fantastic song.
- [85:21]
Geordi Hitch
It's a great song. Also, at that lunch, she didn't put this in. But you ordered some food and you put so much salt on it, you just kept shaking the salt shaker.
- [85:33]
Yotam Sierra
And I was.
- [85:33]
Geordi Hitch
I Was like, this is gonna go in the piece.
- [85:34]
John Coogan
Oh, yeah.
- [85:35]
Geordi Hitch
I've never noticed that you.
- [85:36]
John Coogan
I love salt. I have this amazing story. My grandpa was making my brother and I hot chocolate when we were kids. And, like, my grandma was away at the time, so it was just us hanging out with grandpa. And he's like, I'm gonna make the kids hot chocolate. He makes a hot chocolate, brings it over to us. He's drinking it, he gives us a couple cups, and we're like, oh, Grandpa, this is really rough. Are you sure you made it right? And he's like, yeah, I made it right. It's totally fine. Oh, I know what happened. And turns out he. All the sugar that he meant to put in, he meant to put in salt, but his taste buds were so cooked that to him, it just. He was just cooking, like, salt. Pure salt. Sugar.
- [86:17]
Geordi Hitch
You notice immediately.
- [86:19]
John Coogan
So anyways, I am. I'm like him in that sense. There's almost no amount of salt, but it's very.
- [86:24]
Geordi Hitch
It's a very funny story. They also did this little video interview with us, and they asked us bullish or bearish on a number of things. And one of the things they asked us was blue sky. And we both look at each other and we're like, we love blue skies. Like, it's a nice day, no clouds. Most of the days are blue skies in California. And they had to clarify, like, no, blue sky, like the app. And we're like, oh, yeah. We don't actually think about it at all. We're mostly on X. But it really does give you a little bit of flavor of how we think about the business and whatnot.
- [86:56]
John Coogan
So it was a fun profile. Yeah. Also, the outfits, of course, unfortunately, were not ours. They dressed us.
- [87:04]
Geordi Hitch
They brought a whole wardrobe team and stuff.
- [87:07]
John Coogan
But you gotta get that suit.
- [87:08]
Geordi Hitch
I do.
- [87:09]
John Coogan
The suit is.
- [87:10]
Geordi Hitch
You gotta get yours, too.
- [87:12]
John Coogan
Unbelievable.
- [87:13]
Geordi Hitch
The 1980s theme was very fun, very throwback, and it feels like a return to the early brand. Very much what we were doing. It feels like it captured. It might be the last story that gets told about that era before we go into, you know, whatever we're doing next. Anyway, we have Delian, Asprooha from Founders Fund and Varda in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN Ultradome. Delian, how are you doing?
- [87:40]
Yotam Sierra
Hello, brothers.
- [87:40]
John Coogan
Welcome back.
- [87:41]
Geordi Hitch
Good to see you.
- [87:43]
John Coogan
First appearance. You did 18 last year. We're hoping to 10x this year. We got to keep on a trajectory, so 180 hits this year.
- [87:51]
Geordi Hitch
Welcome to the show. I hope your 2026 is off to a good start. Any New Year's resolutions? Do you like New Year's resolutions? Do you have any meta commentary about New Year's resolutions?
- [88:03]
Yotam Sierra
My goal is to just wear only quarter zips for the entire year and just lean into my new stylist. Recommendations on just looking like a wizened venture capitalist that is ready to go ring a bunch of NASDAQ bells this year.
- [88:18]
John Coogan
There you go.
- [88:18]
Yotam Sierra
Or New York stocks, baby.
- [88:21]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah. That TB Green is looking fantastic.
- [88:23]
Geordi Hitch
Looks fantastic.
- [88:24]
John Coogan
Good. Props to your stylist.
- [88:26]
Geordi Hitch
Okay, first question. We were reading in the Wall Street Journal today that you're cooked. That venture capital is cooked. Venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. Are you cooked? Is it over? Are you going to be leaving the industry after disaster has struck, according to the Journal. What's your reaction?
- [88:46]
John Coogan
Action.
- [88:47]
Yotam Sierra
You know, you're getting this like, you know, sort of case shaped, you know, nature to venture, you know, right now, which has been happening for, you know, sort of a couple years. But it's happening.
- [88:55]
John Coogan
Doing ketamine.
- [88:57]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We were just K holing and we need to like, you know, really focus in on one company.
- [89:02]
Geordi Hitch
Just like guys like, hey, we just told Vanity Fair we don't promote drugs.
- [89:06]
John Coogan
We don't promote drugs.
- [89:08]
Yotam Sierra
We take ketamine and.
- [89:13]
Geordi Hitch
But this bifurcation has been happening. Do you have the riding jacket on? Oh, that's a good one.
- [89:19]
John Coogan
There we go.
- [89:20]
Geordi Hitch
This is good merch.
- [89:21]
John Coogan
Rare.
- [89:21]
Geordi Hitch
Rare. Founders Fund merch. Anyways, we only use that stuff for our horses. Yes, yes, yes. Riding the horses, but yes. So where did the K shape split come from? Is this interest rate driven or just LPs are realizing that it's better to pile into the big winners? Give me more on the dynamics.
- [89:41]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah.
- [89:41]
John Coogan
You look at Chef, you have a big Fund raised in 2025, but it could have been way bigger. Oversubscribe. Part of the issue is PT's hogging the whole fund. But there's instances where there's like way more demand for a specific fund.
- [89:59]
Geordi Hitch
Sure.
- [89:59]
John Coogan
Than there is actual allocations available. And then other cases more on the emerging manager side where they just can't even get going.
- [90:07]
Geordi Hitch
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. What are you seeing, Dan?
- [90:09]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple different forces at play here. A part of it is if you actually even just study the old days of pe, for example, when you go from the barbarians at the gate days to today, PE kind of went through a similar dynamic and super cycle where you had cottage industry to start, then got super scaled and there were a ton of different players. And then steadily there was a bunch of aggregation basically over time that led to some mega, mega funds like the KKR, as etc.
- [90:37]
John Coogan
Of the world.
- [90:39]
Yotam Sierra
I think you're basically seeing, you know, basically venture go through the same thing. And I think you started to see basically like that K shape really accelerate in 2021 and then has only basically continued since then. And I think you're seeing it first on the company side of things. Right? I think we've talked about this before, but like, you know, if you look at it on like a deal count basis, we're basically just on a strict linear decline since the peak of 2021. In terms of total deals done by all VCs across the globe that I think basically like north of $5 million, it's like just strictly going down in terms of number of companies basically per year that are looking like that. So company formation is down, deal count is down. And so by default you basically have obviously sort of fewer logos that you can chase. And so you're getting more aggregation into a much smaller set of logos on the company basically side of things. At the same time, you're seeing companies stay private for much longer. And so the liquidity in the public markets is getting vacuumed up by an even smaller set of companies because there's just a small set that are the mega ones that are raising these huge, huge rounds. I think it was something like if you basically added up SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic and Xai, basically. I think if you added up basically those four companies, it was something on the order of 60% of the total dollars deployed by VCs in that year were scooped up basically by those four or five companies. And so I think that's the dynamic that's then flowing through on the vc, VC side of things where if you're one of those companies and you need to now raise like, you know, $10 billion, are you really trying to go out and do that with like a bunch of $10 billion checks? It's like no. Like you prefer to like, you know, find capital providers that can actually give you, you know, billion dollar checks at a time. So you just like have fewer, you know, sort of mouse around the table. You need to manage some of this regulatory. Right? Like, I think you can't have more than like, I think it's like 6,500 like, you know, institutions on your cap table before you're public. And so you literally have to make sure that these sort of things, you know, aggregate and then there's a part of it that is yeah just the like power law of venture and tech only continues to be like more and more true. Like you know, you're dominated by the big, it's Ikea. There's this like I'm probably going to butcher it a little bit. Like you know, Peter's had this you know, sort of like, you know, thing that he said for sure privately, I'm pretty sure publicly too. So I don't think he'll mind me saying it but he like his like biggest error, you know that he says of like his 20 sort of tens was you know, his impression was just like, you know, there's not going to be that many like you know, you know 100 billion let alone like trillion dollar companies. But it turns out basically like each individual 10x is actually like easier than the last one. Basically like once you're sort of trillion dollar, once you're a $100 billion company, it's actually much easier to go to a trillion than it was to go from like 10 to 100. It's actually much easier to go to 10 to 100 than it is from 1 to 10. And it's much easier to go from like 1 billion to 10 billion than it is to go from 100 million to 1 billion etc. And so yeah that's you know in some ways that like momentum begetting momentum is just like making it so that these like you know, companies get bigger faster, they're scooping up capital faster and the venture firms are getting bigger faster, faster. I think the thing where this stuff starts to break is like I don't think that the current default fee structure is going to be like where the industry is at sort of 10 years from today. I won't name names but there's definitely a decent number of these multi stage mega funds that are doing some of their super late stage investing through both like fee less and carry less basically SPVs. And so at some point if you're doing like a fee list and carryless SPV where you're investing into a late stage startup, you basically just work as IR at the startup, right? Like you know, you're like, you're not.
- [94:01]
John Coogan
Making, yeah, walk me through. I mean SPVs are just notoriously like they're incredible when they hit because it's deal by deal and if you have one true banger it's your, the GPS that are a part of that are retired. So like in Theory, they're amazing in practice, like actually trying to go and convince a lot of people and you're basically staking your reputation on that deal because you don't have the aggregate deals that typically go in a fund. You're saying you kind of have to say this is going to work and do my other SPVs. So at least you're diversified to some degree. But it's a ton of work, there's a ton of pressure. You have to promise the company that you're going to promise or imply that you can achieve some investment amount and then you have to go do all this heavy lifting. So why is a multistage fund incentivized to do that? Is it just to gain favor with the company? What's the incentive?
- [94:56]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah.
- [94:59]
Yotam Sierra
I think the probably hidden secret of Silicon Valley is that there's just a much higher percentage of capital that is deployed via SPVs and co invest vehicles than is probably publicly acknowledged or discussed. There are very top tier, tier one companies, including some of the ones that I listed in those top five that have had rounds come together based off of a significant chunk of the round basically being done by an spv. Why do you do it as a company? Well, at the end of the day, if you're like the CEO of a company, you're.
- [95:27]
John Coogan
No, I'm not saying why do it as a company. I'm saying why do a fee less, carry less spv?
- [95:32]
Yotam Sierra
As a sort of venture investor, just.
- [95:37]
John Coogan
Pure love of the game. I just love deploying capital. I don't need to make money from it. It's volunteer work.
- [95:43]
Winston Weinberg
Work.
- [95:44]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, I mean I think it's, you know, a lot of funds. The way that they end up like, you know, sort of growing in a, um, is, you know, they start off with an initial like fixed fund structure and then like, you know, for their best performing companies, do co invest vehicles, you know, or like opportunity funds to build it up and then eventually become, you know, sort of, you know, multi stage and can actually like handle basically a growth fund once they've shown some of those growth SPVs work. So in some ways, I guess in.
- [96:07]
John Coogan
Some ways part of it is, is maybe they promised LPs, like if you back my fund in a big way, I will give you direct access.
- [96:16]
Geordi Hitch
Or it's value add. Like if you have, you have a stake in a company and you just want that company to succeed, you're like, look, it's value add. I'm just going to go work, get them more money on their balance sheet. Yeah, I'm not making more money off of that piece of the investment, but my original investment is getting marked up and the company's more likely to succeed. Makes sense. Yeah.
- [96:34]
Yotam Sierra
I'll pretend like this is, you know, hypothetical, even if it's not hypothetical. But like, imagine you're a company like opening eye. You need to go raise like, you know, sort of billions of dollars, right? You as the CEO, have a lot of things on your plate, right? You need to like manage the government, you have customers, you have your internal team, et cetera. Like, can you really afford to like, literally fully, fully, fully only be focused on fundraising? Like, no, it's like really hard to do that basically, like as the CEO, when you're operating the company versus if somebody comes to you and is like, hey, let me do like a, like, you know, basically like fee less, carry less, basically SPV that lets me go out and raise is. It's effectively like in some ways, like outsourced ir. It's somebody that's working on this basically entirely full time. And there's sort of a win win on both sides. As the CEO, you don't need to do all the fundraising. With the long tail of sovereign wealth funds, this, that and the other, they can go do the first sets of meetings, then bring you in basically for the final close. For the venture investor, it basically ends up being a way where you now have a really great reputation basically with this company because you're basically helping them sort of pull together a mega fundraiser ways for your sets of like, you know, LPs and for future fixed fund vehicles that you're doing. You now get this reputation of like, hey, I'm close to this, like, you know, sort of super hot, you know, sort of company.
- [97:42]
John Coogan
Yeah, the optics. Yeah, the optics too. Non equity partner in the X chat says a lot of GPS want to lead around but don't have the aum. So just getting the optics of being like, I'm a size Chad, you know, leading this massive round. It's like. And maybe they wouldn't have been able to put it together with a, with a more aggressive fee structure. It's just interesting because on the other side you see some of these, you know, really, really some of the bad actors in the SPV space are like, you know, layered SPV, 10%.
- [98:10]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, yeah. Super high fees.
- [98:11]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [98:12]
Yotam Sierra
Not beer, by the way. Not beer.
- [98:14]
John Coogan
There you go. Were you surprised about the Manus acquisition? Did that trigger you or are you kind of licking your American?
- [98:25]
Geordi Hitch
It's so good that a company like Manus got acquired by a former Founders Fund portfolio company. Let's give it up for Founders Fund for making it happen. Facebook seeded by Founders Fund and now going around and acquiring great companies like Manus.
- [98:40]
John Coogan
Right.
- [98:42]
Yotam Sierra
You know, it's funny, I had like, probably like 30 people text me being like, when are you gonna tweet about it? What are you gonna say about it? I just like, sitting there and I was just like, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say. It's just like I'm like, you know, I'm like a disappointed father.
- [98:53]
Winston Weinberg
You know what I mean?
- [98:53]
Yotam Sierra
Where it's just like, I just can't believe that this is like, like, you know, what the world has come to. How has this happened? Well, you know, my favorite meme about it was like, you know, there was somebody that had like a fake text chat between Zuckerberg and Alex Wang, and Zuckerberg going like, hey, can you go buy Manus for me? And then Alex is like, sure, yes, sir. And Zuckerberg goes, okay, cool. Thank you. Did you get me like, you know, the like, freemium or like the premium one? And I was like, no, I bought Manus.
- [99:17]
Geordi Hitch
I bought the whole company. What do you think about the mega. I don't even know. Mega corns going out at a trillion. Is that going to result in more recycling of LP dollars? Is it possible that SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, couple other names get out and LPs? Feel like I'm going to go back and reallocate into venture and this time around I'm going to try smaller managers again. Or do you think it'll have a different dynamic? How does that play out in a, in a post successful IPO year?
- [99:51]
Yotam Sierra
You know, I sort of one liner. I forget if we joked about this in person when we were in la or if I've done this on TVPN live before. But it's like, it would be incredible if, like the thing that props up the 2026 equity market is the spiked IPO. Elon's just like, oh, Sam needs liquidity.
- [100:08]
Winston Weinberg
What if I.
- [100:08]
John Coogan
No, not needs liquidity. He needs like a couple hundred billion.
- [100:11]
Geordi Hitch
He needs a lot.
- [100:12]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah.
- [100:13]
Yotam Sierra
He needs a lot of liquidity. Like, what if I just go IPO and, and I scoop up all the liquidity in the market and make sure that I do it like faster than he does. But that's the thing that, like, props up the public markets because all of a sudden, like The S&P 500 has like a trillion and a half added to it. By like a single entity. So, yeah, I mean, like these, you know, it was kind of my joke at the beginning of the show, but it's like, you know, I do think that this upcoming year is poised to be at least right now, and it feels like there's like the perfect market conditions for it where it's like, relatively stable economy, inflation's sort of relatively under control. It doesn't seem like China's going to be invading Taiwan over the course of the next year. Like, yes, things are like, you know, sort of geopolitically heated, but like, it doesn't seem like, you know, I mean, you know, like we just captured the president of Venezuela and, you know, nobody seems to sort of blink. And, you know, if anything, the markets are up on the news. And so it feels like you have this sort of stable and growing economy that is poised to now basically absorb probably the largest sets of entry points into like the public market and IPO market than it's like ever seen before. And then that obviously, you know, sort of feeding into like, you know, liquidity into the entire our Silicon Valley sort of ecosystem. What is that going to do? I think it's only going to amplify some of these trends where it's like, I think that it's going to be now more typical for companies. Right now it feels odd that there's a handful of companies that stay private past 100 billion. I think now it's going to be the default that companies stay private basically past 100 billion and the size of these funds is going to increase significantly because, yeah, your ability to deploy a $10 billion fund much more viable when your average entry point is at like 200 billion post and you're expected to still be able to make like a 3-5x on top of that because there's more regular paths like that.
- [101:46]
John Coogan
Do you think there's any risk or potential for regulation as people realize that the returns from the private as these companies are staying private longer? If you're excited about anthropic and you can't invest until it's worth, who knows what it goes out at. At some point I could imagine someone on the left saying, like, we need to ban companies from staying private this long because you're just letting the wealthy kind of like suck up all the returns. And I even saw Vlad from Robinhood posting earlier saying, like, we can't, you know, basically coming out in defense of retail and saying, like, we can't, you know, these companies can't just stay private forever. And obviously he has very. All the incentives to like, get these companies out so people can start.
- [102:37]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [102:37]
John Coogan
You know, doing whatever they want to do. But. But I could see something like that happening, especially given that it will be.
- [102:46]
Geordi Hitch
Very interesting as like a chapter. Just I know someone who runs like a pure play AI fund, but they're not in XAI, OpenAI or Anthropic. And so they're in some great names. They got the trend right early, but they didn't like, brand themselves. And even some funds that don't have like major positions, in one of them, at least they have a lumber with one of them, built a position, played the game and like, participated in that. And I think once they all go out, everyone will see sort of the S1s and sort of know a little bit more about, you know, where the really elite firms landed in the AI boom.
- [103:17]
John Coogan
I don't know, part of the space, SpaceX S1 potentially going out before some of these other names, then also having, you know, if you, if there's a world where XAI gets rolled in and then it's like you have a lab that. That and a space company and a data center company that, you know, historically has been profitable maybe obviously not on the XAI side, but it's going to maybe get people to even be more aggressive in tearing apart some of these other S1s.
- [103:44]
Geordi Hitch
We should do Jared Isaacman and the Space Update. But first I want your advice for Patrick Collison. He's interested in Miami. What does it take for Patrick to have a great experience in Miami?
- [103:59]
Yotam Sierra
There is something a little surreal about like, there's sets of people right now tweeting about Miami were like, the people probably like most strongly critiquing it in 2021. And so there's something spilled up being like, huh, like maybe I was like, you know, like, right idea, slightly wrong time. Just needed to wait for like California. Not just to get hit with COVID would become like, you know, communistic basically and start seizing property. And that's gonna be the thing that convinces people on the Miami thing.
- [104:24]
Geordi Hitch
What do you think about this idea of not moving Silicon Valley to Miami, but moving Sandhill Road road to Miami? Like all the big GPS will be domiciled there. And yes, if you're raising a big round, you'll probably go to Miami, go to someone's house, meet them in person. But a lot of the investors who are not subject to that tax will be operating out of San Francisco. A lot of the labs, a lot of the individual contributors, the academic institutions, you're not trying to move the entire network, but you're still embracing Miami as a important tech hunter hub.
- [104:56]
Arun Gupta
Yeah.
- [104:57]
Yotam Sierra
I think if there's like something to be proud of in the time period where I feel like I contributed to Miami the most, you know, called 21 through 24, I do think that it, you know, established itself as like a fundraising destination. Absolutely. Between like everybody from like, you know, dan Sonheim at D1, Ken Griffin from Citadel, you know, Peter spending a decent chunk of the time there, etc. Like, you know, has now very much so become a destination where.
- [105:17]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah.
- [105:17]
Yotam Sierra
If you're ready raising a later stage round or you're even like, you know, not Peter level gp, but like, you know, up and coming.
- [105:24]
Geordi Hitch
I mean, also, also you have, you have Keith, Catherine, Sachs, like there were, there were. It wasn't just ff that there was a nice network emerging where you could go and take meetings with five different funds pretty quickly. You know, obviously that evolved.
- [105:38]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [105:39]
Yotam Sierra
And so I think it's just like it built a base that is now much easier to build on top of where like now that you have this like, you know, sort of second wave that's happening because it's like California, you know, sort of regulation, I think it's like clearly, you know, sort of cementing itself in it. And I think, I think it's probably what Miami is best suited for anyways. Right. Like, you know, you know, Francis Suarez would always say, like, look, ultimately what we're best at is like the capital of capital.
- [105:57]
Geordi Hitch
Yep.
- [105:57]
Winston Weinberg
And I think that is like, you.
- [105:59]
Geordi Hitch
Know, that's one of our taglines we refer to. Oh yeah, but he can use it. It's fine. Give us the update on Jared Isaacman. Take us through how you process the news and what you're excited for in 2026.
- [106:14]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, I mean, he's obviously, you know, early in. I think it's been like, you know, sort of two weeks since you're confirmation. There hasn't been any like super broad policy announcement yet. But the place where he started to drop some news has actually just been like via his Twitter profile, which has been a fun place to sort of follow along.
- [106:31]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah.
- [106:32]
Yotam Sierra
Or X profile. Probably my favorite one is there's a program called dragonfly that NASA's been working on for a while, which is basically this. So the first time that we ever flew a helicopter on a non earth planet was on Mars with Ingenuity, I believe it was called, with which is this helicopter we got on Mars sort of related to that. It's a Different program, but it's a program called Dragonfly where it's roughly like a small car sized vehicle that is meant to fly on Titan. Titan is one of the. Oh God. And I should not mess it up, but it's one of the, what's it called? Moons of Saturn. Either Saturn or Jupiter. I'm a big enough space that I should know, but what's cool about it is Titan both has four times the density of atmosphere as Earth does does, but also basically seven times less gravity. And so with the combination of two, you basically make it like 30 times easier to fly. And so you and I could literally just like be on the surface of Titan and literally basically just like wear some wings and like, if you just ran relatively quickly, like you don't have to be Usain Bolt, like even at our level of fitness, basically just go and flap our wings and like, we would basically start flying. And with like a little bit of like exoskeleton or anything like that, you could 100% like fly as much as you want. And so Dragonfly is this like small car sized, like flying car basically with like a nuclear battery on board. The program had been like, you know, definitely a little bit behind schedule, behind budget, et cetera. But like, you know, Jared basically came out very publicly on Twitter being like, this is one of my favorite programs. This is the type of like bleeding edge science that like NASA should be doing. And so I do love that he's kind of leaning into like, you know, I don't know, you know, my dream job would absolutely like the one thing that would make me like upend my entire life and quit everything would be like, if I was offered NASA administrator, I think I would do that immediately. And if that was, you know, if I was in the job right now, like, yeah, I think the thing that we should be doing is like NASA should be doing just like the crazy bleeding edge stuff that just like no private company is going to do. Like a fucking flying car on Titan is just like objectively like insane. But like, there's a world where they're going to be able to basically like live stream or like stream basically like video of this like car going around Titan and like, you know, flying through dunes and stuff like that. It's like so, so sort of cool. And then on the flip side, you know, you know, they've like figured out how to just like, you know, really focus on the commercial private market for like the things that are much more near term and what the commercial industry is capable of. So I Don't know if you guys saw, but I tweeted this that you know, basically this year we're going to. Four separate totally net new commercial lunar landers basically land on the moon this year. It's intuitive. Machines has one, Astrobotic has one, Blue Origin has one. And SpaceX. No, it's not SpaceX. They don't actually have a plan for humans. Firefly, Duh, Fire. And you know, for its worth, the like Blue Origin, you know, Mark one lander is like the size of like, it's like a two story house. It's like it's going to be the biggest man made object that we've like ever landed on the moon. And I will say like, you know, until a quarter ago I was probably a little more skeptical that like, you know, Blue Origin was actually going to like land this thing. Now it's like, you know, you see that New Glenn is actually like launching, landing. It's like, man, they maybe have like really turned a corner on like, you know, their engineering and systems design. But the cool thing is like, even if Blue Origin Fs it up, there's also like three other companies that are aggressively pursuing it, are getting like paid basically commercial revenues to go do this. And to me it's just like this breakout year that I still think is, I don't know, underpaid attention to and under discussed. The analogy that I tried to provide is this kind of feels like 1968 where it's just like you have basically a year before where it's like, I don't know if you know, but in February we're going to be sending humans basically back to the moon for the first time. Not on the surface, but to orbit the moon. So that's going to the moon. Four different landers basically on the moon. It's like all in preparation, preparation for if that all goes well, there's like a really decent likelihood that like next year we both have like boots on the moon and like 10 landers landing per year on the moon and dropping off robots and supplies and shit like that. Which is just like, I don't know, 15 year old Delian would just be like, so, yeah, so excited.
- [110:26]
Geordi Hitch
We gotta sponsor the biggest moon landing conspiracy theorist for a trip. They gotta go up there, we gotta just put them on the moon, settle it once and for, for all. Jordy's getting the tinfoil hat on. He thinks that it's not good.
- [110:37]
John Coogan
What kind of evidence would you need to see from these missions to kind of finally determine, finally believe it. I'M kidding. I put on the tinfoil hat. For another thing. Trump's been going pretty hard on fentanyl, trying to stop it from coming into the country. At the same time, you've seen an explosion of Chinese peptides. Do you have any concern that this is all just a big psyop and we're trying to get a generation of people in the United States to just inject themselves?
- [111:09]
Geordi Hitch
Maybe they're putting tin foil in the peptides.
- [111:11]
John Coogan
Yeah, random resources, chemicals. People don't realize you were saying you've lost a bunch of weight just by being a chad. No peptides needed. I get a little concerned because it feels like in the last two weeks you have everybody's like, I guess everyone's gotta be doing peptides. And it's like this, like the source and the purity of these things matters so much. You're injecting these things into your blood. This is not something that you just want to mess around and find some random Chinese website and just hope that the test results that they have on the site are actually real.
- [111:40]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah.
- [111:43]
Yotam Sierra
I will say I regret taking the sort of COVID vaccine and not sure that for my age and health is the right risk reward. I am definitely not yet ready to start injecting my body into a bunch of peptides.
- [111:58]
Winston Weinberg
Who knows?
- [111:58]
Yotam Sierra
They've got some nanomarkers on there where the Chinese release a virus that's like specific to those peptides and they've designed it.
- [112:04]
Winston Weinberg
The.
- [112:05]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, I'll provide kind of like an example of this about how paranoid the Chinese are. So the tinfoil for like Xi Jinping.
- [112:10]
Geordi Hitch
Sure.
- [112:10]
Yotam Sierra
He had this meeting in 2023 with Biden in San Francisco. If you guys remember when like they came and like cleaned everything up for Xi visit. And there's a bunch of like memes around that.
- [112:19]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [112:20]
Yotam Sierra
After a like sit down meeting that they had like, I think it was like down in like Monterey or something like that. And like Chinese official after the meeting came by and sprayed basically everything that like Xi Jinping had touched, everything that like, you know, he put his lips on to like, you know, sort of drink. And the like, you know, US official basically asked him like, hey, like, you know, what is the thing that you just use or sprayed? Reasonable question to ask. And it was a basically like a DNA degrader because they were so worried about the idea of like somebody in America having Xi Jinping's DNA and then potentially optimizing a virus that is like super specific and optimized for him. And so the Chinese are Thinking about like, you know, DNA specific viruses makes you think like, you know, they might be designing DNA or like peptides basically, you know, viruses that are targeting, you know, sort of individuals or groups.
- [113:04]
Geordi Hitch
So, yeah, that's crazy. I was thinking, I was thinking he was worried about us cloning Xi Jinping, and then he's fighting himself, a younger version of himself. He's, oh, no, the new U.S. president. I hate him, but he's my own question.
- [113:19]
John Coogan
They go to a negotiation, it's just.
- [113:21]
Geordi Hitch
Xi Trump, the younger Xi Jinping, hundred of them, hundreds of Xi Jinpings just storming the beaches.
- [113:28]
John Coogan
How did you process the true social post about the military budget, salary cap, salary cap and the budgets.
- [113:37]
Yotam Sierra
Just incredible to have him as the commander in chief, somebody that's actually willing to crack the whip on this stuff where it's just like, yeah, like, why should these companies be optimized for like shareholder returns and like executive salaries rather than like making sure that they're delivering for the war fighter? And it's crazy to me that it's not like, you know, he like did the broad industry thing and then like, I don't know if you saw, but he like specifically then started calling out Raytheon where he's just like, they are not like responding to feedback. They're not delivering enough. And like, you know, went down to the individual logo. And so, yeah, I think it's like, you know, sort of incredible piece of sort of policy and like, you know, bold Commander in Chief and like, like, you know.
- [114:11]
John Coogan
Well, I think right now it's an incredible post. Well, should get into policy, right?
- [114:15]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, but, but, but that's the nature of these things. Like, we saw this with intel policy.
- [114:20]
Yotam Sierra
It can just be like, you know, you know, subtle acquisition policy where it's just like, I mean, you know, secretary, he said can go implement, you know, who he wants to buy from without asking Congress for permission, so.
- [114:29]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, that's a good point.
- [114:29]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [114:30]
Geordi Hitch
Okay, so if, even if it's just directional, it doesn't need to be new law, it doesn't need to be an executive order to have an effect, to have an effect on the stock price. But of course, the defense tech stocks actually mooned because the defense budget is potentially going up by 50%. Do you have a read on this? How big this will be for the industry? Is this a boon for startups in defense tech? Or do you think that the big primes of the world will just quickly get their act together and then go hoover up a lot of that new budget?
- [114:58]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, I Mean, I think there are going to be a set that are leaning in one of the example, I think, I think it's like BAE has like, you know, done a whole set of like startup collaborations where like I think they have like a collaboration with like Applied Intuition on one of their ground vehicles. Like, you know, they have like something with Merlin, I want to say on like one of their like you know, basically like airplanes that they build. I have to go back and look but I remember like reading through one of their like you know, quarterly earnings calls or like, you know, maybe there's like a tectonic like the you know, defense newsletter articulating like all the various partnerships they had and it's like yeah, they clearly are recognizing like they have things that they're good at. They're making, they're good at like making the ground vehicle and the frame around that and the wheels that are, they just like have a whole manufacturing line, etc. They're not as good at the avionics, the software, the automation, etc. And so like they're leaning in on startups. There's clearly primes like that that I think are like really leaning in and very forward. And then you have ones that like clearly seem to think like, oh, this is just like a total fad. Like you know, the like, you know, Trump administration isn't going to really push on this. And so yeah, I think it's like a huge opportunity for both the primes that are leaning in and appreciating that they need to like actually be, be much more aggressive, invest more in R and D, partner more with startups. I think it's great for obviously the Neoprimes and it's just there's a huge opportunity where it's like, I think if you add up basically like SpaceX and roll everybody, all the Neo primes basically found in last basically like 15 years, they still represent basically less than 1% of the total basically Dow budget. And so there's still a ton of upside from some of the big guys basically stumbling. So yeah, I think the Raytheons of the world are definitely not reacting as well. But it's not to say that every prime is getting caught totally flat footed. Like some are definitely you know, reacting to this new environment.
- [116:29]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, well, it's 1pm Jordy. Anything else?
- [116:31]
John Coogan
This was great.
- [116:32]
Geordi Hitch
Thank you so much for taking the time as always.
- [116:34]
John Coogan
Only 179 more appearances to go.
- [116:38]
Yotam Sierra
79 more to go, baby. 99 peers on the wall.
- [116:41]
Geordi Hitch
Let's go have a great rest of your day. See you Happy.
- [116:43]
Winston Weinberg
Later, boys. Bye.
- [116:44]
John Coogan
See you.
- [116:45]
Geordi Hitch
Up next we have Arun Gupta, the founder and CEO at StickerBot Happy co. The Creativity First AI product went viral over the break and I'm excited to talk to him. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBPN Ultra Down Maroon. How are you doing? Good to have you here.
- [117:04]
Arun Gupta
Hey, great to be here.
- [117:07]
Geordi Hitch
Could you please kick us off since this is the first time on the show with an introduction on yourself and the company and just some of the background here?
- [117:14]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Arun. I'm the co founder of Hapago along with my good friend Bob Whitney. Previously I was in Y Combinator back in 2009, same batch of Stripe.
- [117:27]
Geordi Hitch
Oh geez. Amazing.
- [117:31]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, I actually dropped out of Yale in the middle of my junior year and six months later was lucky enough to get in talk to Paul Graham on a weekly basis. It was amazing.
- [117:42]
Geordi Hitch
Okay, let's actually just dig in there since we have some time. What were you building in 2009? What was the mood on the ground at YC in 2020? In 2009?
- [117:50]
Arun Gupta
So we were actually one of the very first hardware startups. A lot of it was, you know, Reddit had just happened, Airbnb Match right before us. You know, there are a lot of B2B stuff, a lot of consumer things. We built a personal sleep tracker. So it was a wristband that you wore while you slept and it used sleep science called actigraphy to track your sleep cycles and wake you up at the right time in the morning.
- [118:13]
Winston Weinberg
Morning.
- [118:14]
Arun Gupta
So back when Fitbit and Drawbone were.
- [118:16]
John Coogan
Like doing, dude, you were so early.
- [118:18]
Geordi Hitch
You were so early.
- [118:19]
John Coogan
So early. I mean, it must be have been painful to see Aura and Whoop and basically have the right idea. And what.
- [118:30]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, what was the blocker? Was it supply chain or distribution? I mean, I went through YC in 2012, first company, first idea. Same thing with where a lot of it like wound up getting built by someone else years later. But what was your experience like if you were to do the post mortem?
- [118:46]
Arun Gupta
Honestly, for us, it was big data. So back in 2009, everybody who worked on big data worked in biotech or worked on Wall street, so you couldn't really hire them away unless you had a ton of money. And all the money is in data analysis, right? So like Whoop Aura, they're analyzing tons and tons of data points and giving you all this information about how you can live better, eat better, be more healthy and we just didn't have that. So. So the business really flies when you have a subscription that works, but without big data analysis, it's really hard to build a subscription that works.
- [119:16]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. That's crazy. I remember 2009 was like the dawn of Hadoop and distributed systems that you had to orchestrate. It was like doing multi training LLM AI infrastructure. You couldn't just be like, put all the data in one database and Google handles it, or AWS handles it, or MongoDB handles it.
- [119:34]
Arun Gupta
And databases became a thing.
- [119:37]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah. All these. We take them so much for granted now, but back then it was such a pain to orchestrate anything you're running, like, true infrastructure just to do, like, basic stuff by now, by today's terms. Yeah. So what led you to start this company? When did you start this company? What were you doing in the interim?
- [119:58]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, so after my YC company gracefully shut down, I started another company called Grailed.com and Grailed was basically.
- [120:08]
Geordi Hitch
You started Grailed with the fashion company?
- [120:11]
John Coogan
That's so. That's so cool.
- [120:12]
Geordi Hitch
Okay.
- [120:14]
John Coogan
Wow. We do a lot of. We don't always have time to do. We don't always have time to do research, but on your printout, Grail didn't make it in. I've used Graileds for a decade now.
- [120:29]
Arun Gupta
Yeah. I started grailed in 2013 in my bedroom in San Francisco. Yeah.
- [120:34]
Geordi Hitch
Were you a collector of, like, fashion items? Yeah, big time.
- [120:39]
Arun Gupta
Big time.
- [120:40]
Geordi Hitch
What were you into back then? What was the first product?
- [120:42]
John Coogan
Did you ever wear Chrome Hearts to an investor pitch?
- [120:48]
Arun Gupta
No, I never wore it to an investor pitch. When I went to see the investors, I was wearing more Loro Piana.
- [120:54]
John Coogan
There we go.
- [120:55]
Arun Gupta
Right? That's the vibe.
- [120:57]
Geordi Hitch
And that's still like, what, five years before Chamath starts introducing it to the Valley via the all in podcast. That's fantastic.
- [121:04]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, exactly. No, back in the day, it was really about, like, workwear and, like, raw denim. And then it became really big through collabs. So there was like an H and M Balmain collab that was really big. There was the Yeezys that dropped. There was all the Nikes that dropped. And then supreme obviously had their massive moment. But no, I was really into, like, all the OG Raf Simmons stuff. Actually, if you remember, asap, Rocky did a video. I forget what the song was called. Like, Please Don't Touch My Rap. And in that video he's wearing there's like, three of my personal collection pieces in that video.
- [121:35]
Geordi Hitch
That's crazy. So what was the, like, the Customer acquisition funnel at that time. And I'm interested to hear how. I've heard a lot of founders talk about, you know, if they got started years ago, they were maybe doing, like, Minecraft bots. A lot of people were doing, like, sniping for sneaker drops. Sneaker bots. Did that play a role? Was there an automated portion, or was it mostly organic? Walk me through some of the trends that were happening at the time with Grailed, and then I promise we will get to Sticker Box. That's why I want to talk to you. But this is the most exciting.
- [122:13]
Arun Gupta
Stickerbox is the most exciting part. But, yeah, Grailed, really, it was all about community. Community, honestly, from day one, it was a community. And all the way through until the end because we were, like, very heavily focused on men's versus women. So it was about 70, 30 men's versus women's. And at the time in 2013, people were like, do men even wear clothes? And I'm like, yes, they're people. Obviously, they're wear clothes. But men's fashion was, like, not a thing at all. So we were able to sort of like, ride that wave and see sort.
- [122:41]
John Coogan
Of riding the Instagram wave in some ways. Like, that had to be. Be. Be the biggest catalyst.
- [122:48]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, I talked. I used to talk a lot about how people. When you were like, hey, what are you into? People will be like, oh, I'm into, like, Nirvana or, like Radiohead. And then when you're like, what are you into there? I'm like, I'm into Noah or, like, supreme or like Jill, something like that. Right. So it's like your personal aesthetic became more defined by the clothes you wore, because we became such a visual society through Instagram rather than the music you listen to, which was more maybe of like a MySpace, you know, know, OG type thing.
- [123:14]
John Coogan
And you guys had people building real businesses on the platform. I have. My oldest friend teamed up with a college buddy of mine, unrelated to me, and started selling on Grailed. Ended up building their own brand called no Maintenance, that's now thriving. But they got their start just reselling. That's how they generate the revenue that they needed to actually. Actually do their own inventory run.
- [123:41]
Arun Gupta
So, yeah, a lot of fashion designers, too. I think Reese Cooper probably, you know, started out on.
- [123:49]
Geordi Hitch
There's. There's a viewer in the chat that says, I bought my first pair of Rick Owens dunks from Grail. This is so cool.
- [123:56]
Arun Gupta
That's awesome.
- [123:56]
Geordi Hitch
That's amazing.
- [124:00]
John Coogan
Probably, yeah, holding them.
- [124:02]
Geordi Hitch
So then, yeah, taking me through the. The Idea to. To get back in the arena for the third time. When did you start the company? Was this post chatgpt moment. I mean I feel like we've talked about this in the show. Like there is such an opportunity for interesting businesses here in the age of AI. But do.
- [124:19]
John Coogan
And I was always saying, cool. Everybody wanted to build these AI hardware devices for adults. I'm like, I have a phone. It is an AI hardware device. They don't market it that way. But I mean Apple kind of does. But. But I was like, I don't need another device that like helps me order doordash. Right?
- [124:35]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [124:36]
John Coogan
But my kid, I don't want my kids to have. I don't want my kids to have an iPad. No, but creating a product, I always thought like if you made a product that just let kids ask questions.
- [124:46]
Geordi Hitch
Well, the rabbit R1. The rabbit R1 came out and they used teenage engineering. It's this beautiful orange package. Very cool. But a lot of the reviewers who are adults were like, were just comparing.
- [124:55]
John Coogan
It to their phone.
- [124:55]
Geordi Hitch
I'm comparing it to my iPhone and, and I never got around to actually buying one and giving it to my 4 year old. But I was thinking that it feels like a great kid's toy. And then there is still the narrative of great technology start as toys. So I always thought it was a great market to go after. But what was your inspiration?
- [125:11]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, so I can take zero credit for creating the sticker box. It was all my co founder, Robert Whitney. He is the original inventor along with his son who helped him basically co develop the device. And basically the story is pretty classic. Sun was like, hey, I want a coloring book of tigers eating ice cream. And he was like, oh, I don't have that. But I can just print it off an image generator and then you can color it. And then he's like, okay, great, I'm going to print that and then color it. And then he's like, now I want lizards riding skateboards. And then he prints lizards riding skateboards. And then you see this magic moment go off in the kid's head and they're like, wait, I can say anything. And like for us, like we're a little bit more jaded, I think. You know, we're like, oh yeah, AI LLMs. It all works for a kid. They're like, I just came up with this idea and not only do I see it now I can hold it in my hand and color it.
- [126:01]
John Coogan
Yeah. I was with my 3 year old yesterday using an image model and he Said in his words, he was like, it's like magic.
- [126:09]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. No, and I think the physical aspect is just, it's so important when I, I use image generators with my son and I have airprint and I will print the photo even though I'm running out of ink left and right because full page color photo, it just goes out really quickly. But it's amazing and it's way different than just being like, oh, here's a Ghibli of your toys. To be like, here's the thing that you can put on your wall. You can enjoy.
- [126:38]
Arun Gupta
Physical representation is huge.
- [126:40]
Geordi Hitch
Or color it in. It's a coloring book now. There's so many cool things you can do.
- [126:43]
Arun Gupta
Put it on your notebook, on your water bottle. But I think that's what my co founder Bob really understood is that this physical representation, these physical stickers are just what's so powerful for children. And it really is such an imagination accelerant. You know, it's like these ideas, they're in my head, but then once they come out of my head onto paper, he was like, wow, this really transforms what they're able to do.
- [127:05]
Geordi Hitch
And there's two sides to this. There's like the cynical be a good parent, no screen time, print stuff out that's better from fighting the iPad cake thing. And that's true. There's a lot of evidence of that. That's a good thing. But you come to it with a negativity of like, I'm avoiding a bad outcome. So I feel like I'm taking my vegetables. But I just think that like there's like a lindy beautiful thing about texture and physical things.
- [127:31]
John Coogan
Yeah, we have like an old, it's not a Polaroid camera, but it's this really, really bad digital camera that then will print out kind of pictures on it. So one thing I like about sticker box is it's not like these kind of products haven't existed. It's just like integrating.
- [127:45]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [127:46]
John Coogan
Putting it all together into it and it's a form factor.
- [127:49]
Yotam Sierra
And that's the genius.
- [127:50]
Arun Gupta
Right. My co founder brought the product to my house. He had already built it, he had in a cardboard box. It looked awesome. And I look at it in one second and I'm like, it's all about how you put this together. Right. It's like not like these things didn't exist. It's all about your product sense. And basically like how you intuitively were like, this is the right kind of product for a kid. Autonomous self serve stickers, lasting physical pieces Pretty magical stuff. But we'd like to say that it's an AI product and like you said, AI for kids and AI hardware for kids is amazing, more magical. But we like to say that the AI itself disappears behind the magic of the device because it's really not about the AI, it's about the idea. Like the idea is the hero, the sticker is the hero. It's not the device or the screen that are the hero. It's the kid's imagination that becomes the hero of the story.
- [128:40]
Geordi Hitch
So talk about the prototype. It sounds like your co founder did all the hard work. He's the workhorse, you're the show pony, apparently. We'll give him all the credit in the world, but it seems like he was a tinkerer hacker, was able to whip something up pretty quickly, I imagine. Arduino Raspberry PI. Are there wires everywhere? And then do you go to a co packer or a manufacturer? Is this something that's pretty turnkey and there's a solid ecosystem around, or was it a long multi year process to actually get the first one made with high quality?
- [129:12]
Arun Gupta
It was difficult, you know, because like these things are thermal printers. Right. So he came with like the idea fully formed and like a lot of it already baked. But to turn from a prototype to a production product that, you know, our Christmas load was insane. You know, just the amount of kids unboxing on Christmas and then hitting the servers, like he was stressed, I'm like, you know, rightly so. But to get there, it's difficult because when you think about it, this thermal printer, it's meant to print receipts, it's meant to print text on receipts, it's not meant to print images. And if you look at the fidelity of the images that's being happening, it's like think something like 300dpi on the image. It looks beautiful. And that is sort of like a little bit of our secret sauce is, hey, we're able to make these images look really great through a combination of many different things. But that's something that he was able to do really, really well. And something that we had to work with custom, honestly with the factories to try to get them to make it happen.
- [130:05]
Yotam Sierra
And you're sold out.
- [130:06]
John Coogan
You're sold out. I just bought one while you were here with us. Thanks to Shopify. It makes it really easy to check out, but it's going to get delivered in February. It's been selling like crazy. You guys are just trying to keep this thing in stock.
- [130:20]
Arun Gupta
Yeah. So we had a Ton of units available for Christmas shipping. Those went in like two weeks or less. And then we just kept selling. Like we had the December 28 ship date, those sold out in like a few days. This January 6th ship date sold out in a few days. Then we had a February 17th ship date and I was like, February 17th. It's like not even. It's like a month and a half away. Those sold, those all sold out. Now we're in February 24th, so can't keep this thing in stock. But we're ramping up manufacturing and we're going to do our best so everybody can get one.
- [130:52]
Geordi Hitch
So is the 2020, 2026 strategy really get solid on the supply chain so you can scale a ton? And then are you focused on like ruthless ramping of digital ads or are you more likely to go, let's get Walmart, let's get Target? Because I can imagine it's selling really well on both, but you probably don't want to do both as an early stage startup at the same time. You want to be really have your ducks in a row, right?
- [131:20]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, yeah. It's sort of a classic trap that startups get into. Where Target is like, yeah, we'll buy a million units, we'll buy 2,000 units. And then they sit on the shelves because you don't have the marketing to support them. So you kind of have to ramp up appropriately. So for us right now, really, it's like we've got this core image to sticker generation loop down cold. Where do we go from there? You know, kids are making characters like, some kids have this like stickman and Capybara character and they go on adventures over and over again. So, like, let's let them name that character and then reuse it. Let's let them send that character to their friend's box. Let's let them upload their own likeness into the box and say, hey, let me do me and my mom on a picnic in the moon. Or like me riding a dinosaur or what have you. And like, basically what these kids are doing is what we feel like is we're basically enabling the next generation of storytellers, right? So the next Spielberg, the next Ryan Coogler, the next Miyazaki, they're growing up with the sticker boxes. They're like imagination accelerant. And it's letting them tell these like little graphic novels or little stories where they're reusing these characters and they're basically developing their own ip. So leaning more into that and creating more features for them. And honestly, I think the other thing that we are just so happy about is how it brings families together because it's for kids, obviously, but like it's really fun to use, you know. And like the nice thing is, is like when it's like I'm like at the thing at the table, you know, and like the dad is like in the background and like hovering and then he's like, you know, let me do one. And then like, you know, the uncle or the mom or the cousin are like all coming together and they're like, oh, you did that. Let me try to remix your dragon and make it like a metal dragon. Let me make your metal dragon breathe fire. Let me make it breathe fire in a volcano. So it really brings everybody together. So I think focusing more on these sort of like whole family experiences as well as the single player sort of like experience with the individual kid as well is something that my co founder is really focused on. He really believes passionately is using the. To bring people together and as a really positive activity for parents and kids to do.
- [133:18]
John Coogan
What have you guys done on the, on the pa, like on, on the actual material side? I know, you know, people are very afraid of receipts. I don't, I personally.
- [133:29]
Geordi Hitch
Women put out a post about, yeah, don't touch.
- [133:32]
John Coogan
I saw you guys have avoided like BPA and bps, but maybe talk about come some of the decision making there.
- [133:38]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, this was another thing that was really difficult. So BPA and bps are obviously a hot button topic, but if you produce paper, thermal paper, and you test it often, there are trace amounts of BPA and bps in the paper. And for us that wasn't good enough. You know, I was like, just because it's below The California Proposition 65 limit doesn't mean that it's, you know, BPA or BPA completely free.
- [134:04]
John Coogan
Yeah. So limits are not. Not safety.
- [134:06]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And us, it's like, it's a kid's product. It's safety from the ground up. Everything from the images that are generated to everything that happens with the device. So you can touch all these stickers. There is no bpa, no bps. We tested in batches from the factory. It was really difficult to do. It actually delayed our launch by a full four or five weeks. We could have launched four or five weeks earlier if we were willing to accept sort of like this trace element of BPA BPS in the paper. But we were like, no, we like refused to release this.
- [134:36]
John Coogan
That's going to be a good angle because I Imagine you guys are already getting copied by a bunch of different manufacturers and it's like, yeah, you can use the knockoffs, but you know, the.
- [134:46]
Geordi Hitch
Kids talk about safety with regard to image generation. Obviously some of these I'm going to try to jail. Just fair warning, let's put that dragon in a bikini. Let's not have that happen. We want the Dragon. Dragon breathing fire. I want to know about what models you like, how model agnostic you are because I imagine that if you, even if you just change the model to something better, even if the style looks better, you're like, well that doesn't look like the dragon I'm used to generating. So there's some sort of like lock in there. At the same time you might be optimizing for cost. How are you thinking about the software side?
- [135:19]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head there. And for us it's like it's really a product for kids. Right. And I think ChatGPT, when you do image generation, it wants to make everything look sexy. That's kind of the bias, right?
- [135:31]
John Coogan
Right.
- [135:31]
Arun Gupta
You even upload your own photo. It's like it wants to make you look super buff, like you're a superhero.
- [135:35]
Geordi Hitch
Well, that's because I put that in my prompt by default. It has to or else. But yes, it looks very like polished, refined, smooth skin. It's a glow up filter. There's something going on. There's system prompts.
- [135:49]
Arun Gupta
Matter safety is number one. So it's basically a multi factor system. So we have a patent for the sticker box device itself, but we're actually also working on a patent right now for safety in the sticker box box system. And it goes all the way through from the text all the way through to after the image is generated. So when you say the text, we analyze the text for safety, we remove bad words, analyze the prompt for, you know, how likely it is to generate something safe or unsafe. Then we go through an enhancement process where the sticker is steered towards being something geared for a child. So it's actually written in some different ways in order to do that, then we generate the image. And I'm oversimplifying a little bit here. And then, and even after we generate the image, then there's post image generation checks and those post image generation checks are on I don't even know how many variables. Right. There's all the sorts of bad things like hate speech and nudity and violence and all sorts of different things. And we basically have all these confidence intervals and scores that go into it. But it's this huge system. Like, you think about airplanes, right? And airplanes are like this complicated system of many, many, many checks overlapping with each other. And that's what creates the robust safety system. It's a similar system here, right, where we many, many checks at basically every area of the process. Because the last thing we want is for a kid to get something that's unsafe or for a parent to question it. Like, for us, our big mission is, what if AI were built for kids? And I think that the boogeyman in our heads is that social media was not built for kids. Social media was built for adults.
- [137:21]
John Coogan
Grok was not built for kids.
- [137:24]
Arun Gupta
Was not built for kids. I mean, AI is not built for kids. It's built for businesses, right? It's built for adults, and it's built for businesses. But for us, we're like, what if we could just reimagine AI completely and just say, okay, what if this was built for kids? And that's why we didn't put a chatbot and a teddy bear. That's why we made a sticker image generator, right? Which is completely different direction.
- [137:42]
Geordi Hitch
So talk about latency. With all those checks, I imagine none of this is happening on the device. You're going to the WI fi, to the cloud, to your servers, hydrating the text with an LLM that's not super fast. Then generating an image isn't super fast. Then sending that back down to the box and printing it, that's not super fast. How fast do you think you can get this? Do you want to do it on device at some point? And then what user experience sort of tricks are you using to make the latency and the lag tolerable?
- [138:17]
Arun Gupta
Yeah. So great questions. It's actually really fast. Mostly because of the work that my co founder, Bob and his great engineering team have done.
- [138:27]
John Coogan
So I think the time.
- [138:29]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, Bob is.
- [138:30]
John Coogan
Bob Whitney.
- [138:31]
Arun Gupta
Bob Whitney, yeah.
- [138:32]
John Coogan
Bob the builder. Let's go. Incredible. Incredible nominative determinism.
- [138:36]
Geordi Hitch
I was wondering where you're going back.
- [138:38]
Arun Gupta
I mean, there's not a better moniker, honestly. He's really in.
- [138:41]
John Coogan
He's a better time to sticker.
- [138:44]
Arun Gupta
I might be off by a couple a second here too, but I think time to sticker is like six to eight seconds.
- [138:48]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [138:48]
Arun Gupta
So you push the. Get the sticker in like six to eight seconds. And that's with all of the content moderation, everything you do there. But one of the nice tricks that you mentioned, right?
- [138:57]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, yeah. And because you're not doing like ChatGPT level HD 4K. It's probably faster to actually generate the image.
- [139:05]
Arun Gupta
Exactly.
- [139:06]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [139:06]
Arun Gupta
But I think the other thing that you said that's really interesting is once you say it, right, you say it and then it hears it and then it displays your text on the screen and that's a nice moment. That's an intermediary moment that makes, makes it feel not as slow, right. Or it makes it feel a lot faster because you're like, I just said this thing.
- [139:22]
Yotam Sierra
Whoa.
- [139:22]
Arun Gupta
There it is on the screen.
- [139:23]
Geordi Hitch
I'm reading it back, seeing the words and then you're probably seeing.
- [139:28]
Arun Gupta
And then there's a pregnant pause basically, and then the image comes in. But that moment between saying what you have seeing it on the screen and that like, like just slight delay to when the image comes out because it appears on the screen and then prints basically at the same time. It's like a lot of suspension and it's basically like relief that happens kind of in your head, right? Like it's like when a joke lands, you know, it's like you have something happening, happening, happening and then there's the punchline. So there's this sort of tension that's built up like in the process and then it lands and it's just. It feels really good because you're like, oh my God, I said that and now it's real.
- [140:03]
Geordi Hitch
That's very cool.
- [140:04]
John Coogan
You have the background at grailed. Can we expect any sticker box fashion partnerships? I want the Bottega weave version of the sticker box. I want the chrome hearts. I want full.
- [140:17]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, that'd be really good.
- [140:18]
John Coogan
I want something I can leave on the table.
- [140:20]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, well, I mean, I am interested. Do you see yourself more expanding vertically or horizontally? Do you think you might be a multi product toy company or more of a camera and printer company that maybe winds up making a device that's delightful for an analog photograph? Who goes on photography trips and wants to print things quickly? Do you see yourself focusing on a particular demographic over time or expanding one way or the other?
- [140:50]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, I think right now we're really focused on AI for kids. So like what does that look like? And in terms of like multi devices, we obviously have tons of ideas, you know, a really fun space to be in, but I think that there's just so much gold inside of this creation material machine. Yeah, right. So it's like kids maybe not might not be the best illustrators, they may not be able to be animators. Right. They might be able to use Photoshop or whatever. Super well, but they can still bring their ideas to life with the AI, they can still print them. So I think focusing more on creativity and investing more in the sticker box is definitely where we're going for the time being.
- [141:23]
Geordi Hitch
3D print.
- [141:24]
John Coogan
Do a, do a, do a 2 billion. Do a $2 billion training run for your own model. Yeah, I've heard 2 billion.
- [141:34]
Geordi Hitch
Do you think you'll wind up fine tuning and running a custom model or some open source, like fine tuned on some optimized hardware or the cost doesn't matter.
- [141:44]
Arun Gupta
Definitely. This year my co founder Bob is very interested in creating our own model. So definitely from the ground up on our own model with our own training data. Because when you talk about safety, that is the number one holy grail not to put a ton on it. You want the training data to be completely safe and that way the model can't generate anything. That's totally. And that's what really matters.
- [142:04]
Geordi Hitch
And then in terms of like the business model, obviously it feels like razor and blade model because you're buying the box, but then you're also buying ink and paper and that's how you make money. Do you have a subscription as well?
- [142:15]
Arun Gupta
So there's no ink, it's all thermal printing. So it's all just black and white. So there are the paper refills. But we want people to use the device. So we're kind of just pushing as much paper at people as possible. It's very, very cheap. Or like, you know, we're not, we're not trying to make a lot of money off of it right now. We want people to use the device. So you get, let's see, 200 stickers for $6, which is pretty good. And free shipping on all of those stickers for everybody who's watching. So if you buy stickers off our site, it ships for free and you can buy as many as you want. And then yeah, we're trying to put more features in. So like, let's say like you have a box and I have a box box. I send you my tiger character, my tiger astronaut, and you use my tiger astronaut in your box and maybe we make a story together. And my tiger astronaut and your wizard go into the castle and then we go underwater or we do these things. So like basically creating more features for people to create together, for them to create more with each other and just do more sort of like more ideas and more, more, more intellectual property and more content, basically creation.
- [143:20]
John Coogan
Ken in the X chat says, what about licensing deals? Would you ever do?
- [143:24]
Geordi Hitch
We're joking about supreme and Chrome hearts. But I mean Disney and stuff that.
- [143:28]
John Coogan
They'Ve got a one year. One year email you.
- [143:31]
Geordi Hitch
Okay.
- [143:31]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [143:32]
Arun Gupta
One year exclusive A R U napico dot com.
- [143:36]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, I mean what's it called? The Yodo player has a bunch of cards that you can buy that have specific stories, licensed music, licensed short stories that are read aloud. And I could see some sort of partnership there being super lucrative where you could buy this pack and then be able to generate this type of character. That sounds.
- [143:57]
Arun Gupta
That's exactly what we're thinking. Sticker packs of parent companion app. You unlock Teen Ninja Turtles, you unlock hello Kitty, you unlock whatever you want. And then honestly let kids create their own stuff. Right. If kids create their own dinosaur superhero, let them sell that sticker pack.
- [144:13]
Yotam Sierra
Right?
- [144:13]
Arun Gupta
And then. And their kids can download it as well.
- [144:15]
Geordi Hitch
That's exciting.
- [144:16]
Arun Gupta
But yeah, licensing would be a huge play because it's super fun.
- [144:19]
John Coogan
I want to see sticker box millionaires, 8 year olds that just have, I mean grailed.
- [144:24]
Geordi Hitch
Had this ecosystem too. Give us the fundraising news. I want to hit the gong. Give us the fundraising news.
- [144:30]
Arun Gupta
Oh yeah. So we raised $7 million. Hit that gong.
- [144:36]
John Coogan
For the kids. For the kids.
- [144:38]
Geordi Hitch
I'm so glad.
- [144:39]
Arun Gupta
Always for the kids. We do it for the kids. But yeah, $7 million. Maveron, who is behind Love Every which is another Montessori Kids product. They were investor. And then Beth Ferreira. Sorry, we got. We had Jerry Lou from Avon and Jason Soer and then we got Beth Ferrera from Serena Ventures. Serena Williams for fun. Also put in a significant amount of money into our round.
- [145:01]
John Coogan
Do you have kids yet or is Bob carrying all the weight there?
- [145:05]
Arun Gupta
Yeah, Bob for now. Bob is, but give me six months.
- [145:08]
John Coogan
Six months.
- [145:08]
Winston Weinberg
Let's go.
- [145:10]
Geordi Hitch
Breaking news here.
- [145:11]
John Coogan
Let's go.
- [145:12]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah.
- [145:12]
Arun Gupta
Seriously, my wife. I'm sure my wife is watching.
- [145:16]
Geordi Hitch
It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for.
- [145:19]
John Coogan
Yeah, so great to meet you. I'm excited. I can't wait to get mine.
- [145:22]
Geordi Hitch
What a white pill. And good luck with this year. It sounds like it's going to be a massive one. And please come back on the show when there's more news. We'd love to.
- [145:29]
Arun Gupta
I really appreciate that.
- [145:30]
Geordi Hitch
We'll talk about it.
- [145:30]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah.
- [145:31]
Arun Gupta
We're trying to be a positive force for good. There's a lot of negativity around AI and I think for good reasons in a lot of cases. But for, for us it's really use as much.
- [145:40]
John Coogan
Use as much water in the data centers as you want. I'm happy with my Electricity bill going up.
- [145:46]
Geordi Hitch
Because for this my electricity bill can go up. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day and have a nice 2026. Goodbye. Our next guest is Julie Bush, the co founder and CEO of Valanor Enterprises. They recently closed a massive. Jose. Julie, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [146:06]
John Coogan
What's going on?
- [146:07]
Julie Bush
Hey guys, it's so great to be here. I feel like you've had a thousand of my friends on and it's good to finally make this happen.
- [146:13]
Delian Asprooha
We've been waiting for.
- [146:13]
Geordi Hitch
Well, we've literally had some of your friends on. We've had Colin from friends and family on the show.
- [146:18]
Julie Bush
Yes, the friends you had. Colin Founders Funders Fund is one of our.
- [146:23]
Geordi Hitch
Delian was on earlier today.
- [146:25]
Julie Bush
I spent a decade at Palantir so I've used a Palantir pal.
- [146:29]
Geordi Hitch
Overnight success. Yeah, we got all of them. But for those, since it is your first time on the show, please give us an introduction on yourself and Valenor.
- [146:38]
Julie Bush
Yeah. So Julie Busch, co founder and CEO of Valenor Enterprises. And we're bringing a new business model to defense and national security. You guys know as well as I do that the barriers to entry in this market are so high. And so we've built something really unique. We're an operational holding company to service the long tail problem. Problems, the unsexy things that nobody is able to go after because the barriers of entry are so high. So you're really incentivized to go after the moonshots like the next generation fighter jets and the golden domes. But there's basically 80% of the market that's just untapped.
- [147:14]
Geordi Hitch
So walk me through operational holding company. What are you adding to? What are you holding? How old are these companies? How big are they? What can I compare it to in other pieces? Other holding companies that I'd be familiar with?
- [147:30]
Julie Bush
Yeah, we're trying to be Berkshire Hathaway for defense tech.
- [147:34]
Arun Gupta
Right.
- [147:34]
Julie Bush
And so for us, we're holding product companies and that's usually software, software defined hardware. We started a little over a year ago and Today we have five publicly launched product companies. We have 10 in the in the world works. So we're actively working on three more and we likely will add two more before the end of 2026. So we're moving pretty quickly here and we're tackling everything from power systems for unmanned autonomous systems to combat casualty care. So think about parts of the market that are really, really critical. But again, like there hasn't been innovation there in decades.
- [148:17]
Delian Asprooha
Yeah.
- [148:17]
Geordi Hitch
So talk to me about.
- [148:18]
John Coogan
So, so this, so this is an example of a company like a company that maybe at scale like could only ever be a $50 million revenue business if they get every key customer. And so it's hard to like raise a lot of money for an opportunity like that and build out some crazy go to market team. And, and, and so they can partner with you to get that distribution and basically get this platform to make it easier to sell into the government. Am I saying that, that right? Where am I wrong?
- [148:46]
Julie Bush
Yes, exactly. Like, we can both build and buy companies. We hold them, we're the majority owners of them. We, we run, we centralize all the go to market and all the operations and that allows us to move really, really quickly. And then we decentralize engineering and we basically run them like product lines, but their own, they're their own subsidiaries. So we have a ton of flexibility. We're the capital allocator. So you know, I, I know you guys also were following defense tech hype, but we're able to get great outcomes for our DMs and the engineering teams and these subsidiaries because they're not out there fundraising, they're focused on building a great product and we're basically doing everything else.
- [149:29]
John Coogan
And I imagine part of the thesis here is you have hundreds of new defense tech companies and government contractors created. A lot of them will build great products, but maybe not get to the scale where they can IPO or anything like that and you can come in and actually provide an outcome and then the opportunity to actually continue to scale that business. And so maybe a year or two years from now, there'll be even more opportunities on the buy side.
- [149:56]
Julie Bush
That's right. I mean, when I think about the market, I think we could be one of the ways many of these companies are able to be sustainable and endure after the hype goes away. I always like to say, like, we want to be the most sustainable company in this market or platform of companies in this market. And yeah, I think earlier you said, so what about like, is this like, are we looking at like a $50 million TAM here for this product? I mean, I like to think a lot of what we're working on, they're like hundreds of millions of dollars tams behind them. They just don't have to be 10 billion. Right. Like they don't need to be and oral. They don't need to be Palantir right now. Now everyone's getting pitched to be like, I'm the Anduroll of X. I'm The Palantir Y. And there's really only going to be a handful of those companies.
- [150:44]
Geordi Hitch
Speaking of Anduril, are you Adam Porter Price's worst nightmare? Are you guys going up against each other to try and buy companies or do you target different market segments so you don't actually run into each other in back to back board meetings when a company is choosing to sell?
- [151:00]
Julie Bush
No, I mean, I actually see him as a great partner for a U.S. sten, you know, sends me lists, things they need. Right. So they could be buyers of our, of our assets.
- [151:11]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [151:11]
Julie Bush
Just like I think primes could be like the other large primes. They need more innovation than Andre does. Right. Just so happens app is like brilliant at M and a brand roll. Right. And so I actually look to him as someone who is, is really important to us.
- [151:31]
John Coogan
And so have you guys sold any, any of the businesses yet or is that a, is that a future?
- [151:38]
Julie Bush
No, I would say we're a little early for that. Right. I do think, you know, it could be interesting in the next 18 months to see what happens. And of course, like each one of these is, is their own individual strategy and like we can hold them too, and we want to hold them. We, we want, I think we can make a lot of these companies profitable really quickly because we can drive down their operating costs.
- [152:01]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. How are you processing sort of the defense tech hype waves? You know, Ukraine happens, everyone wants to talk counter uas, Taiwan heats up, everyone wants to talk about surface vehicles and rebuilding the Navy. And those are important projects, but you can get sort of whiplash. Is there, are there, is there, are there real pockets of value when there's a lot of energy and maybe a lot of executive orders and truth social posts about a category? Or do you want to sort of zoom out and be looking for more opportunities that might become big narrative arcs in the next five years or something like that? How do you think about these defense waves?
- [152:39]
Julie Bush
I love this question. I've been in this market 20 years. I was at Palantir 10 years. Built out most of the government business then there, I think when there is a crisis or there is a, you know, we. The pandemic was a great example of this. Like it does create a different level of action within the government. I think this is part of why, you know, right now with Department of War, it's, it's great to see them putting like sticks and carrots out there because it's creating action without a crisis. I don't think we want to wait till there's A crisis. Crisis for, you know, us to be in a bad position. But I do think the hype comes in waves and, you know, you can seize it. I think Palantir does a really good job of seizing that. That's something I really learned there. And for us, you know, we are looking at things that are timely. There are things we are not going to build or buy right now just because we know where this administration's priorities are for the next three years. But I do think you want to be ahead of the curve. So we have a product called Dispatch, for example, which is essentially an autonomous power station for unmanned systems. You know, the drone market is like proliferating and drone dominance is a huge program in Department of War. But you can't extend autonomy if you still have personnel in the way that are powering your systems. And so this is like a docking station. Just like you would like charge your iPhone for anything on the blue UAS list. And like that's a little bit early, but I think like we're going to seize on that because it can be a first mover in that space.
- [154:08]
Geordi Hitch
Space, yeah. How do you think about dual use technologies? When I look at the legacy primes, almost all of them have wound up at least with some sort of commercial business. Palantir obviously famous. Anduril, not yet, but I'm hoping for a consumer drone that I can fly around maybe with a camera on it.
- [154:27]
John Coogan
They have General Dynamics, they have Gulfstream.
- [154:31]
Geordi Hitch
And it's sort of just. Sometimes it just happens over time, sometimes it feels deliberate. And you see it in pitch decks at a seed round where the company says, hey, we're going to do this military thing. But then eventually there's this obvious add on in commercial or oil and gas or something else. Do you think that dual use can be a distraction? Do you like thinking about it in the near term? How are you processing the dual use nature of some of these technologies?
- [154:56]
Julie Bush
I love this question. I think it's a distraction, honestly, like for, for Palantir it was critical. And like, really when you think about Foundry and those platforms, those are meant to be for like any use case in the world, like, yeah, you know, so the fact that it is dual use makes sense for them. But I think today, you know, traditional venture incentivizes your products to become dual use because that makes you. That means your TAM is so much greater. And again, this is why I think 80% of the government market is like being left untapped. Adapt. Because most of the use cases are single use and like Honestly, that's really critical too. And I think if you, your products over time can become dual use, even if you are thinking that they have a single use focus initially. And I think if you start your products in government, you have a much greater likelihood of making them dual use for commercial versus vice versa. If you start your product in commercial and you try to move to government, it's, it's incredibly difficult. You know, when you think about compliance, you have to like re architect your entire platform for it to become fed ramp high or to meet impact level accreditation status. So I'd much rather see our products, if they like, they don't have to become dual use. They can be single use. And I think the government needs single use products. But many of them are already dual use. You know, some of our initial buyers were actually commercial customers and like that's value valuable too because it establishes commerciality. But it has to be focused like your first customers have to be in government in our ecosystem. And I just think dual use is way overhyped.
- [156:35]
Geordi Hitch
Talk about the fundraising strategy to date.
- [156:39]
Julie Bush
Yeah, so my seed round was myself, Tracevens at Founders Fund, Paul Kwan at General Catalyst and Grant Persandig at Red Cell Partners. All of which I like deeply trusted or I never would have done this. Like, I'm a little bit of a unique founder mom of two. You don't see a lot of defense tech women founders, but.
- [157:01]
Geordi Hitch
Founder.
- [157:04]
Julie Bush
But you know, I, Trey and Paul and Grant were people I deeply trusted when we started this process and they've been incredibly supportive of this journey and I think they recognize the need for a new model in this space. And so as we've continued our kind of fundraising strategy, it was important to me at the A that we brought in Colin and kind of friends and family capital. You know, he's OG Palantir, cfo. Seen what it's like to build a generational defense tech company from the inside. Someone I deeply trust. We were executives there together and I also think they're brilliant capital allocators. And at the end of the day, we fund our companies. We are a capital allocation machine.
- [157:43]
Delian Asprooha
That's great.
- [157:44]
Julie Bush
And so they've been an awesome part.
- [157:46]
Geordi Hitch
Congratulations on.
- [157:47]
John Coogan
We got a gong. We, we got a hit for you.
- [157:54]
Geordi Hitch
Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you.
- [157:59]
John Coogan
Come back on again soon. I'm. I'm sure there'll be plenty of news to discuss.
- [158:02]
Geordi Hitch
Sounds great.
- [158:03]
John Coogan
Cheers, Julie.
- [158:04]
Julie Bush
Awesome.
- [158:04]
Geordi Hitch
Talk to you soon. Goodbye.
- [158:06]
John Coogan
Next up, we have our Land Lambda Lightning round. We got Winston Weinberg, co founder of Harvey. Look at this thing.
- [158:15]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, I like the sound of that. Good job.
- [158:19]
John Coogan
We have Yotam Sierra, and then we have Josh Wolf to cap it off. So let's bring in Winston Weinberg, the.
- [158:27]
Geordi Hitch
CEO and co founder of Harvey, from the Restream waiting room into the TVPN ultra dome. Winston, good to see you. How are you doing?
- [158:33]
John Coogan
What's happening? Good.
- [158:35]
Winston Weinberg
I like that cloud.
- [158:36]
Geordi Hitch
Yes.
- [158:37]
Winston Weinberg
Crazy.
- [158:37]
John Coogan
It's powerful.
- [158:38]
Winston Weinberg
It's on one of those.
- [158:38]
Geordi Hitch
It's powerful.
- [158:39]
Winston Weinberg
It's like Thor coming in.
- [158:40]
Geordi Hitch
Yes, yes. I mean, you do have a nice background. It's clean, but not nearly enough.
- [158:46]
John Coogan
No thunder, no lightning, no height. We have a guy. We have a cloud guy.
- [158:51]
Winston Weinberg
This is a huge problem. Yeah, if you guys can hook me up with your cloud guy, that'd be great.
- [158:54]
Geordi Hitch
We can.
- [158:55]
Winston Weinberg
A blimp guy.
- [158:56]
Geordi Hitch
Yes. It's pulsating right now. Well, thank you so much for taking time.
- [159:01]
John Coogan
So this was really well timed because. Because we just got our December legal bill. And I love our. I genuinely. Our lawyer is a very good friend of mine.
- [159:14]
Geordi Hitch
I love him, but he handwrites everything or you use a typewriter.
- [159:19]
John Coogan
Not quite. He's being as efficient as he can. But every company has a lot of work. And interestingly, I just feel like legal bills, because they are variable and the work is important, but I just feel like it's always a surprise. The number's always bigger than you expect it to be. And I'm excited to head into a world where that bill can be smaller for a lot of companies and get better work. So hopefully, I know the work that you're doing is.
- [159:46]
Geordi Hitch
But yeah, kick us off with the state of the union. Where is Harvey today?
- [159:51]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah, so started three and a half years ago. So, I mean, God, I think it's felt like every day, it either feels like it was yesterday or was like 50 years, something like that, probably. And just kind of oscillating back and forth. Started selling to kind of like very large law firms. Now we've expanded to selling to large corporations as well and mid market. And what we're really trying to do is kind of have like a operating system that's in between. So it's for all lawyers, and it helps them basically provide those services, you know, more cheaply and can do the work faster, I think, to be honest to your legal bill, and I'm a little laggy. I don't know if that's on me or you.
- [160:33]
Geordi Hitch
I think that's just the. You're watching the show, so maybe I don't.
- [160:37]
John Coogan
You Seem like you're in real time.
- [160:39]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, you look fine.
- [160:40]
Winston Weinberg
Perfect. I'll take it. I think the reality is probably your legal bill, the stuff that they're charging for, that's going to not be as expensive, but there will be other type of legal work that you're going to need done.
- [160:52]
John Coogan
Yeah.
- [160:53]
Winston Weinberg
And so your overall legal bill will probably be the same, but the line items will look different is my guess of how this goes.
- [160:59]
John Coogan
Yeah, yeah, yeah. More, more, more hours spent on the actual high leverage work versus, you know, just generating a documentary there. What changed last year with Hart? Like, what were the big inflection points for the business last year? Because I just noticed this, you know, having friends that were lawyers, I saw like a huge difference in how they even thought about Harvey at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year. Just like they had. They were kind of like one shotted by Harvey at some point during the year, which is like, that is what you're. If you're building an AI company, you want to build a product that's so magical and powerful that people are like, whoa, okay, I really believe now.
- [161:38]
Geordi Hitch
And you also want to start building it when it's a little rough around the edges and then let the models get better. And then that moment hits and you're ready.
- [161:45]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah, there's you basically, like there's two things that happen. One is the reasoning ability of the models get better, and then two is your orchestration into the correct context gets better. Right. So I think of this as honestly, like there's three type of employees or like folks that you work with, like colleagues. One is you have to give them all of the perfect context and every single piece of information to do the job, and then they can do it. The second is you say, hey man, the same way that we did XYZ last week. Could you do it again? And then they do it. And then the third is folks just do it without even any of the context. And so a lot of what we're doing in the product actually is how do you make sure that for a specific task, all of the correct context is being pulled and put into the platform. And then how do you run the models over that context to get the right output? Right. And it's actually like a very hard problem at scale, because if you think of what you're doing, you're kind of building like a, like a legal brain or like a partner brain.
- [162:40]
Yotam Sierra
This is what they do.
- [162:41]
Winston Weinberg
They get a task from, you know, one of you guys and they break that task down into all these like 10 subtasks and then they, you know, give that to other associates, etc. It's a really hard thing to build.
- [162:51]
Geordi Hitch
Chatbots launched Chat GPT Health yesterday. How do you think the consumer prosumer legal advice category will evolve? People are probably going to Lem's Consumer LLMs today.
- [163:06]
John Coogan
They're definitely going.
- [163:07]
Geordi Hitch
And just ask a, hey, right this thing.
- [163:10]
John Coogan
Is that, is that an area that like you guys don't have any in.
- [163:14]
Geordi Hitch
House council product or something?
- [163:17]
Winston Weinberg
So in house counsel, we definitely do. So we serve a lot of Fortune 500s. And that's, that's actually, that's growing, I think last quarter.
- [163:28]
Josh Wolfe
Thanks.
- [163:28]
Winston Weinberg
Give it up for them.
- [163:29]
Yotam Sierra
Yeah, let's give it up.
- [163:30]
Winston Weinberg
I think last quarter it was like 41% or something like that was actually corporates, so that's, that's. There we go. Yeah. Give me one more though. That is the cloud. If you. Could you combine the cloud with that?
- [163:46]
John Coogan
Well, I, to be honest, I thought you said 41% of the. I thought you were saying 41% of the fourth. But that'll be soon, I'm sure.
- [163:52]
Winston Weinberg
Here, here. I'll come back on when that happens. Hopefully soon. And we can do like a blimp cloud. And that sounds like Thor lightning strikes. So we are interested in this and like helping consumers out. One thing we have right now is actually if you're a citizen of Singapore and you are filing a claim below 20,000, you can use Harvey to help you file that claim and then the magistrate judge can actually use Harvey to review that. And one of the. Yeah, and one of the things that.
- [164:23]
John Coogan
Like Spider man meme well, so what.
- [164:26]
Winston Weinberg
We'Re actually ending up wanting to do eventually is in other stages. Both parties can decide they have to both consent to this, but they say, hey, I'm going to submit these facts and Harvey is going to help me draft it. Right. Because it's hard as a consumer to like know when your rights have been violated and what to put into the complaint and things like that. But both of us will agree that we're going to submit this into Harvey and then the outcome is going to be binding. And that's like eventually would be actually incredible because. Because a huge problem in Singapore is, and it's an even bigger problem in the United States is just access to justice in general.
- [165:04]
Yotam Sierra
Right.
- [165:04]
Winston Weinberg
Where people actually can't get any of their claims met. One, because the average price of a lawyer is $353 an hour in the US which is astronomically too high. Right. And Then the second reason is the courts are just, like, absolutely overburdened.
- [165:19]
Yotam Sierra
Right.
- [165:20]
Winston Weinberg
And so any of those systems that you can do to help that, that really moves this along. And so we're doing some of it with kind of work with different governments. And I think eventually we'll look into this, but it's not on our roadmap right now.
- [165:33]
Geordi Hitch
What are your big predictions for 2026 just in terms of AI progress? Are you building the business that expects another jump in capabilities? It feels like a lot of people were talking about Claude Co being uniquely enabled by Opus 4.5. Have you seen a similar step change in any particular model? Are you waiting for that or is it sort of just business as usual? Yes.
- [166:02]
Winston Weinberg
No. I mean, you have to build everything assuming that it's going to get better. And what you do is you actually just try to create a culture of trying to build really complex things. And we have a lot of how we do this is we have a lot of design partners and so work with, like, private equity or a law firm or something like that to try to build, like, a really extreme use case. A lot of the times it fails. And that's actually okay because it fails. And then we realize, oh, if the models improve X, Y, Z, then it would actually probably work.
- [166:32]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [166:33]
Winston Weinberg
And then we bucket that and we wait and then we try it with a new model and eventually that stuff starts to work. Right. So a lot of it is like, like, how can you go out and try to do the frontier level tasks, get the feedback of what needs to improve to actually complete that, and then you have that set and ready to go as a use case.
- [166:52]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [166:53]
John Coogan
How much do you think the legal system can actually speed up? Anybody that has had any, you know, experience, a lawsuit will understand that. Like, you know, something that really should be a decision that hypothetically, if you got the right people in a room and everybody was, like, mature, you could just kind of like, figure it out. And obviously people try to do that with settlements, but then you end up getting, like, you know, these dates that get pushed farther and farther and farther out. Hypothetically, if two different parties are putting stuff into Harvey, you know, you can basically theoretically, kind of like, decide something almost instantaneously. Then in theory, you could then appeal it and Harvey and like, basically run it again and then appeal it again, you know. Yeah. And so it just feels like there's going to be. You're kind of like fighting hundreds of years of, like, precedent in the way that things are done. And so in some ways, like Even if we have the technology, maybe lawsuits are still these and any type of like legal process could still end up taking months or years in some cases.
- [167:54]
Winston Weinberg
Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff that needs to happen on the actual court system to like facilitate this. Like, I guess maybe a better way to think about this is like, like there's three categories. One is like the process and the system. Right. And hopefully you move that along by just the technology advancements are so high that the process and system breaks and then it has to change. The second is like all of the context that's relevant. So can you like collect all the data that's relevant to actually doing the task? And then the third is actually just like the underlying technology. Right. Like you need all three of those. I think there's going to be a lag. I think. Exactly right. But there are a lot of, you know, we just talked about what we do in Singapore and there are a lot of kind of forward looking folks that are looking at this. The other thing I'd say too is like, we see more movement on the transactional side because at that point it really is just up to the principals. Right. So both sides want to do something. You can do it.
- [168:48]
Yotam Sierra
Right.
- [168:48]
Winston Weinberg
And honestly, like a lot of the best lawyers on earth, they're dealmakers. Like, that's what they're doing. Right. They actually like the reviewing of the documents. Yeah, that's kind of just like table stakes. It's actually they give massively, really valuable business judgment advice. Right. And it's because they've just been in those rooms so many times that they've seen so many different private equity deals done that they can actually.
- [169:11]
John Coogan
Yeah, you have the greatest, the greatest entrepreneurs in history that maybe only sell their company. You know, they sell their company once or they start another company, they sell it again. But that's nothing compared to the lawyer that's been through 200 transactions tons.
- [169:27]
Winston Weinberg
And they're in the room. And that's happening more and more. The lawyers are in the room even more than the bankers are, actually, increasingly. And so I think that all of this goes to say that I do think the profession is going to change. I think that's good for consumers of legal services. I also think that's really good for lawyers because the reality is people go to law school because they see TV shows like Suits and they want to be like the lawyer on that TV show. Right. Or the Lincoln Lawyer or whatever. I don't know. Yeah, I love Matthew McConaughey. And so they want to be a lawyer like it is on tv. Right. And I think what's important is if these tools start saturating the market, your career is going to look closer to that. It's going to look closer to, like, working with clients and to actually going to trial and working on these big deals. So that's why I'm really excited about it. We work with a lot of law schools on kind of figuring out what that career path is going to look like. Yeah.
- [170:17]
John Coogan
What's happening, like law school applications, is that a local top tons of people are deciding to go to law school. Some people are concerned by that because people are going to saddle themselves with debt or spend a lot of money. And I feel like there's a lot of uncertainty. How have you been processing that? Are some of these law schools, I imagine they're trying to get access to Harvey and maybe you have relationships them.
- [170:45]
Winston Weinberg
So we work with a lot of law schools. And so we announced our program last year, and at this point, I'd have to give you the stats, but I think we're at like 15 of the top 20 law schools or something like that. So we're definitely moving pretty quickly there. Thank you. I would also. One thing I want to say to this is I think that a lot of folks have said that that's actually like a bad sign for the economy when more people apply to law school. I actually don't think that's why more people apply to law school school. I think a lot of people apply to law school because they think that being a lawyer, you can make a change in the world. I genuinely believe that. And you can. And I think actually what happens is when you're in, like, tumultuous times, a lot of people say, hey, I actually want to change this. Especially, you know, when you're applying to law school, you're younger, Right. You're in a younger generation. And I think that's actually a lot of the reason why, you know, these applications increase over time.
- [171:33]
Geordi Hitch
That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.
- [171:37]
John Coogan
Yeah, Very, very cool.
- [171:38]
Geordi Hitch
We could talk for so much longer, but I'm sure we'll have you on many times this year.
- [171:42]
John Coogan
Yeah. Congrats to the whole team on all the progress, and thank you for hopefully.
- [171:45]
Geordi Hitch
Reducing our legal bills. We will talk to you soon.
- [171:48]
John Coogan
We're shifting around the budget.
- [171:50]
Winston Weinberg
We're shifting around the budget.
- [171:52]
Geordi Hitch
We'll see you soon. Our next guest is Yotam from Sierra with some fantastic news. He is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP in Ultradome. Yotam, how are you doing? Good to see you.
- [172:05]
Yotam Sierra
How are you guys?
- [172:06]
Geordi Hitch
We're fantastic. Since this is your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.
- [172:12]
John Coogan
Gladly.
- [172:13]
J
I'm Yutam Segar. I'm the co founder and CEO of Sayera, based in New York City. Sayera is in the data and AI security business. We make sure that all of the data that goes into these AI systems remains private, remains secure, and we enable enterprises to adopt AI.
- [172:29]
Geordi Hitch
That's amazing. How did you start the company?
- [172:30]
J
Company? I started the company out of a friendship and a partnership. My co founder, CTO and I go back 16 years. At this point we were standing in the same line, standing in the same line to, to enlist when we were 18.
- [172:47]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [172:47]
J
And I had the pleasure of working side by side with him in the military service and I knew that I always want to work with him. So the moment he said, let's start a company, I said, okay, I'll go with you.
- [172:59]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [173:00]
John Coogan
What did you guys do first?
- [173:03]
J
What do you mean? We did the cyber security in the idf, in the Israeli military.
- [173:07]
Geordi Hitch
Sure.
- [173:07]
John Coogan
Got it, got it, got it. Okay, so this is your first, this is your first company.
- [173:11]
J
This is our first and last.
- [173:12]
John Coogan
I don't think we're last.
- [173:14]
Geordi Hitch
There we go.
- [173:14]
John Coogan
Love that one. Shot it.
- [173:16]
Geordi Hitch
Well, what's the key to getting large enterprises on board? As a first time entrepreneur, it seems like that that's like a lot of people vibe, code, something, get some ground up. Adoption. It seems like you've gone to the top of the market. What informed that strategy? What's been the key to success?
- [173:32]
J
I think for us it's been a combination of listening, using our two ears to really, really, really listen to the customers. Understand that they know very well what they need to fix, why things are not working, what hurts, why things failed in the past, combined with the ability to engineer a super, super high velocity and really solve complex problems in super complex ecosystems. I think that the combination of these two things together has been our secret to success with the large enterprise.
- [174:05]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [174:06]
John Coogan
What scares you the most about how AI is being adopted in the enterprise today? When are you talking with a customer and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
- [174:14]
Geordi Hitch
That's a good question.
- [174:17]
J
Wow, where do I start? I think that there's so much pressure being put on the security risk and compliance teams to get out of the way and let the AI be rolled out. I think that the level of security capabilities that's being bundled with AI from the AI providers themselves is very, very insufficient. And I think that in many, many regards, the gap, the exposure that is being created is quite meaningful. And we're going to see the results of that in the coming years.
- [174:57]
Geordi Hitch
What's the key to creating differentiation in the cybersecurity category? It feels like there's a lot of companies that are established, they're not asleep at the wheel, and yet you've grown very quickly, gotten very big. How are you positioning and creating white space?
- [175:14]
J
So the first thing that is really unique about cyber security is that in most of what we do in our lives, we get measured on how well we do on average in cybersecurity. We get measured on our weakest link.
- [175:25]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. Doesn't matter if you an 8 on.
- [175:27]
J
Average, if you still have a 2 or a 3, it's bad news. Something bad is coming your way. And because it's, you know, we're not defending a static target, we're defending a very dynamic target. The threat vectors are changing, the IT landscape is changing, the regulatory landscape is changing. There's always going to be exposures, there's always going to be soft spots. I think for us, our focus on data, the ability to understand and differentiate between the 1% of data that really matters to an organization, if that data was leaked, breached, exposed, that would create a bad year for them, not just a bad weekend. And the 99% of data that map, that clutches, which is so much of the data they have, based on the ability to do that across the enterprise at the enterprise scale, we've really been able to build holistic data security and AI security platform that helps the organization achieve so many outcomes.
- [176:22]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the latest fundraising news. We gotta hit the gong for you.
- [176:29]
John Coogan
Is this like a friends, friends and family round?
- [176:33]
J
Yeah, I happen to have friends with $400 million. That's.
- [176:40]
John Coogan
Good, friends to have. Great vote of confidence to get Blackstone.
- [176:45]
Geordi Hitch
In series F. You're gonna run out of letters soon, so hopefully we'll see you at the New York Stock Exchange soon. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will see you soon. Have a good rest of your day.
- [176:55]
John Coogan
Cheers.
- [176:56]
Geordi Hitch
Goodbye. And up next, the moment you've been waiting for. Josh Wolf, the co founder and managing partner at Lux Capital. He'll be joining us in just a second. We will go back to the timeline. In the meantime, while we wait for him to join, did you know that the founders of Home Depot were 49 and 36. And they both. Each of them had three children each when they started the company. And they'd both just been fired from their jobs when they started Home Depot.
- [177:28]
John Coogan
Where were they fired from? Same company.
- [177:30]
Geordi Hitch
Oh, read from this. Ken Langone, Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank founded Home Depot in 1978 with $2 million raised from 40 friends. They had to put the ultimate friends and family round together, none of whom were wealthy by your standards. The average investment was $50,000. After Bernie, age 49, and Arthur, age 36, had been fired from their previous jobs with three children each. No health insurance. That's a nightmare. No savings, heavily mortgaged homes. They were effectively broke. The rest is history. From nothing. Home Depot has grown into an empire with an enterprise market capitalization of over $250 billion that employs. That provides employment to more than 400,000 workers, thousands of whom became millionaires investing in the company's stock while the founders have given away in excess of 1 billion.
- [178:23]
John Coogan
Incredible.
- [178:24]
Geordi Hitch
In charitable donations.
- [178:25]
John Coogan
Incredible.
- [178:25]
Geordi Hitch
And still counting.
- [178:27]
Yotam Sierra
Wow.
- [178:27]
Geordi Hitch
What a run for the Home Depot founders. What a run for Josh Wolf. The moment you've been waiting for. We have Josh Wolfe in the Restream waiting room. And here he is in the TVPN ultradron. Josh, how are you doing?
- [178:37]
John Coogan
Look at this setup, guys.
- [178:39]
Geordi Hitch
You look fantastic. How are you doing? Did you have a good break? Are you off to a good new year?
- [178:44]
John Coogan
Seems like it's a great new year.
- [178:45]
Josh Wolfe
Fantastic. Excited.
- [178:47]
Geordi Hitch
And what's the news? It seems like you're kicking off 2026 with the best bang.
- [178:52]
Josh Wolfe
We. We raised a new fund. We.
- [178:54]
Yotam Sierra
We're excited.
- [178:55]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. How much did you raise?
- [178:57]
Josh Wolfe
We raised a billion five and. Oh, we get the gong.
- [179:03]
John Coogan
That's good.
- [179:03]
Josh Wolfe
Excited about the gong. You know, it's crazy. I remember 20 years ago, 20 plus years ago, we raised our first fund and it was 100 million and I struggled to hit it. We got 92.1. I'll tell you, to this day, I remember literally every single person that said yes or no.
- [179:18]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah, every single person.
- [179:19]
Yotam Sierra
Everybody.
- [179:20]
Geordi Hitch
How many of them are still along for the ride? Do you go back?
- [179:23]
Josh Wolfe
We have 12 people who are OG Lux investors that are like part of our family that.
- [179:28]
Geordi Hitch
I love beer at this point. That's fantastic.
- [179:30]
John Coogan
That's amazing.
- [179:31]
Geordi Hitch
Okay.
- [179:31]
John Coogan
Yeah, there's been.
- [179:33]
Geordi Hitch
We cover narrative violation. The Wall Street Journal today is saying that you're cooked. They're saying US venture capital fundraising declined 35% in 2025. How did you get it done? What are the markets like? Is this.
- [179:47]
John Coogan
Yeah. What Are, what are the, what is.
- [179:48]
Geordi Hitch
Your reading when you see a headline like this? 35% down and yet you're doing well. What's the secret to success?
- [179:55]
Josh Wolfe
I think, I think it's right. I think the headline is right. You know, we all spoke, I want to say, back at Valley.
- [180:02]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah.
- [180:03]
Josh Wolfe
And we were talking about the Minnows and the megas. And I had made this thing that maybe was like a sort of prediction but in anticipation that basically you're gonna have this bifurcation where you have a long tail of the small funds that were getting basically disappear. And I know you guys hit the on that earlier, but I was with one of my large LPs and I was like, I think you're going to see 30 to 50% extinction rate, involuntary exit.
- [180:21]
John Coogan
Yeah, that idea of a lot of people are on their last fund, they just don't know it yet.
- [180:27]
Josh Wolfe
People have never been through a cycle. They have inadequate reserves, they haven't invested in succession planning. They're in the wrong sectors. They are in sectors that have too much capital, they don't have enough. And they were basically in a market where everything was going up and to the right and they looked really smart and they're not idiots. But usually in up markets people look smarter than they are. In down markets they look dumber than they are. And in this particular case the prophecy was like 30 to 50% would end up disappearing and going extinct. And this LP laughed at me and he's like, josh, it's going to be 90%. So he was even more aggressive. And I think that's going to happen. Some will join bigger platforms and get absorbed. And you're seeing that GC bought a group out of Europe and you'll see other people sort of tuck into some of the other big platforms. Platforms, those are the minnows. At the other end you got the megas and the megas. There's probably five or six firms that are basically like 80, 100 billion AUM today and growing. And I actually think that they will voluntarily exit. So you will actually see IPOs probably from Andreessen, GC, GA, a handful of others that are basically gearing up to be multi asset platforms. And they're amazing investors, they're great people, but it's just changing the game. You've got small fries that are basically exiting and people that are emerging managers. A few will enter and grow. We were once an emerging manager and entered and grew. And then you have large guys that are basically gearing up, I think, to go public. So it's probably, I don't know, 12 firms in the middle that are between 1 and $3 billion that can do early 100k checks and late 150 to $200 million checks. And I think for the next few years that's going to be the place to be.
- [181:49]
Geordi Hitch
That's a good place to be.
- [181:51]
John Coogan
More positively, how excited are you for this moment to have this amount of capital to deploy? I've read your, your letters as long as I've been in the industry and it feels like Lux as a fund was really built for this moment. Everything from hardware to bio to AI, all these things that you've been writing about forever feel like they're having such a moment.
- [182:17]
Arun Gupta
It is.
- [182:17]
Josh Wolfe
And I gotta be honest, as much as the team is out on the edge scouting it, it's really about the founders that we back. So you look at Brian and Palmer and Trey and Matt at Anduril, they have just absolutely crushed, crushed it. This was at a time when nobody wanted to fund defend seven years ago. Being able to be founding investors in Anduril, seeing the success that they're having, the success that I anticipate from here is just incredible. You look at CASR at Applied Intuition, I gotta say, amongst 350, 400 companies that we've funded over the past 20 years, it is one of our only cash flow positive businesses and they're just also crushing it.
- [182:46]
John Coogan
Let's give it up for them.
- [182:47]
Josh Wolfe
They will get a gong many times, many times cognition and hugging face. And we've got an amazing team. I mean Brandon Reeves and Grace Isford and Peter Hebert and Shaheen Farshi and lan Zhang and Dina Shaker, like Shak Veda, they're just all out crushing it. And I'm very grateful. I feel like we've got the best team on the field and more importantly, I feel like we've got the best founders. Eric at Modal and the team at Ramp. And I just feel extremely fortunate that we get to partner with these guys and it's like the gift that keeps on giving. So my biggest thing to my team right now is don't screw up it up. We've got a good thing going. Be humble, you are only as good as your last deal. And serve our entrepreneurs and make them successful and they will make us successful. I feel very grateful.
- [183:34]
John Coogan
How are you thinking about this year? What are you focused on and most excited about? Personally from an investing standpoint, most important.
- [183:42]
Josh Wolfe
Investment that we've made as a firm internally has been our young team. That is Just again, kicking ass now. But in terms of sectors, I'd say generally about a third of what we do is aerospace and defense. So we're doing that globally. You know, we're air, land, sea, space, cyber and beyond and now subsea and subterranean, which is wild. That was something that Palmer himself was talking about years ago and I thought it was crazy, but of course we've seen that in everything from the southern border to Gaza and Israel. It's a real thing. And so we're now in the US we're in the uk, we're in Israel, we're in Bulgaria. US and Delian. Exactly. We're in Japan.
- [184:18]
John Coogan
Don't they have some cash flow? I thought Enduro had some cash flow.
- [184:21]
Geordi Hitch
I don't know if it's cash flow, but just like remarkable economics.
- [184:23]
Josh Wolfe
Yeah, yeah, it is a great founder, great business. I'd love to do something in India in defense. And I'm very bullish, as you may have heard about this IMEC corridor between India, Mideast and Saudi and UAE and Israel and Jordan, Mediterranean, Europe. And so I just think that whole thing and the air, aerospace and defense segment, US and allies, is going to be a big deal. You see Trump putting out a trillion five on the defense budget, enormous amount of spend. You had the clip from Palmer earlier today, which was awesome, and the incentive alignment so that the bloated bureaucratic beltway bandits are starting to realize it's not just about hyping your pipeline as a defense company, but actually delivering real material and weapon systems to the warfighters. So that's pretty critical. So that's one sector. Biotech has been in the doldrums for the past, I don't know, two years. XBI is up 50% in the past six months. And I think you're going to see an enormous resurgence in cutting edge biotech, particularly at the intersection between AI. We were founding investors in this company, evolutionary scale that we took out of Meta and then CZI ironically ended up buying them just a few weeks ago. So I think you're just seeing more and more of that and then everything in embodied intelligence. The next wave of AI and compute infrastructure. Infrastructure is not just going to be two dimensional AI, it's going to be 3D. So some of that is bio, some of that is robotics, some of that is automation industrial. But I think that you're going to see some huge deals, some really big dollar deals around this idea of embodied intelligence where physical intelligence and Lockheed Groom and the team are just incredible. But you'll probably see two or three other things that are adjacent areas, not specifically robotics, of how do you take some of the great inspirations of our low power brains and embody that so that we're not having hundreds of thousands of GPUs and Nvidia clusters, but instead doing both edge inference and really interesting biological inspired ways of having AI into the 3D world, which is going to be wild. So excited about all that.
- [186:15]
Geordi Hitch
That's amazing. It's sort of a bad time to start to become a venture capitalist. We are seeing this K shaped dynamic. A lot of small funds.
- [186:25]
John Coogan
Well, not necessarily a bad time to be, maybe not the best time to start your own fund.
- [186:29]
Geordi Hitch
But I want, but I want some advice for someone who is, who can't be talked down from it. Maybe the person who's going out.
- [186:37]
John Coogan
Join a great fund.
- [186:38]
Geordi Hitch
Join a great fund. Is that your advice or what if someone says, I want to start Lux, I want to start a fund.
- [186:43]
Josh Wolfe
When we started Lux, it was at the tail end of the dot com boom bust. And I was like, let's carve a niche out that nobody else was doing. They're going to be brilliant people. I mean, I got to be honest, like, you know, whether personally, some of the partners or the firm, in some small ways, there are brilliant people that I know that are going to be launching funds and they have networks and access and kinetic activity. And there is this barbell. You know, you have older folks in the industry who have access and influence, but you have younger people that every night they are out and pulling together incredible engineers and developers and entrepreneurs. And I would never count those people out now. They're going to need capital over time and there'll be people that we partner with, but over time they will go from a small fund to a big mega fund. So I'm actually, I would never discourage anybody from starting a fund. It is one of the great entrepreneurial things to do.
- [187:24]
John Coogan
Totally. But yeah, if you go back to 2021, where the numbers that we're referencing and that the Journal is referencing, it's like if you knew founders, people would be like, well, here's 20 mil, you know, and it's like, I don't think we need that many more funds like that. It's like you want the, you want the life's work allocator who has a differentiated view, co founder firms, etc.
- [187:45]
Josh Wolfe
If somebody was saying in 2020, 23, 4, 5, that you're going to start a media business that is going to become like lightning in a bottle and compete with CNBC and be more relevant to a younger generation and be broadcasting on Twitter, you'd be like what? But you guys are crushing it. You have found a niche, you've got a vibe. It's incredible. And so why shouldn't somebody be able to do an adventure? I will never discourage anybody that wants to start a venture firm as long as they're thinking about how do I do this in a really distinguished differentiated way. And I can be so good that they can't engage.
- [188:16]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. What are your LPs thinking about the IPO window this year? Next year it feels like there might be trillions of liquidity coming to the tech industry. Is that going to have an effect on the early stage at the next, the next stage of scale ups? Will that affect VC dynamics or is that kind of just a foregone conclusion at this point?
- [188:40]
Josh Wolfe
No, I think that you're going to have a big set of IPOs. I mean everybody sort of knows the names off the tip of their tongue but probably 6 to 10 companies I think this year have such high demand, they've so far been rewarded by basically saying no and waiting and having ever higher rounds and lower cost of capital. I do think you even look at Palantir and the valuation of Palantir and Alex and the team are amazing. But to me it is less about Palantir and more about huge amount of pent up demand for next generation defense tech. I think if and when you ever do see a debut from Anduril, no idea on the timing, size, all that kind of stuff, but the demand is going to be really high, you know and you see it in the private markets now just as a proxy. We used to get bids on the secondary market for a lot of our companies sort of at last round price or maybe at a discount to nav, you know to the discount to last round price. Most of the bids we get for our companies now, particularly the ones that could be or will be going public, are at premiums. And so I think the demand is really high. It will usher in a next generation of companies and it will happen in AI, computer compute. You'll see it in some of the big foundation labs, you'll see it in biotech. I think you're going to see a window over the next six months where you see a ton of really interesting biotech IPOs and it'll happen in aerospace and defense in this next generation. And this whole confluence will just make a ton of sense. This arc from Google having its employees protest working on Project Maven to seeing the rise of Anduril, to seeing Trump's lashing the existing bureaucratic. And then you see mega IPOs and these next gen companies that didn't exist 10 years ago being worth more than some of the existing primes. I think it is going to be a bellwether for the industry and it.
- [190:17]
Arun Gupta
Is great to be American.
- [190:18]
Josh Wolfe
It is great to have American capital markets. Capital wants to go where it is welcome and stay where it is well treated and it is here. So super bullish.
- [190:26]
John Coogan
Yeah, well said. What does an object need to. What qualifies an object to get on your shelf here?
- [190:34]
Josh Wolfe
You gotta be part totem of my like nostalgic childhood. You know, I've got. I don't know, you know. This is the Cyclone, which is the scariest roller coaster.
- [190:44]
John Coogan
Oh yeah.
- [190:45]
Josh Wolfe
That's where I grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn. I will never forget my scrappy roots.
- [190:48]
Geordi Hitch
It's a wooden roller coaster, right?
- [190:50]
Josh Wolfe
It is a wooden roller coaster. I'll tell you. It is the scariest roller coaster in the world. Not by virtue of speed or descent, but it is sold. Your ride may be the last. And the thrill of that is like, you know, mind blowing. I've got my first Game Boy, you know, if you. You had Palmer rocking the new mod retro. I've got my first Nintendo Donkey Kong flip when I was. So this is my childhood, you know. And it's things that inspired me from. We're all just from science fiction to science fact. It's. It's all the little totems that have made me.
- [191:27]
Geordi Hitch
I love it.
- [191:28]
John Coogan
I love it. Incredible. Well, thank you for giving us the update. I'm sure you'll be back on many more times this year. It's going to be a massive year and I look forward to it.
- [191:35]
Geordi Hitch
Yeah. We'll talk to you soon.
- [191:35]
Josh Wolfe
Guys, congrats on what you built.
- [191:37]
Geordi Hitch
Thank you for being part of the show.
- [191:38]
John Coogan
Congrats to your whole team.
- [191:39]
Geordi Hitch
Multiple times last year we got to hang out and it was really, really fun. So thank you so much.
- [191:43]
John Coogan
Awesome to look forward to.
- [191:44]
Josh Wolfe
Peace.
- [191:45]
John Coogan
Cheers.
- [191:45]
Geordi Hitch
We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. The last thing I want to talk about is this new Fujifilm camera has a very interesting feature that allows you to take photos from any period in time. So instead of baking in filters or lenses or anything that you could change, you hold it like an old Fujifilm camera. But there is a dial on the side that that will let you select a decade. So you can say I want the photo. I want this particular photo, the next photo that I take, I want it to look like it was taken in the 1930s. I want it to look like it was taken in the 1970s. I want it to look like it was taken in 2010 and it will emulate that directly on the device. Bake that into the file that it gives you.
- [192:37]
John Coogan
Is it film only or does it actually give you a digital?
- [192:41]
Geordi Hitch
I believe it's digital. Let's read from it says as at the Fujifilm New Product Experience event, I tried out the Generation Checky Instamax Mini Evo Cinema that can shoot. Oh, it can also shoot videos. A design that evokes 8 millimeter film cameras. It comes equipped with a dial called the Jedi Dial that lets you enjoy effects inspired by the 1930s and 1920s. Of course it offers the fun of Chucky and its model. And it's a model that also lets you enjoy that analog like operation feel. So I believe it's a video camera that will spit out an MP4 on a memory card that you can upload to whatever you want. Maybe we should get one around the studio. We should get one that's connected over HDMI into the stream and we can use that like we've used the VHS camera in the past that you may have seen here on tvpn. Anyway, anything else we should talk about?
- [193:36]
John Coogan
Apparently Trump just ordered the US government to buy 2,200 billion in mortgage bonds to drive mortgage rates down. Says he's bringing back the American dream.
- [193:46]
Geordi Hitch
More debt for the American taxpayer.
- [193:48]
John Coogan
Interesting. More debt for America to bring down the rates for Americans.
- [193:57]
Geordi Hitch
That could be good, I guess.
- [193:58]
John Coogan
Could work. We will see.
- [194:00]
Geordi Hitch
There's also a new Hyundai Waymo and CES. It's estimated to cost $42,000 which if true is like a 10x decrease in the price of the Waymos. Political reality being a little bit spicier. Says this is the end of the Cyber Cab before it's even born. The ability to adapt the Waymo sensor tech to almost any vehicle means Waymo can pick and choose vehicles based on grade, market fit and other variables. So you could be in a rougher environment with a lot of population potholes. You build a Waymo out of a G wagon, I suppose.
- [194:34]
John Coogan
I like it.
- [194:35]
Geordi Hitch
If you're on clean streets, you go.
- [194:38]
John Coogan
With something and what's up with this? Will, I am has a car. It's a three wheel singular.
- [194:45]
Geordi Hitch
Really quickly I need to clarify this because we have to issue a correction. This is completely fake news because there's a. Apparently there's A community note on this that says this is actually a different company's Hyundai Ioniq 5 self robo taxi. It's not Waymo's so we will see.
- [195:02]
John Coogan
Where this completely fake news anyway. But apparently Will I am has a new micro mobility ev. It's three wheels. This thing looks absolutely insane. Greg Brockman was. Was fired up on it. Looks straight out of Tron. I. I like the look. And we should get Will I am on the show to talk about Trinity.
- [195:21]
Geordi Hitch
That would be great.
- [195:22]
John Coogan
It's come. It's. It's gonna be. Maybe they're selling this on Kickstarter.
- [195:26]
Geordi Hitch
That's wild. I wonder. Yeah. Sort of a motorcycle that doesn't require as much balance. I wonder where this would be the most popular. It certainly looks cool. It seems like a fun thing to go for a drive in. I wonder if it's more experiential or supposed to be something that you would actually commute in driving through Los Angeles. And that feels a little treacherous to me. I don't know that I would actually choose to do that. But maybe, maybe as a replacement for the golf cart.
- [195:52]
Yotam Sierra
Very.
- [195:52]
John Coogan
Yeah. Very curious on price point as well on where this will land. But we'll work on getting Will I am on the show to talk about it. Thank you for tuning in today. Super fun show. So many great guests. Billions dollars. Billions of dollars in fundraises and I can't wait for tomorrow.
- [196:11]
Geordi Hitch
I can't wait for tomorrow either. And we will see you tomorrow at 11am Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to TVPN's newsletter@tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow.
- [196:22]
John Coogan
Thank you folks.
- [196:22]
Geordi Hitch
Good night.
- [196:23]
John Coogan
Have a great afternoon.