Full Transcript for John Coogan, Co-Founder & Host at TBPN

Carolyn, we have such an exciting guest today. I have been looking forward to this for a while. We have John Coogan from TBPN on the show. Hi, John. Hi. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you for coming after a long day of live TV. TBPN, as we all know, is this daily live video and podcast focused on business and technology. So we're going to do the interviewing this time.

Great. Looking forward to it. I can't wait. So we go pretty far back and we were just talking. Soylent is what I first remember you with, but I was talking to Carolyn right before you came on and I said, they pivoted into Soylent. I do not remember for the life of me what John was working on in summer 12. Tell the story. Yes, it's a wild one.

So I grew up in Los Angeles, studied economics in college, got the programming bug thanks to Hacker News and the Y Combinator community. Learned enough to be dangerous in Python, a little bit of Ruby on Rails and said, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley and start a tech company and figure all this out. And I went out and was at the time I didn't know anything about any particular industry.

So I grabbed a friend from high school who I had a really good rapport with. He's now become my business partner for over a decade. We've been working together and I and we said, let's build an educational technology product. We know education. We've been in the educational system for 20 years. Maybe there's a problem that we can identify and build something that we want and then share that with the world and get some customers.

So we applied to Y Combinator and Imagine K12. We got into Imagine K12, which at the time had a few partners in common, a very similar structure. And so we were on a cadence of we were in Imagine K12 summer 2012. So we had a can I interrupt really quickly and just say Imagine K12 was the only accelerator that had like Y Combinator's blessing.

It was started by Jeff Ralston. We said we want to help you because we want there to be an accelerator for ed tech companies. Totally. Yeah. Just wanted to throw that out. Yeah. We had a very good relationship with that. Yeah. Actually, PG came and spoke at our Imagine K12, one of the dinners. It was a very similar format. And so when we got to Silicon Valley, we were sort of crashing on the couch of a friend of a friend.

And they were definitely not in the startup mindset. They were more in the, you know, relaxing corporate job golf on the weekends. And that was sort of oil and water because we needed to build a business and we were running out of money. Back then, I think Imagine K12 was still on the older funding model. YC had moved to, I think, one hundred and fifty thousand.

We were we only had seventeen thousand. So we had seventeen thousand for two people to live on. We had no we didn't come from any money. I think I had five thousand dollars in credit card debt. And we had no other income streams or any savings because we were straight out of college. OK, to Silicon Valley to let's try and build something.

And so we had seventeen thousand dollars and we were like, this is the most amount of money we've ever seen. This is incredible. We're ready to build. And so we showed up in Silicon Valley with a broken down 1995 Chevy Blazer that didn't have air conditioning and a box of books. Literally just a bunch of books about programming and all sorts.

And you just grab a book when you want to learn something. Eventually, you know, started looking online for solutions. But that initial living situation wasn't really working for building a company and being up late and working around the clock and turning down dinners and all the different things that you get dragged into when you're just living a somewhat normal life.

And so we go on a website that existed at the time that was kind of like the precursor of vibe coding. So it's called Padmapper and someone had. YC startup. Yeah. And so and so Padmapper was amazing because it took Craigslist listings and Airbnb listings and put it on a Google map. Of course, this is in every single product today. But back then, these products didn't have their own mapping features.

So someone built this feature as a product. And we looked on there because we wanted to be near YC in Mountain View. And we saw a company on there that said, hey, we're a startup. We're in Y Combinator. And we were like, this is perfect. They'll be on the exact same schedule, same mindset. They have demo day. We all understand the pressure.

We all understand the life cycle and what we'll be doing. There won't be many distractions. Let's do it. So we go. We tour this place. And the listing made it look palatial. They said, we got a pool. We got a jacuzzi. It's exactly like the social network. I was just thinking that. It's exactly like the social network. We're going to be throwing parties.

We're going to be having fun. It's game on. We got unlimited money, $17 ,000. We're going to have the best summer ever. This startup thing, that's going to be the easy part. The hard part is going to be pushing people away when they're coming over to hang out. We get over there. The pool is filled with algae. The jacuzzi is filled with leaves.

The bathrooms barely work. There's only one bedroom available for me and my co -founder. And so we have to move in together. We get twin beds that butt up against each other. I'm fairly tall. So I had to put my suitcase at the end of the twin bed and put my feet on the suitcase to extend it. We had one desk that was on sawhorses. And all of this stuff, it's miserable.

But you sort of take pride in it because there's so much lore and whatnot. And, of course, we build for three months. I learn a ton about programming. Get an app in the App Store. Get a couple hundred downloads. But nothing's working. Stuff is barely functional when I'm demoing it. And we learn a ton. But YC Demo Day comes for both startups.

And the other group was a group of founders out of Georgia Tech. They were building a wireless network that was called Meow Global Networks and then Level RF, sort of pirate radio, shared internet, Wi -Fi mesh networking company. And we both had the same experience. Like, incredible focus, incredible product development. We learned so much.

But the business was just not in any place to accept venture capital. And so both of us came away from demo day saying, okay, well, that $17 ,000 is now $4 ,000. And it's got to last us forever. Because until you make revenue or raise more money, you don't have any money for anything. So the budgets came way down. The team actually shrunk down.

And at the end, there were basically two teams that had merged. There were four co -founders. And as a part of trying to save money, we were looking at our income statement or the transactions that were going out of the small checking account. And we noticed that we had paid our rent in advance. We owned our laptops. We couldn't unsubscribe from Wi -Fi.

But we did have this cost of food that was pretty substantial. And in San Francisco, you face a tradeoff between healthy, convenient, and affordable. If you want something that's healthy and convenient, you can go and pay a restaurant and get a great meal. If you want something that's convenient and affordable, you buy fast food. But, of course, that's not healthy.

And if you want something that's affordable and healthy, you can grow your own food, cook for yourself. But that's very time -consuming and time is money when you're building a startup. So that's where the idea for Soylent, this meal replacement shake, this powder that you could mix up and eat for very cheap, came from. Okay. So you have your startup, which has failed.

You've got the Level RF guys, so four of you all together. Did you formally merge or did you just– was it like more of a casual thing? And at what point– And at what point? Yeah. Like when in the cycle did this happen? So the numbers were dwindling. The battle was taking its toll. And there were a number of founders who were still finishing college and met with post -demo day slump, no venture capital coming in.

They made the decision to go back to school, finish their degrees, which I think was the right move.

I had burned the ships. I had not applied to jobs and I graduated and I wasn't just going to jump back into, I don't know, finance recruiting or I wasn't going to get a job at Google. Like I didn't, I wasn't actually good at programming yet. So I didn't feel like I had an easy parachute to go anywhere. And I loved what we were doing. It was so much fun.

Every week we would come up with a new idea and go and work on it for 80 hours straight, stay up all night, do nothing except build it. And then we'd put it out on Hacker News and there'd be a couple of comments and people would say, oh, this is really cool. You should do this next. And it was so much fun. And we'd pull each other in. I did one of these projects.

You might be familiar with Rap Genius, the company that would annotate rap lyrics. We made Symphony Genius, an app for annotating musical sheet music. Extremely small, Tam. Very fun. But actually a very interesting image processing problem. How do you detect where the staff is, where the music notes are? I wrote an image recognition algorithm in Python by scratch, counting up the number of black pixels versus white pixels.

And all the stuff that's super easy with AI today was all very hand coded back then. But it was a lot of fun. And we were launching all sorts of things. And none of these things worked. So we had a whole wall of ideas with sticky notes of things we could build. We'd pull one off the wall. And instead of spending 20 minutes vibe coding like you do today, we'd spend two weeks on it and then launch it to crickets and go back in the cycle.

But the actual merger, the official employment contract equity allocation, that happened after Soylent had some traction. And we talked to the YC team. And there was a debate over, should we go through YC again or should we just raise a seed round? But we had a lot of traction. And we had, I think, a couple million dollars in pre -orders, which was very good for a new food company on Kickstarter, effectively.

And so, but the precursor to the official merge was post -demo day. We're all running out of money. And my co -founder at Soylent comes to me and just says, like, hey, man, you can hang out and not pay rent and don't worry about rent. Like, we have $150 ,000. You had $15 ,000 or $17 ,000. I think you'd be useful generally. Just stay and we'll pay for the food and rent and you can just kind of work alongside us and we'll try and figure something out.

And so I worked with him on some projects. Rob worked on, who became the CEO of Soylent, worked on sort of a separate project. And we were both demoing those and sort of helping each other out on trying to keep a number of irons in the fire until we found something that sort of stuck. And then as soon as Rob wrote the blog post announcing Soylent and it had gone viral on Hacker News and there was intense press attention and all of a sudden there were people just falling over themselves to give us money.

We were like, okay, abandon everything else. They didn't have any customers or users, so no one's going to miss those other projects. Let's go all in on this. And then we sort of formalized the relationship, sort of reallocated the equity a little bit. But it was enough to go around that it was a pretty quick discussion. So now is a really good time for me to share a little note that I dug up in our software from Paul Bukite.

And this is around– this is pre -Soylent. This is like around the summer 12th. It says, a lot of weak ideas does not equal one strong idea. That's great. We should have listened to that one. The sticky note wall is not the way to greatness. Okay, so let's get into Soylent. But I'm also going to share a more positive note that came after from Paul Graham.

And this is in February 2013. It said, pivot of all time. They're now making a nutritious food substitute. I'm cautiously optimistic. I love it. So we understand like why you wanted to make this food alternative that was healthy and affordable. Why did it go viral? Who was buying it? I think it went viral for a few reasons. One, it was sort of a precursor to some of the rage bait that we've seen online where it was very controversially framed.

And we actually learned this later, but there's a very ancient marketing technique around a stress test. So famously, there was a– David Ogilvie was trying to sell glue. And glue is the most boring product to sell. And so what he did was he took an actor and put glue on the bottom of their shoes and glued them to the ceiling. And then while the actor was glued to the ceiling by only his shoes and this glue that he was selling, the actor delivered a monologue about how great this glue is.

And you can't look away because if the glue fails, the man will fall and potentially be injured. And so we did the same thing where Rob spent 30 days eating no food at all and only consuming this product. And then he reported that not only had he survived, but he had thrived and he had lost weight and gained muscle and just been healthy. And these like health transformations, they always go viral.

They're very popular. Fad diets are super old. They always come and go. There's always a new one. But the tech community had never had one. And I think people didn't realize like that as busy and as noisy as hacker news and the tech community was, if you came at them with something that was completely separate from competing over which open source repo is the best or debating tabs versus spaces or Python or versus rails, like you could totally break through because it was fresh and different.

And so that was the early community. We went from hacker news directly to Vice magazine and tech crunch to eventually the New Yorker. And Rob was on the Colbert report on late night TV. It drove a million dollars of sales in one day. It was the craziest thing. This was like a heyday. This was pre Colbert leaving the Colbert report. And it was wild.

We were looking it up and he was like the first tech founder to go on the show. I think Brian Chesky had been on before. But I don't think anyone else had really actually done the late night. Now it's standard practice and like lots of folks can get on and they know how to perform. But we broke through in a really, really big way to a very broad audience because it was this weird lens into Silicon Valley.

And I think people saw Silicon Valley as this like hard charging, hard working, you know, ultimate optimizer culture. And we were the poster boy for that. Was this before or after Super Size Me came out? This was after. And so it was the same. It was the very same playbook. Right. And you can go back and find 30 day diet challenges, cleanses, all sorts of things happen.

Nothing is new ever, really. But particularly in food, this just broke through in a very interesting way because it was delivered on a on basically a hand coded blog shared on hacker news, which is just like it's not a noisy place. Whereas if you do the typical thing where you say, I want to go on, you know, like the daytime TV circuit, the view, Oprah, Maury, whatever.

We actually got introduced to some of those folks to come on that show. And they were like, we want you to hold up a big pair of pants. And we were like, oh, I don't know. That's the brand. But but but they're used to that. And so that's actually more a more noisy space to run that playbook. No one had talked about food or nutrition in Silicon Valley at all.

Now there's a lot of health influencers and there's a lot of overlap between the Andrew Huberman's of the world and the tech and the tech folks. So like the the world is a lot flatter now, I think. But at that time, Hacker News was not was not ready for the debate that was going to ensue around Soylent. Yeah, that is the first biohacker. So VCs were tripping over themselves to fund you? Yeah, I think so.

Although the tripping has gotten so much more aggressive that it looks quaint by modern stats. But at the time, a $20 million Series A was big. A $5 million Series A was normal. $10 million was great. And we basically jumped straight to Series B because we were making like almost $3 million a month within like a year of launching the company.

Why were you manufacturing it? Like what were the raw ingredients? Yeah, so I mean the raw ingredients, we were ordering these things on Amazon. It was like protein powder, right? Like you buy protein powder, you add some carbohydrate powder, some fat to it, some vitamins, minerals. Like it was just like everything in the, you know, the biohacker or the bodybuilder or the nutrition freaks like closet or medicine cabinet.

If you mix all that together into one protein shake, you kind of got the Soylent formula. And we met someone who was affiliated with Muscle Milk and they had all the connections in terms of supply chain. And so that was actually pretty turnkey. They're co -packers that can do powder blending. It was still cool to see because it's uncommon for tech companies, but you walk into a big warehouse, there's a big machine, you measure everything out, you put it in, it mixes it up and then you put it in bags.

It's all just like making pasta, but at a really, really big scale. Right. Wow. Why did you, why and when did you then leave Soylent? I left Soylent because the company was pretty mature and I was running e -commerce and we didn't really need a software team at all. Actually, I was interested in other stuff. And so the whole business was going through this like pivot to retail, which is very make or break for pretty much every direct to consumer brand that starts online.

And at the time, part of the reason why VCs were tripping over us was because the growth rates were so strong online and a lot of VCs believe e -commerce is the future, which it is. But e -commerce still grows very slowly. And so eventually you wind up growing at the rate of e -commerce. So e -commerce is really big, but what is that in that e -commerce number? It's maybe 10, 20 percent of overall commerce, but it's a lot of TVs.

It's a lot of books. It's a lot of stuff that is easily shippable. A lot of groceries are still not sold on e -commerce. And so we sort of penetrated the total TAM of online protein powder supplements and we needed to solve retail. And so we brought in an executive team. And we maybe could have figured it out ourselves as sort of mixed bag.

But I think all of us were sort of burnt out on that strategy because the business was getting like farther and farther away from innovation, farther and farther away from what we were good at. And so my co -founder at Soylent and the high school friend that I had originally moved out to Silicon Valley with was quitting smoking at the time.

And he said, I think I have a product that solves a lot of our problems of shipping things that are heavy like liquids on the Internet. I think we should launch a nicotine gum company because Nicorette is in a similar place where it's 50 years old. A lot of people were comping Soylent to insure. And we were like, yeah, there's something there where you can bring back these old formats.

There's supply chain for it, but it hasn't been modernized and it hasn't been brought to the Internet. Let's do the same thing. But a packet of nicotine gum fits in an envelope. Like it's not a whole case that you have to spend. We were spending $10 a box to ship it to people with Soylent, the bottles. With Lucy, the nicotine gum product, we were spending a dollar.

And so the economics just flipped. Of course, there are a million other problems and that's a whole other story as any startup story goes. But it was exciting to sort of have a fresh slate. And we also had realized at Soylent that we had this very Silicon Valley open source mindset. Ah, competition's fine. Like let people encourage people.

And that was exactly wrong. We got copied endlessly by a bunch of companies that outperformed. Like Huel. Huel was a great one. Yeah. Huel really executed methodically and did very well. But there were tons of these. There was Joylent and Zoylent and Moylent. And there were like a million different spinoffs. There were open source competitors.

And then there were like McDonald's launched something that was like, you know, a protein shake. And so there was just like endless competition. And what we realized about the nicotine gum market was that there was sort of this like one -time regulatory change that was happening at the FDA.

Where new products would need to go through what's called the PMTA process, which is almost like getting a drug approved. It's taken us something like 10 years to get through it. And so it would be brutal and really, really hard. But it actually turned it more into a venture style bet because you have this binary outcome. You have this guillotine over your head the whole time you're building the business.

But if you make it through, you're one of the few companies that actually has license to continue. And so competition decreases precipitously. And so that was very attractive to us. And then also my two co -founders at Lucy were Caltech PhDs in bio and were much more interested in FDA, bio. That side of the business was much more attractive to them.

And that's where they had more skills. So that's why we wound up building a business. What year did you start, Lucy? That was 2016. Okay. And we went through YC with that one. I think winter 2018. It was winter 2018. How was YC different? So it was– I mean it was different in the sense that I was allowed in the building because I was over in Imagine K -12.

Remember? Yes. Duh. But it was interesting because obviously I lived vicariously through the summer 2012 because I was going to like reunions as this like retconned co -founder and very close with everyone in that batch because we would host people and meet people. So I knew a lot of people in the real summer 2012 batch, not just the Imagine K -12 batch.

But it was interesting because summer 2012 was the batch that broke YC because it had gotten so big. And it was 70 companies, something like that. 86. 86, yeah. And so I had like sort of lived through this interesting like there was the YC is over, hot take. It's too big. It's lost its roots, right? And then I'd watched Coinbase go to the moon, Instacart and Zapier.

And then Soylent was doing really well and there were a bunch of other companies that were doing well. And so it was just a total narrative violation of like what you were told was a lie. The big batch worked. And so coming back to that and watching the bigger size, it was very clear that the model did scale at least to the point that it did.

Just to clarify, that batch didn't break YC. It broke the YC partners who were working with that batch. There weren't enough. There weren't enough. And we hadn't sharded. So every partner had to know about all 86 companies. So just to clarify. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Talk about quaint though. I mean, 86 companies. That's quaint. Yeah. So what happened with Lucy? So Lucy went through a similar arc actually.

So I worked very closely with my co -founders for– I mean, I guess I was– I mean, I'm still on the board. So I'm still working with them. But almost a decade. And we grew that business a lot. Never had the same experience as Soylent. Like never went viral. Never was in the New Yorker. And a lot of that was because we had a very different strategy.

Like with Soylent, it was a product that– you know, we weren't selling to kids. But, you know, it's a food product at the end of the day. It's all generally recognized as safe by the FDA. Like people can make decisions about what they eat all day long. Nicotine, nicotine gum, these are very different products. They're age -restricted. They're FDA -regulated.

The claims that you make about these products are very, very important. Whether or not you can say this helps you quit smoking. There are a ton of things that you can't say. And so we didn't really want to be like mega viral. And then we also watched Juul go super viral and get a bunch of kids addicted And so that was a huge risk that we didn't want to do And we were like, we want to be the anti -Juul, we want to be the anti -cigarette And we want to go after all the smokers who are trying to quit And are thinking, ah, Nicorette, that stuff tastes bad And it's hard to find, and the branding doesn't speak to me It makes me feel like medicine, I'll try this other thing That

was our customer And then also the post -vape community that had picked it up in college And then realized, I don't want to be vaping around my family as I grow my life I should get off of this, why don't I pick up the cool nicotine gum? And so we were pretty deliberate about being much more targeted with the marketing But of course that meant way lower growth rates Like it took us 10 years to get to the size of Soylent And so it was a lot slower And then again, you go through the retail, e -commerce to retail transition That's not my strong suit And so I get a little bored during COVID I start doing YouTube videos, trying to reconnect with the tech community This is what

I was going to ask you When did you do the YouTube things and why? It was COVID Yeah, COVID So I've always been very full -time entrepreneur employed Which means more than 40 hours a week I've never done two companies at the same time Anything it's like if I'm working on something, I'm working on it exclusively But COVID was interesting because there were no happy hours There were no VC holiday parties to go to There were no networking events There were no, like even family engagements were basically zero So there was just a lot of downtime and a lot of people were making sourdough Or watching Netflix And I was saying, let me answer questions that I'm getting from my

friends About business and Y Combinator and startups But instead of sending them a long text message I will just send them a YouTube video So if you look at the first videos that I published It was a series on startup fundraising My experience with it Some basic definition of terms I'm not a super expert or anything But I've raised, I think, like 10 different funding rounds across my career And so I had a little bit to share And so I just tried to solidify that And a lot of it's sort of repurposed from YC's documents Which are the best in the business But those hadn't been brought to YouTube in a video essay fashion So it's a scripted narrative that has a clear structure

And then I was also just sort of nerd sniped by motion graphics Because of my programming background And so I really liked making animated bar charts and stuff like that And so I was just having fun And then eventually that sort of grew into storytelling around YC companies Companies that I admired Companies that I was interested in Even just tech trends What's going on with the metaverse? Who's going to win this race? Some commentary, some analysis, a lot of history But I sort of got to the end of that road And then was looking for the next thing Although there was another interlude If you want to go into Founders Fund Should we? Yeah Yeah, Founders Fund was a great

experience So I was doing YouTube videos And I had incidentally I'd been aware of Founders Fund I'd pitched them But they'd never actually invested in any of my companies And so Who'd you pitch? We'd pitch Peter And interestingly, he gave us the best feedback That predicted the entire history of the company And we didn't take the advice It was ridiculous And so that's why I was like I gotta go I gotta go I gotta go in Because Yeah, for Soylent So we came in And we were like Here's what all the other VCs are saying And we agree with them Like we don't need to market We just build our product And he was like No, no, no You're the exception to the rule You're not building a

network effects business You're not building the next Facebook You're building a widgets company You struck lightning in a bottle You should be so thankful Now it's time to run the playbook That every consumer packaged goods company Has run since the dawn of time Which is You are selling Coca -Cola You run a Super Bowl ad You need to get great At continually marketing And distributing your product You need to be everywhere And he laid out Like sort of The traditional consumer packaged goods playbook Which has held up for decades And was in fact Not really disrupted by the internet Of course e -commerce is like A nice additive And there are things that you can do On the

internet That are beneficial But The iron law Of like retail sales growth Is still true He recognized that And it was interesting Because It was It felt like Talking to just a normal Like MBA type Like not a Silicon Valley person But that was the contrarian position Because every other VC Was saying Well you're going so fast On the internet Without any marketing budget Why would you ever need to market? And we were like Whoa Okay So anyway He had a big guy Told you so Yeah And I was like I'm never making that mistake again So I got to go Work with the founders fund folks And understand more About how they view Business and technology And what they're interested in And I

mean It was a wild experience The first Wait You don't just say I got to go work With the founders fund I mean How did you get hired there? So Mike Solana Had reached out to me Because I'd done his podcast We'd talked online A big part of My My Goals With content creation During COVID Was just to reestablish Some sort of connection With Silicon Valley I was living in Pasadena A suburb of Los Angeles I wasn't Bumping into People in tech That often But I would bump into them On Twitter And I would bump into them On YouTube and so There were a lot of people That were taking Twitter Very seriously There were a lot of people That were taking Substack And podcasting Pretty

seriously But there was this huge White space on YouTube And I figured out How to do Something a little bit different In the sense that I was doing video essays Gary Tan was also doing Video essays But there weren't That many You know What is the history Of Stripe? What is the history Of DoorDash? What is the history Of Coinbase? There weren't that many Videos out there About that From the perspective Of someone who Loves technology And business And has tried To build Technology companies And has A career in business And so There were a lot Of people Who had never Been to Silicon Valley And would go On Wikipedia And pull up Some stuff And they didn't Necessarily nail Like

what is Actually the Interesting thing I think And so I was able To carve out This niche As someone Who could Tell the story Of a tech company From the perspective Of a founder And so That eventually Broke through And I wound up Just profiling A ton of founders Fund companies Because if you Want to talk about DeepMind OpenAI SpaceX Facebook Like you just Wind up hitting Founders fund Companies If you just Focus on like Impactful tech Companies And the Interesting stuff Is in their Portfolio Not just because They're great Investors But also because They've focused Outside of The B2B SaaS playbook In an interesting Way that Coincidentally Draws attention From people Outside

and Just people on The internet Because people Want to know About rockets Watching rockets Land is Universally Interesting And so You can tell A much more Engaging story About the Development of SpaceX than You can Say you Know another B2B SaaS Company that I find Interesting but It's harder To make visual Right Yeah Did you go To founders Fund when You were Trying to get Lucy funded Yes we had Talked to Someone and We got so Close and When I got In I was able To look at The slacks And I was Able to be Like ah They kind Of clocked One of The problems Oh okay Okay But still You know It would Have been It would Have been Fine It wouldn't Have been You know Game changing For

the Fund so You know I respected Their Investment thesis I was just Going to say Though John You just Don't strike Me as a Stuffy old VC Yeah So I Came in As an Entrepreneur In residence Specifically Yeah And I had

Super interesting. But I found that I do not thrive in that environment of needing to make like snap, expected value, put your money where your mouth is, like go make the bet right now. The train's leaving the station. You're either in the round or you're out of the round. I enjoy looking backwards and understanding where things might go in the future abstractly.

But it's much harder to do all like the deal negotiation. So I was very much not trying to be like, oh, put me in. I would got to be on the investment team at any point in time. And I sort of expected that. But it was great to be able to fully validate that and scratch that itch that like if I didn't, if I was in the room and I didn't and I wasn't like I want to stay in this room, then I'm fine to move on to other stuff.

How long did you stay? I was there a little over two years. Okay. So 2023, 2024. And then towards the end of 2024, I've been doing more video essays and documentaries, but they were becoming more involved. There was a slower pace of play. It would take me like a month to do a project. And I was flying around doing interviews, meeting people, editing.

We were turning into this like much larger production. And I realized that I was going to be on the road constantly, which was not working with my family plans. And then also I'd talk to some folks who make documentaries and they sort of showed me a preview of what the Top of That Mountain Looks Like. And they were like, yeah, yeah, you're on a track to sell a documentary to Netflix or HBO.

And I was like, that sounds amazing. And they were like, it's not.

And I was like, yeah, if it goes really well, you could make X. And I was like, that's not enough. And they're like, oh, and by the way, like everything that you love about the content that you make, like the creative direction, the soul that you put into it, your viewpoint on like, I believe business is good. They're like, yeah, that's leaving.

It's going to be a hit piece. And they're going to edit it in a bad way because that's going to be better for their business. Soul crushing. And so I was like, well, actually, I don't want to climb this mountain any further. But I do want to stay doing media. I still want to do interesting things. So I tried a bunch of different media products.

I started a solo podcast where I would do a similar thing, but it was unscripted. I like the unscripted stuff because I felt like the more I was on the teleprompter, the more I was scripted, the more soul crushing it was. I wasn't that interested in it. I like the process of writing, but then reading it was sort of a hassle. And so I like the unscripted stuff.

I liked talking to people, but I didn't necessarily want to be flying around the world constantly chasing the next big interview. So like the big interview show was sort of off the table. And so when I met Jordy Hayes, my current co -founder, which you got to tell me how you met you and Jordy met each other. So we met through a mutual friend, Wilmanitis, who just sort of identified us as two people in Los Angeles with similar backgrounds.

We'd actually both raised money from Andrews Norowitz. We both raised money from Google. We both had families and kids in Los Angeles had been like deeply viral at certain points with Soylent and his company Party Round had gone viral many times. And so we sort of understood the Internet, enjoyed the Internet, enjoyed tech, but had this like arm's length relationship with tech where we were never duking it out in the big companies, in the scale ups and the hyper scalers.

In the arena. In the arena. We were like adjacent to the arena. And we were like, well, what what what advantage does this give us if the non -negotiable is having a family in Los Angeles? Well, media is actually really good in Los Angeles. And there's a whole variety of things that you can do around media if you design a show that's meant to be remote.

We started in person in Los Angeles and we were able to do that because we were both here. And then eventually when we started adding guests, we we structured the guests format so that it it leans into its like its remoteness in a way that people aren't clamoring for us to. Oh, it'd be so much better if you interviewed 10 people a day in person, like even if we a lot of our guests, even if we were next door to them, they'd be like, I'm not coming over for a 10 minute spot.

You know, it's like a quick interview. It's a one. There's a news item. You're coming on for 15 minutes, giving us an update, telling us about some fundraising news. Even if we were even if we were a couple blocks away, they probably still do it over Zoom. I was listening to you talk about like your day. You guys meet to go to the gym at 630, talk there, have breakfast together.

And then you each do your little things. Then you come together three hours a day. And then Carolyn, you'll love this. Jordy usually has a driver to take him because he lives a little bit far away. Sometimes he'll be like, I don't want the driver. I want to continue hanging out with John. John, you drive me home. What makes you two have such a magical relationship? It's like your old best friends.

It is. It is. I don't know. I think it's I think it's seeing eye to eye on a lot of things and then having enough enough differences of opinion that there's good debates. What kinds of things do you guys disagree on, actually?

So I think it would be I think I think if one of us was was like pro tech and the other one was anti tech, that would be a really hard relationship to maintain. But if if we're both pro tech, but I think that Apple is the greatest company and he thinks that Google is the greatest company. Now, that's a very friendly debate that we can that we can that we can go at each other's throats and then walk away from having a lot of mutual respect.

And so I think it's hard to say that there's like one consistent debate. It's more like some news happens. What are the two sides of this? And we very quickly get to the the debate over the like the debate that a venture capitalist might have the debate that a founder might have. OK, there's this new product from this new company. How does that impact startups? How does that impact the big companies that are legacy companies that might be threatened by this new product? What is this company overvalued or undervalued? We don't really disclose like, oh, this is we think this startups buy on the show.

But that's internally the way we're thinking about it. We're not thinking about like, oh, this company raised a billion dollars, like raising a billion dollars is a bad thing and should never happen like that. That's just not our equation because we're pro business and pro tech. Right. Right. When you first got started, were you like were were you just experimenting or did you think we're creating this new type of media company? Oh, yeah.

Dying business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we had we had no idea that we would be live, no idea that we'd be daily, no idea that we'd be effectively producing a modern television show. I had a bunch of ideas. Many of them did not play out, as I thought. One of them was that there was a huge opportunity for a show with no guests. And of course, we have like the most guests.

So we had a thousand guests last year. So so that was that was proven wildly wrong. But I think I think what we did figure out was that this to host back and forth allows you to fill a lot of airtime and then creates more flexibility around not missing stories because you can't always get the perfect guest at the right time. I mean, we'll see this even with like like we had we I want to name the company, but we've had a number of founders come on.

We developed great relationship with them and then they'll get acquired or something like that. And they will just be like, look, the comms department doesn't want me to go on the show right now because I'm owned by a public company now. And they have a whole different process for this. And we're like, yeah, that's fine. We'll talk about it and we'll analyze the reporting and give commentary on that.

And so the audience is still getting the news, which is a set agenda of things that happen. If you're going to TVP and saying, like, I'm using this as a way to stay up to date on the news and we're just like completely missing stories like, oh, we just didn't talk about the new iPhone because for whatever reason, like we could. Oh, we couldn't get Tim Cook.

So we just didn't do any Apple stuff during the new iPhone release. Like, no, we'll have Mark Gurman on from Bloomberg and he'll talk about it or we'll just talk about it ourselves and we'll react to the tweets and the news and the Wall Street Journal articles. And so we're able to cover any story. And sometimes the coverage is amazing where we're like an exclusive interview with the person that everyone's wanted to hear from.

No one knows that this has ever happened before. No one knows what to expect. And then sometimes it's like, yeah, we actually have like no one to talk to about this. So we're just going to, you know, read you some information, do some research on our own and just talk about it. Uh, between ourselves. Do you have like, you probably have like a top 20, but can, what's your favorite segment of all time? Oh, so there's a bunch.

I mean, Mark Benioff, such a character. We had him on the show today and he's just, he's just so much energy and we have a great like kind of back and forth where it feels like we're sparring really high energy. Um, there's been a whole bunch of really, really amazing moments. Uh, there was this very interesting moment where, uh, uh, a gentleman by the name of Soham Parikh was found working for multiple startups at the same time.

So he was, uh, so he had, he had employment contracts with something like seven or eight Silicon Valley startups as a software engineer. And everyone said that his work product was good, but then they discovered that everyone was paying him. And so we remarkably got him to come on our show and talk about it and sort of address the allegations live on the air.

And it was a huge day. I think 100 ,000 people were watching live, which was crazy. Everyone wanted to know who is this person. They'd never seen him. And that's interesting because we will get like a huge household name, CEO, and there won't be 100 ,000 people watching because there's plenty of content about them. And maybe they don't have big news.

And then sometimes we just get lucky. Like we did GitHub Connect, which is Microsoft's conference. And we had the opportunity to sit down with Satya Nadella. And we were so excited for this. And we were ready to just talk to him about his career, just get to know him, you know, talk to him about anything. What's your opinion on AI? There's a million things that we could talk to him about.

But that day, the news broke of the exact ownership structure of OpenAI. And so all of a sudden we had like the exclusive interview with Satya Nadella. And it was this like celebratory moment because he is now maybe the greatest venture capitalist or up there with the greats and just produced like 100 bagger for Microsoft. Those are his words, by the way.

He calls it 100 bagger. Oh, my God. I was going to ask you, have you ever broken news? Because you said that's not our thing to break news. But clearly you did kind of. Yeah. In general, in general, we like to be a commentary layer on top of breaking news. So most of the most of the time it's news happens and you come on TVP and to further contextualize it.

And if you don't come on TVP and it's big news, we might be talking about it. And then occasionally folks will say, I'd love to break the story with you. But we always recommend that they also do a written piece with someone if they really have big news. But then every once in a while there are just like scoops or news, even in the sense of like someone comes on the show and they say something interesting that's unique and they've never said before.

And then that just becomes a headline. And we're now at the stage where there's a number of outlets that will rewrite things that are said in TVP and interviews and put them up as articles, which is, of course, great for the growth of our show. But it's interesting because we just try and have the most interesting conversation possible, answer the questions that we actually have.

And then sometimes those are good enough for a broader audience. And so other journalists and reporters will sort of contextualize that further. I was going to ask you if like the interviews that get the most attention or the most viewers, are they in proportion to how famous the guest is? But maybe not then. There's a little bit. There's a little bit of that.

But you'd be surprised. And in fact, anonymous accounts often drive a lot of live viewership on X. So because you might have followed some poster like Rune, for example, for years. And I think Rune has hundreds of thousands of followers on X. But people only see the tweets. He's never been doxxed, right? Yeah. Yeah. He's never been doxxed.

And also people are just interested. Like, I want to know more about that philosophy. There's natural curiosity behind the profile picture. And so we create a space where Anons can come on, remain anonymous. I don't even when I'm texting them, I don't even ask for their name. And if they tell me, I forget it because I have no interest in that.

What I do want to know is understanding how they see the world, who they are, and just how they talk about these topics reveals a lot. And so I guess you could put the Anons at like zero fame or maybe a lot of fame, but they also drive viewership. But the famous CEOs do drive viewership, but less than you'd think. Do you have to disguise voices for these anonymous folks? We have never done that.

Some Anons have done that on their end because it's just a Zoom call. So you can join using whatever. Most of them don't take it that seriously. Okay. Okay. As I was doing a little bit of research, I sort of felt like you were very much like YC in that there was sort of a high variance in the tweaks that you'd make to the show. Oh, yeah. You know, but you also were very strict about sort of what you wanted to deliver to your audience.

What is your North Star that's always guided you despite the experimentation or changes or whatever? The North Star, I mean, Jordy has this phrase where he says, what is it? It's like we're a bakery or something, and if we don't show up, the bread doesn't get baked. So that's very different than a lot of software companies where you might not really be able to take a week off, but you can take a week off, and the software still runs.

That's the whole beauty of software. And so, yes, culturally, you should be there. You should be in founder mode. We all know this. But truthfully, you can take a week off, and the business will keep humming, not only because the servers keep running, and that's the beauty of software, but your employees are set up to take over and manage things.

And you're right. We don't have that luxury. Like if we don't go live and we're not in these chairs at 11 a .m. Pacific every Monday, every Tuesday, like the show just doesn't happen. And so that's been the North Star in the sense that like we got to sit down for three hours, do the show. If it's bad and we don't like it, that's miserable.

There are lots of companies where you can be producing a product that happens, and you're like, yeah, my company makes five products. I'm not a fan of product number six, but I don't have to use it every day. My customers do, and these customers, they don't really care about how bad product six is, right? But that's not true for us. Like I have to listen to the show because I'm on it.

And so if there's a bad interview, I have to sit through that bad interview. Like mine. Yeah, right? Was mine the worst? No, no, yours was amazing. I thought you meant like mine, like you have the same job because you know from interviewing that if you have a slow interview, you're like, I want to speed this up. No, I'm saying I tried to listen to my interview.

We had a great time. The one with just me, not the one with me and Paul. Yeah, no, no, no. That one was seminal. It was amazing. I could not even listen to it. Oh, people can never listen to their own. It was so painful. No, no, no. It was great. It was great. I loved the thing that really stuck with me was the carpetbagger point because it was so interesting hearing your history and your understanding of like what happens in bubbles, what happens in gold rushes.

And then also like how Gen Z and the cool kid lingo has recontextualized that and everything new is old. Do you mean grab your bag culture? Get your bag culture. That's correct. Oh, God. I even got it wrong. Carolyn is like I'm so old. Very close. I didn't know what this meant. It was so embarrassing. But importantly, you did know what it meant in like a spiritual sense and in a cultural sense, which I thought was very interesting.

A little bit of a tangent, but do you remember who the dinner speakers were in your Lucy batch in 2016? Yes. Oh. Steve Huffman. Great. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. He was great. Yeah. I love to ask CEOs. I don't know. I don't know if it was private dinner, so I don't know if I should actually say it. But I'll speak in vague terms. But I always like to ask CEOs like, oh, like what's your favorite YouTube channel? Like Adam Aseri, what's your favorite Instagram thing? And a lot of times some of these folks are like clearly not using the products.

Not Adam. Adam is deep in it. But Steve was like extremely deep. But like shared some Reddit that I found and I was like, this is next gen culture. And so that one stuck with me. And then I asked Paul Graham a question that I don't remember what the question was, but I remember his answer. And it was something hilarious. I give you permission to tell the story.

So I don't remember the actual question, but I remember him saying like, that's a terrible question or something like that. And the whole room erupted and it was very funny or something like that. I don't remember. It was just like a lot of fun. Paul Graham is an extremely funny person. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he's another great guest because like there are so many there's so many guests who are in like yes and mode because they don't want to like offend us or they want to they don't seem adversarial.

And PG is not that person. He will he thinks truly independently, which is great. Yeah, you guys want another similarity you guys have to YC is that you have this hearty sense of humor about things. Yeah, and I love that. Yeah, what made you feel like that's okay? Like, yeah, I think there's another thing with Geordi me and me and him both in like class clown builds for a long time like class clowns, I think.

But I was thinking about it more and I was thinking about like why why do we have permission? Like who gave us the permission to like make a bunch of jokes with Mark Benioff or like some are at his expense, some are at our expense. Like we have this very jovial rapport extremely quickly. And I think it's because deep down I'm just a techno optimist and I'm optimistic about technology.

And so I see I see the debates around technology is as they're high stakes. But like technology has delivered a lot of really great things. And so the poking fun at these things is often a way to sort of recalibrate around the level of seriousness but also recalibrate around the stakes in that, you know, whether whether this new technology gets here, whether we get the self -driving cars in five years or 10 years, like I think it's going to be good.

And so it gives us a little bit more permission because it's positive some and not zero some. Well, and also like the whole gist and that's true for our podcast, too, is it's not about gotchas. We're not trying to embarrass you. We just want to get to know you and hear your story. Like there's it's very genuine. And I'm assuming it's that that's true for all of us.

Yeah, it's very it's very interesting. We get a ton of we get a ton of pushback from folks about like do they ask the hard questions? And when we dig into like what the hard questions are, it's always like go go into politics and like controversial paths and whatnot. And from our perspective, I'm like I'm trying to ask the hardest question I can about this person's technology and their business.

And like, will they build a good business or are they overvalued or not? And I'm trying to I'm trying to get into that. And so it doesn't look hard at all. But I'm not. But it's fine because I already know the path of what they're getting at, which is like drag everyone through the mud. Get weight weight into politics. Your show will be bigger, like much bigger.

The views will be they will come. But the audience will degrade and and you'll have sold your soul. And the and the and the the the the product and the audience will be less differentiated and it'll just be a lot less fun. And also just like I'm just not interested in politics personally. I just don't I do like like I have to I would have to force myself to like sit down and like read politics news.

Whereas like you can give me a semi analysis report and I'll just read about semiconductors on the weekends. Like I'll just do that naturally. Yeah. So I have kind of a really random related question that I'm just personally curious about. You know, you've a thousand guests last year. Yeah. Some of those people like I know them and I don't like them.

Yeah. Does that impact you at all? Are you just like they're going to have something interesting to say? I don't care if this person's a real troll or this person maltreats founders. Yes. So sometimes we don't know that they mistreat founders. But I but I so I think you might have a little bit more information, in which case I should be running guests by you.

But but but but also sometimes sometimes, yes, there are just like people that have interesting things to say that the audience wants to hear from things. But then also, like, you know, we do occasionally give people enough rope to hang themselves. Like there are people that we have on the show where they've said where we haven't even been super adversarial or gotcha.

And they've said things that definitely made their company look worse. And so, like, that's sort of up to them. And I think, like, creating more space for that is probably generally good. Of course, you have to, like, do some sort of second filter on, like, you know, is this is this even reasonable? Is this a serious person? Is there any value here? But we do cast a wide net and then we do have a lot of flexibility with, like, how we frame the interview, the questions that we ask, how much prep we do and then also, like, how how much time we give them when we give them time, where their position, what's the context of the show leading up to it? So even even if, like, if

there's a whole bunch of context that happened before and it's just been guest after guest saying, like, this thing is bad and then we have the person on who makes the argument for it's good. Like, I think that that creates more balanced conversation usually. But it is it is a constant dance, constant dance. It's a good answer. Yeah, that's so interesting.

Carolyn, will you ask about the name? Oh, yeah. Tell us how you came up with your name. Yes. Quick lore. So to tech bros start a podcast. It's a tale as old as time. Why not call it the Technology Brothers podcast? Because you'll reclaim it. We're not tech bros. We're technology brothers. There was an old tweet about comparing the two terms and how, you know, tech people should use technology brothers because it's funny.

And it's funny. And it's funny. And so and so we were like, let's let's go over the top. Let's dial up the technology brother to the to to 11. And so suits and champagne and all the things that Paul Graham would absolutely laugh at. And we laugh at it, too. Right. And and I think people got that. And it's like, oh, they're being the most they're being deliberately obtuse about what it is to be a tech bro.

Tech bro. And so, you know, it's like it's all these things that don't map to Silicon Valley at all and are completely outside. But then there is like a seed of truth there where like when there's an interesting thing where like when you start out, you wear the T -shirt at Stanford. But when you've really made it in tech, you wear the suit on Capitol Hill because you're being.

Yes. That's like the only time I see founders in suits is when they're in front of. And so and so and so there is a little bit of a deeper message there around professionalizing technology, taking what we do seriously. But back to the name, Technology Brothers, fun. You need a name, funny name. But Technology Brothers dot com is so long and everyone would just call us the tech bros.

And so we were like, we're not really doing the thing. Like we just get abbreviated immediately. And I think that I think the Technology Brothers dot com, they wanted like one hundred thousand dollars. I'm not crazy. And so so so we were like, what if we go a little bit more sports center with this a little bit more ESPN in style? Well, inspired and and do TBPN and we'll kind of work backwards from it.

Everyone thinks it says stands for Technology Brothers podcasting network. In fact, on the day we launched, it was technology business because we were like, we want to open the aperture and just be a little bit more serious, a little bit more of a of a space where a CEO like Mark Benioff can come on during earnings and give us the first interview.

And, you know, he might go on the Technology Brothers podcast, but it's TBPN is an easier sell. And so we liked that. We like that we could take it a little bit further. We like the way the logo worked and the domain was cheap. So we got TBPN dot com. We got TBPN on every social handle possible because no one had ever thought to can smash together a B and a P because it's notoriously bad

I have a few like random questions that I have to ask you because I've become like so intrigued. Lightning round. I've become so intrigued with your business as I've been spending more time. And of course, I've been watching all these interviews. If you've been doing this live every day, first of all, has one of you had the flu or what happens if you're sick? Oh, you can go watch the episodes where we're sick.

The sick episodes are the best sometimes. No. Well, when we started the show, we were it was terrible flu season. We both had kids in preschool for the first. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So we were so sick. And but we'd figure out how to let the camera let the team, the production team know, okay, cut away from John and turn down his microphone because he's gonna blow his nose and then cut back.

But we would just like, you know, sort of just like grit our teeth and get through it. Now, we haven't actually had to do it. But I do think over time, guest hosts make sense. We have Tyler Cosgrove, who's on the team. Now he's sits on the show and and participates on the show. So the old intern, the old intern. Yes. Currently on a gap semester.

And so he so he sort of sits in as the third mic. We also have a number of guests that have been on so often that they could potentially effectively co host the show in a pinch remotely or something. But in general, we've just tried to stay really consistent with the, you know, sleep, diet, exercise, all the things that keep you healthy, and then just kind of like get through it.

I can't believe this john. And don't you have like three kids? I do. Three boys are young. How are you not getting more sick that you're you literally are like, Jordi, I can't come in today because I have diarrhea. Isn't there a YC adage about this like growth fixes everything?

Okay, Carolyn and I were wondering if you drive home in the suit? Or do you just hang it up under that I change most days? Okay, change. Okay. Um, can we come visit someday the ultra dome? Yes, we're on our social radars tour. Absolutely.

Come on the show in person to it'd be great to have you. In person is really fun. You take out the headphones and it just is a much more relaxed experience. There's not as much of a delay. The and it's great for these conversations that don't need to be like breaking news. Um, so it can be more scheduled ahead of time. But that'd be fantastic.

And I'll show you the whole studio and share anything we've learned that might apply to better lighting and soft backgrounds. Okay, if you are doing this live every day, you've had to have some funny disaster stories. Do you have one? Yes. Um, the stream has gone down a few times due to AWS outages, YouTube outages, there's all sorts of different systems that can go down.

Uh, we've been very, very lucky. We've never had like a big guest during an interview go down. There's been little things where it's been a little patchy at the intro. But in general, we've gotten very lucky. And, uh, and we usually just play it off as a joke. Uh, like, oh, we're being attacked by people that don't want us to podcast. They're being DDoS.

You haven't had a time when you're like, uh, I forget what I was just saying. Or haven't you had something like crazy? So pause. So we, we learned of a hot mic moment that was extremely close to happening, but we missed it because I was doing an ad read. And so the guest was, was technically mic'd up and saying crazy stuff, I think. Oh my God.

But, but, but we dodged it and it did not happen on the show. Um, other stuff. I mean, there's, there's stuff that happens every day where, oh, the camera focuses on the wrong thing or I step up for the gong or, you know, we've had things where I've tried to pull up one ad to different kind of ad companies. Like there's always little minor tweaks, but I see this very much as like, uh, we like racing themed analogies.

We've defined, designed the brand after F1. And so I, I view the show as, as just, uh, doing laps on a track. Like I'm at a point in my career where I think I can keep the car on the track, but every time I do the show, I shave off a millisecond or a couple of tenths of a second. And I just feel like the life's work is just doing it until, until you're actually on the perfect racing line constantly, not cutting each other off, asking the right question at the right time, getting good information from the guest while putting them at ease, interrupting with the right jokes at the right time.

All of this stuff is just little tweaks that there's no one secret. It's just a lot of practice. And you see it in folks like Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jim Cramer, you know, Lex Friedman, anyone who does great interviews, Dwarf Cash, there's a million people who have become fantastic at interviewing. And, uh, it was, it was never just, uh, an overnight success.

Yeah. And you're never going to lack for news. I mean, technology news never ends. And you just, didn't you guys just sign with the CAA? We did. Yes. Big deal. Yes. It's, it's very fun. Uh, I, uh, I, I, I mean, I know Michael Ovitz, obviously I know more of the history actually in, in, uh, and less about what we will be doing together at the time.

Uh, but since we've been signed, I've learned a lot and they've been a great team to work with. Um, it's, it's very interesting, certainly not on my bingo card, certainly not in like the forecast. I very much thought that this was going to be just like a tech podcast with a couple of people and like, maybe we do other stuff and maybe we do it like every couple, you know, a couple episodes a week, maybe one, one episode a week.

And now it's like a thing. It's not just a thing. It's a huge thing. I am so happy for your guys' success. Thank you. And I love the show. It's so refreshing to have like a media option that I actually enjoy, like seeing or reading or whatever, consuming. Like it's just, you guys are great. Um, so congratulations. Yeah. Thank you. And good luck with your life's work.

And also, I mean, thank you for hopping on to, uh, uh, during YC demo day. Uh, it's, that was particularly funny because that was the second time that we've had a surprise guest. And I think the audience often thinks that I'm underselling that I've had this surprise guest lined up. But, uh, when you and Paul Graham jumped on at YC demo day, I found out like 10 minutes before.

And so I'm, I'm bringing the surprise guest. The other time it happened was at, uh, at Meta Connect. We knew that we were going to be interviewing, uh, uh, Mark Zuckerberg, but we didn't know that James Cameron would be joining the show. And so they bring him over and I'm like, I'm interviewing James Cameron. This is incredible. And so those moments have been, uh, like surprises, but to the upside, like they've been fantastic.

Can I tell you how hard it was though, to get Paul from like where he was, I had to go find him. I could not find him, John. I went to where I had last seen him. Cause I was talking to your guy. I was like, I'll go get Paul. We'll come on the show. I went to where Paul was nowhere to be found. Like, I think he's eating somewhere over there.

So I run, I peel him away. He's surrounded by founders, peel him away. I'm like, we're going on TV. And we have to go through the crowd and everyone, they're like, Hey Paul. I'm like, he can't talk right now. We're going on the show. And we literally like sat down and then we were alive. It was really funny. I'm glad that it worked out. I got so, so many text messages about that from media people being like, how did you pull this off? Oh yeah.

Oh yeah. Because I mean like the, the, the one interesting, uh, vector with like, uh, Graham, obviously very well -known, but not widely available. There are certain people that are widely– that are known in tech, but they're on a show every week because they're promoting something and they're just always around. And so you can get those people, but you won't be like, oh, how did you do that? And with PG, I got a lot of like, how did you pull that off? He doesn't like, you know, going on TV shows or, you know, that's not his bag.

So I'm glad it worked out and we had so much fun. It was great. And thank you. I know like now's quitting time for you, right? You get to change out of the suit. The suit comes off in just one minute. It's getting a little hot in here. You can drive home and hang out with your kids and like have dinner before you start with Jordy at 630 in the morning.

I'm obsessed with their daily schedule meeting up in the gym.

So thank you again. And I can't wait for this episode to come out. Thanks, John. It was great to talk to you. Have a great rest of your day. All right. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.