John Coogan, Co-Founder & Host at TBPN

Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Great. Looking forward.

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 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 some. We were in Imagine K12 summer 2012. So we had a...

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 150,000. We only had 17,000. So we had 17,000 for two people to live on. We didn't come from any money. I think I had $5,000 in credit card debt and we had no other income streams or any savings because we were straight out of college, to Silicon Valley to let's try and build something. And so we had $17,000 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 wanted 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 to vibe coding. It was called PadMapper and someone had...

Yeah. 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.

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's 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. There's no business. 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 LvlUp, 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 trade-off 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.

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 had 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 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 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 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 from 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'd 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. 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 or 17. 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, who became the CEO of Soylent, worked on 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.

That's great. We should have listened to that one. The sticky note wall is not the way to greatness.

I love 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, David Ogilvy 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 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 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 versus Rails, 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 TechCrunch 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 the heyday of this, was pre-Stewart 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 thing. Now it's standard practice and 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 hard-charging, hardworking, ultimate optimizer culture and we were the poster boy for that.

This was after and so 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 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 the daytime TV circuit, The View, Oprah, my whatever, like 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, I don't know if that's the brand, but they're used to that and so that's actually 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 Hubermans of the world and the tech folks. So the world is a lot flatter now, I think, but at that time Hacker News was not ready for the debate that was going to ensue around Soylent.

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. $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.

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 biohacker or the bodybuilder or the nutrition freak's 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. There are 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 pull out, you measure everything out, you put it in, it mixes it up, and then it puts it in bags. It's all just like making pasta, but at a really, really big scale.

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 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% 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. We maybe could have figured it out ourselves. It's sort of a mixed bag. But I think all of us were sort of burnt out on that strategy because the business was getting 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 Ensure 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 were a million other problems and that's a whole another 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.

Yeah, Huel really executed methodically and did very well. But there were tons of these. There was Joylent and Soylent and Moylent and there were like a million different spin-offs. There were open-source competitors and then there were like McDonald's launched something that was like, you know, 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 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 wind up building that.

That was 2016.

And we went through YC with that one, I think, winter 2018.

So, it was different in the sense that I was allowed in the building because I was over in Imagine K12, remember? But it was interesting because obviously I'd lived vicariously through the summer 2012 because I was going to reunions as this retcon 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 K12 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, and...

86. Yeah. And so I had 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.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

So Lucy went through a similar arc, actually. So I worked very closely with my co-founders for, I mean, I guess I was on, 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 and 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 like, I don't want to be vaping around my family as I grow my life. Like I should get off of this. Why don't I pick up the cool nicotine gum? Right? 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.

Yeah, cool. 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 it 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, like, 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.

Yeah. Founders 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 I was pitching, 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 got to go. I got to go. I got to go in because...

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 retail sales growth is still true. He recognized that and it was interesting because it felt like talking to just a normal MBA type, like not a Silicon Valley person, but that was the contrarian position because every other VC was saying, well, you're growing 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 I told you so. 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...

So Mike Solana had reached out to me because I had done his podcast. We'd talked online. A big part of my goals with content creation during COVID was just to reestablish some sort of connection with Silicon Valley. I was living in Pasadena, 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'd figured out how to do something a little bit different in the sense that I was doing video essays. Garry 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 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. Like 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.

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.

But still, you know, 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.

So I came in as an entrepreneur in residence specifically and I had the opportunity to sit on some investment committee meetings and they were super interesting, but I just, 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 the deal negotiation. So I was very much not trying to be like, oh, put me in. I would love 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 was in the room and I wasn't like, I want to stay in this room, then I'm fine to move on to other stuff.

I was there a little over two years.

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. It was 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 talked 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, like 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, and they were like, 'Yeah, if it goes really well, you could make X.' And I was like, 'That's not enough money.' 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 were 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.

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 liked 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... I liked the process of writing, but then reading it was sort of a hassle. And so I liked 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 Jordie Hayes, my current co-founder of...

So we met through a mutual friend, Will Manitis, who just sort of identified us as two people in Los Angeles with similar backgrounds. We'd actually both raised money from Andreessen. We'd both raised money from Google. We both had families and kids in Los Angeles. He'd been like deeply viral at certain points with Solana, 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 arms-length relationship with tech where we were never duking it out in the big companies, in the scale-ups and the hyperscalers in the arena.

We were like adjacent to the arena, and we were like, 'Well, 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 structured the guest format so that it leans into 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 today 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. 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 a couple blocks away, they'd probably still do it over Zoom.

It is. It is. I don't know. I think it's seeing eye to eye on a lot of things and then having enough differences of opinion that there's good debates.

So I think it would be... I think if one of us was like pro-tech and the other one was anti-tech, that would be a really hard relationship to maintain. But 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 go at each other's throats and then walk away from having a lot of mutual respect, right? 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 debate over... the debate that a venture capitalist might have, the debate that a founder might have. Okay, 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? Is this company overvalued or undervalued? We don't really disclose like, 'Oh, we think this startup's a 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's just not our equation because we're pro-business and pro-tech.