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Kevin Weil
Founder, Warp Sciences; formerly VP, OpenAI for Science and Chief Product Officer, OpenAI, Warp Sciences

Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell, Duo on Arrival, 100 Really Difficult Phone Calls, Norwegian Gold Scheme

📅 Oct 22, 2026 TBPN 115 MIN 8271 VIEWS 405 SEGMENTS · 6 SPEAKERS
00:00:36 Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell. Matthew Prince is the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, a company focused on internet security and infrastructure. Prince discusses major cybersecurity vulnerabilities, AI’s growing role in finding and defending against threats, and why rapid software updates and industry coordination are essential. He also predicts that surging AI-agent traffic will reshape the internet’s business model through mechanisms such as micropayments. 00:29:12 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 00:38:05 Meta Unveils New Class C Stock 00:47:07 Kevin Weil, founder of Warp Sciences, discusses bu...

What Kevin Weil said

Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.

Kevin Weil, founder of Warp Sciences, announced the company's mission to use AI and robotics to accelerate drug discovery and reshore scientific capabilities from China. He stated that Warp is building next-generation pre-clinical CROs in America, aiming to prevent the loss of the pharma industry. Weil explained that the 3-5 year process of optimizing drug molecules is currently outsourced to China, and Warp aims to bring it back using AI and robotics. He confirmed a $215 million funding round led by Lightspeed, with participation from IVP, Mayfield, Lux, Menlo Ventures, and others. Weil emphasized the need for vertical integration, building from scratch rather than acquiring existing CROs, and highlighted the importance of generating data at scale to train scientific AI models.

Key takeaways

  1. Warp Sciences raised $215 million in a round led by Lightspeed to build robotic labs for drug discovery.
  2. The company is building a next-generation pre-clinical CRO in America to reshore scientific capabilities from China.
  3. Warp Sciences is fully vertically integrated, with chemists, roboticists, mechanical engineers, and AI researchers.
  4. Weil stated that the 3-5 year process of optimizing drug molecules is currently outsourced to China.

Numbers and commitments

FigureWhat it refers toTypeAt
$215 million Funding round for Warp Sciences commitment 57:49
3 to 5 years Duration of drug molecule optimization process timeline 51:00

Chapters

  1. 0:00Warp Sciences mission and vision
  2. 49:00Reshoring scientific capabilities from China
  3. 50:38Economics of robotic labs
  4. 52:49Demand and market growth
  5. 53:56Robotics and vertical integration
  6. 57:16Build versus buy analysis
  7. 57:44Funding announcement

Questions asked in this interview

8
  1. 46:07Get that gong ready. Kevin, how are you doing?
  2. 48:30Just how much of like the drugs coming down our pipelines were actually made outside of the country?
  3. 49:48But how has that played into it or has it been a non-factor?
  4. 52:20Do you imagine you're going to very quickly be, you know, even as you're expanding capacity, like turning away a lot of opportunities just because of how many opportunities there are?
  5. 53:34But what do you think your view is?
  6. 54:39But am I wrong about my intuition there?
  7. 56:45Did you do the build versus buy analysis before embarking on this journey?
  8. 57:44Well, I want to hit the gong. How much did you raise?
John Coogan 0:03 ↗
You're watching TVP. Today's Thursday, October 22nd, 2026. We are live from the TVPl, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have Matthew Prince already with us, the CEO, co-founder of Cloudflare here to break down P2P2 shell. PHP2 shell. Ah, I'm rusty. I wasn't here yesterday. I'm back today. But we're very excited to be joined by Matthew Prince. Let's bring in day, whatever that means. Here he is.
Yes, I was out yesterday. I'm a little rusty. Thank you so much for taking the time, Matthew. How are you doing?
Matthew Prince 0:42 ↗
I'm good. I mean, it's been a busy week and especially busy morning kind of getting the news I'm sure of this out, but really proud of the team at Cloudflare and what we're doing to help make sure that the internet stays safe.
John Coogan 0:56 ↗
Yeah. What actually what is the timeline here? What happened? When did this start in your world? Because I think a lot of people found out about it from your post yesterday or from a number of other posts that went out just yesterday. But it seems like your team is not asleep at the wheel. You've known that this is going to be the year of cyber security risk. You've been doing a lot of things. So take us through your timeline of what I'm wearing my tinfoil hat. You guys were having some big party yesterday.
Matthew Prince 1:20 ↗
We were having we had our customer conference as well. So it was a customer conference.
John Coogan 1:26 ↗
Sounds like a victory.
Matthew Prince 1:30 ↗
There you go. We had a good time. But so we were about two months ago.
John Coogan 1:36 ↗
Okay.
Matthew Prince 1:37 ↗
OpenAI originally reached out to us to let us know that they, in combination using their models but also some work that some security researchers had done, had found a vulnerability in a piece of software called PHP. PHP is a programming language for the web. It's a very popular programming language. About 70% of the web uses it. Popular CMS services like WordPress are built on top of PHP. And the problem with this vulnerability is it was called an RCE or a remote code execution vulnerability. And what that means is that you can send some basic just requests to a server and then essentially take that server over, be able to run your own code on that server. So you could read all the files on the server. You could spy on anything. You know, if someone was typing in usernames and passwords on a website and you'd taken over the server, you'd be able to see those usernames and passwords. You could take it over to do other criminal things like make it part of a botnet, launch denial of service attacks, distribute child pornography. And so the ability to take over a server is extremely bad, and this vulnerability allowed that to happen. Not that long afterwards, Wiz, which is a subsidiary of Google, also discovered a second vulnerability in PHP, which they also disclosed to us. And I think in this case, you know, Google's team and OpenAI's team did exactly the right thing. They quietly worked with industry leaders like Cloudflare to say, 'Hey, we found this problem. How can we clean it up?' And it wasn't just us, you know, they went to Automattic, which is the creator of WordPress. They went to the PHP Foundation, which maintains PHP. They reported it to the United States government. And over the last two months, there's been a concerted effort by lots of organizations to say, how can we get in front of this particular risk? And so at Cloudflare, we implemented for all of our customers for free, quietly behind the scenes without really letting anyone know, a level of protection, and that was true for even our free customers because we think it's important to make sure that the internet stays safe no matter what. That helped protect against that, and that's effectively like a band-aid. You know, if you break a bone, you want to actually get the bone fixed, but in the meantime you might put a sort of a bandage on it. Cloudflare provided that bandage to help buy some time, but anyone that's running a web server today, you know, if it's running PHP, you need to be updating that. It's critically important. The NSA has issued guidance that if for some reason you can't issue the patch, it's actually better to take your server offline than it is to run it naked right now. And we went from seeing, you know, before, you know, it was clear that some details of the vulnerability got leaked, which if you're reporting to that many people, the fact that that was kept secret for as long as it was.
John Coogan 4:29 ↗
Yeah, I was going to say, isn't that somewhat of a miracle that this has been going on for two months and it required coordination between people in tons of different countries and different organizations? Like honestly, some, you know, restore some faith in humanity that people could keep that big of a secret.
Matthew Prince 4:50 ↗
They did, and it was just in the last, you know, 36 hours that we started to see an uptick where clearly something had leaked.
John Coogan 4:59 ↗
Interesting.
Matthew Prince 4:59 ↗
And that then prompted the PHP Foundation to release the patch. The problem is the minute you release the patch it gives enough detail that people can figure out how the exploit happened. So we went from hours before the patch was released, we were seeing thousands of attacks across our network. At this point, we're now seeing millions of attacks per minute across our network where people are trying to compromise servers. And again, you know, Cloudflare's protection is helping. But the real key is if you're running a server right now, get it updated with the latest version of PHP. It's free. It should only take a few minutes to do it. If you're using managed software like WordPress, often it will do it for you automatically. But that's the most important thing that you can do to stay safe right now.
John Coogan 5:46 ↗
What about in the consumer realm? Are there — I've been sort of, you know, I've run into other people who have been like, 'Oh, I've heard about this. Do I need to update my iPhone, update my Chrome tabs?' Like is there anything that breaks out into the consumer world or is all of this just for webmasters, people who are actually serving web services, running servers, or does anything bleed over into consumer just yet?
Jordi Hays 6:14 ↗
People are saying cycle your social security number.
John Coogan 6:18 ↗
Oh yeah. Yeah. Rotate your social security number. I saw that.
Matthew Prince 6:21 ↗
Yeah, I think that in this particular case, you know, the PHP vulnerability really applies to businesses and people running web servers. So there's not as much for the consumer, but you know, as if Testo and the Chain Smokers and Common and one of the worst vulnerabilities the web has ever seen wasn't enough for one week, we also had other vulnerabilities that were disclosed this week. There was a Node.js vulnerability that was also something that probably consumers don't have to care about. The one that consumers should care about more is that it was discovered that one of the key root servers that powers the encryption behind the internet, that they're supposed to be secured with these very long complicated passphrases. They're supposed to be 328 bits at a minimum. Instead, an Indian company that was running some of these root key servers, instead of using 328 bits, they used literally the number four.
John Coogan 7:22 ↗
So their password was less secure than your ATM PIN.
Matthew Prince 7:24 ↗
And the problem with that is that because of —
John Coogan 7:28 ↗
Can we give them the benefit of some 4D chess? Because who would think to guess that? No one would think if you were going to try to brute force it, you would pick a number at least in the four digits. Yeah. And then go from there.
Matthew Prince 7:41 ↗
They had, I think, I can't remember if it was six or eight of these key root server certificates. The most secure password they used was the number 136. So they did, you know, again almost to your ATM PIN. Yeah. At that point —
John Coogan 8:01 ↗
They call that security through obscurity.
Matthew Prince 8:04 ↗
No one. And they just rage quit the product category. Did I see that? I think they just —
John Coogan 8:09 ↗
Yeah, they did. So, but I mean, you can't fire us. You can't fire us. We quit.
Matthew Prince 8:16 ↗
Not how you can ever be trusted is tough. But this is actually one where consumers do have something because these certificates, if somebody could get in the traffic flow, they could pretend to be Google. They could pretend to be your bank. They could trick you into doing a bunch of things. And so what the industry has done is as soon as this happened, your browser, your operating system, distrusted these particular certificates, but until you upgrade your browser, until you upgrade your operating system, then you might still be trusting these certificates and your browser could be spoofed. So I think that right now is a great time when your phone says, 'Hey, do you want me to upgrade overnight?' The answer is yes. When your browser is harassing you to upgrade, like just do it. Takes a few seconds. You're going to be much more secure. And I wish I could say that this was an unusual week and we're never going to see another week like it. I think we're going to see a lot more weeks like this. I think the next two years are going to be incredibly fraught with what again are these new tools that we have that have infinite patience to go look for vulnerabilities finding real problems across the internet. And it's going to feel scary. It's going to feel like the sky is falling. It's going to feel like there's nothing we can do. And I think there are going to be stories that characterize AI as the bad guy. AI is not the bad guy here. AI is the good guy. The AI didn't create these vulnerabilities. AI found them. And I think the question is like if you're living in a house that's got deadly monsters living in every closet, but you don't know they're there. Are you in a better place or a worse place than if you start going through the closets and finding the monsters and killing them? Like it's going to be a lot more frightening to go through and kill the monsters, but you're probably going to get a lot safer. And so I think we're going to see some very scary stories, but there you go. Scary monster music. We're going to see some very scary stories. But the good news is that OpenAI, Anthropic, the Frontier Labs, and then in partnership with companies like Cloudflare are actually killing the monsters off, and I think the internet is going to get more secure.
John Coogan 10:23 ↗
How are attacks evolving? Like are you seeing like swarms in a way that's like — swarm is obviously like this sort of like it's a real thing, but it's also like kind of an idea out of like the Matrix. Like something. Is it that different than historical efforts when there's this kind of vulnerability? Because I imagine you can just like get effectively a directory of every possible website that might have this vulnerability and then run a program.
Matthew Prince 10:59 ↗
Yeah, there's something called a rainbow table. It's basically like every possible password, but that was easily mitigated. But yeah, a for loop with every possible —
John Coogan 11:09 ↗
Are you seeing like rogue swarms of like powered by open weight models that are driving a lot of this or is it just hey there's a vulnerability that impacts 70% of the internet?
Matthew Prince 11:21 ↗
Yeah, I mean so first of all you don't need AI to take advantage of the vulnerability in this case once it's been discovered. So the people who are trying to exploit this now, they're not using models to exploit it. They're just running fairly simple scripts that are just trying to check every single server, every single IP address online to see if it's vulnerable to take it over. What I think has changed is the rate at which attackers can figure out what they do when they find themselves in an environment. So about a year ago, there was a very very popular plugin that plugged into Salesforce that got compromised by a Russian hacker. And it was so broadly deployed that it effectively gave the Russian hacker access to a huge portion of Salesforce's infrastructure and Salesforce's customers. But what was interesting was when you actually studied what the attacker did, they clearly weren't in enterprise sales. So, they didn't really know how Salesforce worked. Sure. And so, they kind of bumbled around like not quite knowing what to do or the fact that they'd stumbled on what was an incredible treasure mine. And as a result, what could have been just a disaster of a hack wasn't nearly as bad. What we're seeing now is if that same hack happened today, the attackers are using AI to say, 'Okay, I found myself in Salesforce. What stuff should I go looking for or stealing or trying to do?' So, the ability to very quickly figure out I'm here, what can I take advantage of, is gotten there. What we're not seeing yet are, you know, I think the example out of OpenAI with the Hugging Face compromise. I mean, that again makes — I mean, it's almost out of science fiction some of the things that are happening there. But I think the good news is that you know the cost of running that type of an attack, an agent swarm like that, is still extremely expensive — hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars for that. And so an organization like OpenAI that's got those resources, the good guys have more resources than the bad guys.
John Coogan 13:35 ↗
Yeah.
Matthew Prince 13:35 ↗
And so for now I think you're actually seeing kind of a very naive use of AI by at least the sort of typical cyber criminal. I think it's probably different when you're looking at nation state actors. I think that if you look at China or Iran, the NSA in the United States, that's a different case, but right now I think that AI is actually helping the good guys more than it's helping the bad guys. We're finding the monsters that are hiding in the closets.
John Coogan 14:02 ↗
What advice would you give? So over the last week we had OpenCode ran into issues and reported being like attacked for basically days on end. Obviously the attackers were going after the token theft. Yeah. Effectively token theft. The modern version of — Railway had massive issues over the last 24 hours. I know of another big inference provider that has been like under attack and like viscerally feeling that for the last three four days. Wow. And that people that everyone would know.
Matthew Prince 14:39 ↗
And this is probably what a lot of these are symptoms of — the attackers are like wow we could do a lot more if we had more compute if we had more AI models. And so stealing tokens, hacking inference providers, that's giving them access to tools. You know, you'd see this before like it's for a long time Cloudflare was an Okta customer. And Okta kept getting hacked over and over again. And Okta was an identity provider. And the reason why was they were going after us and they were going after Coinbase, which was another one of their customers. And again, I think attackers are trying to find their way to whatever is valuable that they can get to online. And I think right now the ability to have more inference, more tokens, is something that attackers are very much longing for. And so they're going to go after a bunch of those providers. And then, to your question of what to do, like you got to just stay up on all of the security patches that are out there. You know, I don't know the details of like the Railway attack, but my hunch is it's probably based on one of these latest vulnerabilities that was out there. And so it's just, you know, you talk about like an OODA loop, which is like how quickly you can adapt versus your attacker. And so at Cloudflare, we're just sort of saying, how can we make that OODA loop faster and faster and faster and faster so that we can adjust incredibly quickly. And part of that is using AI tools and using things that can actually proactively have a swarm of defenders that are looking out for the swarm of attackers. And that's exactly what we're doing at Cloudflare and what we're doing for all of our customers.
John Coogan 16:13 ↗
Do you think that ski resorts are ready for this new wave of cyber vulnerabilities? I'm joking, but I'm actually —
Jordi Hays 16:23 ↗
Yeah, people have been talking about bringing down the grid. If you bring down ski resorts, if you're out getting a couple laps in and the lift grinds to a halt, your first thought might be, oh, is this kind of like a ransom attack?
Matthew Prince 16:37 ↗
Or the snow maker turns on when it's not below freezing and just sprays water all over everyone. It could be horrible things. I mean, and I think that, you know, I have some insight into a certain ski resort operator called Vail and some of the board meeting conversations with the activists and one of them, an alternate person for the Slate guy named Bryce Roberts who's a great VC. I think you've had him on.
John Coogan 17:04 ↗
Yeah, we love Bryce. He's up to be a candidate on Vail and he said have you guys thought about AI at all like in terms of that cuz it's something like you know 30% of questions to AI are about trip planning and like literally everyone in the room scratched their head and said oh we haven't thought about that at all. There's a lot of industries that need some serious modernizing and a lot of management teams that need some serious modernizing and I might point at Vail as being one of them.
Yeah. Last question for me. It seems like the balance between attackers and defenders is going to be increasingly infrastructure driven and I feel like this might change the discussion a little bit maybe not at a national level just around the AI data center buildout because there's a certain amount of just if you have a bigger data center with more GPUs running more inference to secure systems and you're going up against a smaller data center with a similar model or a distilled model that's three months behind like you want as many advantages as possible. And I'm wondering if you think that like raw compute power becomes an important discussion in like the geopolitics of cyber security.
Matthew Prince 18:15 ↗
Yeah. You know, I mean maybe at some level and I think that again I'm encouraged that it's the good guys that have more resources than the bad guys. And that's I think that's going to help the defenders stay in touch. But you've got to have great partnerships between companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and companies like Cloudflare and others in order to make sure that this is going forward. At some level the whole thesis of Cloudflare from the beginning was that if you got enough internet traffic flowing through a system and then you could use machine learning to look for patterns and attacks and threats that you could see things and stop things. And I think we're really good whether that's an attacker working for North Korea or it's a swarm of agents at identifying those things and staying in touch with it. And I think that's why we're seeing such real demand for our services and more and more people signing up for Cloudflare. And again I think it's important to us to say that you don't have to pay us in order to stay safe online. We want to make sure that everyone has the resources regardless of what their budget is. And so, you know, we continue to be committed to this. And again, I wish I could say that this was a really unusual or bad week, but I think for the next two years, we're going to basically have kind of a week like this on average almost every week where big vulnerabilities are getting released. We already know about a number of substantial other vulnerabilities that will come out over the coming weeks or months. And the good news is that we're ahead of them and we're protecting them. And if you want to make sure that you're protected, using a service like Cloudflare is one of the best kind of, you know, band-aids.
John Coogan 19:55 ↗
It's not — you're not making a prediction. It's like you see the pipeline, so you know this is going to happen. And then it also like the more high-profile this trend gets, the more motivated people are going to be to find the next one. And at least one of the security researchers that at least claims to be involved said that it was found originally by type prompting find bad vulnerabilities in PHP.
Matthew Prince 20:20 ↗
No way.
John Coogan 20:21 ↗
That's really it.
Matthew Prince 20:22 ↗
Someone's claiming that who claims to be involved. Who knows? But yes, I mean, but it's again like and it's going to feel really scary. We're going to find a lot of monsters in a lot of closets.
John Coogan 20:33 ↗
But the monsters were there already.
Matthew Prince 20:36 ↗
Yeah. Like they were just waiting to come out and kill us when we weren't expecting it. I would rather we actually be turning it over and so I think —
John Coogan 20:43 ↗
Do you think there has to be some groups that are really upset because they had found these vulnerabilities and have been exploiting them? Like they didn't want it to get out. It's got to be — they're — I mean I've talked to folks at the NSA that are like this sucks. Like you guys are finding —
Matthew Prince 20:59 ↗
I was using this to spy on the nation's enemy.
John Coogan 21:02 ↗
And so and that's again I think that's a — I think that's a — that is a consequence of modernity.
Matthew Prince 21:10 ↗
Yeah. That's all good news because we're finding the monsters, we're killing the monsters. It's going to feel very very scary. It's going to feel like the sky is falling. I think, you know, we're going to come out of this and two years from now, I think it's going to be almost impossible to write buggy code like at least in terms of, you know, the sort of classic divide by zero or off by one or, you know, unconstrained memory glitches. There'll still be business logic code that people will get wrong or machines will get wrong. But like already we see how many of the errors AI is helping us correct. And so even though I think we're going to have a couple of years of really really really bad stories. Yeah. I think that the real trend, the real story that's not going to be popular to say but is true is the internet's going to get a lot more secure and we're all going to be better off because of these tools and how they're helping protect us.
John Coogan 22:04 ↗
That's amazing. That's amazing. I have one last — a couple more years of the most bullish headlines for Cloudflare going to be. There was a lot of debate throughout the year over the pros and cons of these staged rollouts like Mythos goes super viral definitely draws people's attention but a lot of people are like ah I want to use that for my business and then Fable comes out and it's sort of nerfed in cyber security and then Daybreak comes out and there's different ways Glass Wing there's different ways to get into these programs. Looking backwards, it feels like I like the idea of, you know, everyone gets amazing AI, but I also like the idea of everything getting patched before the negative things affect me. I don't necessarily want to need to, you know, inference the most advanced model just to like use the web myself and write hack into the service that I'm using to patch it before I give it my social security number, etc. Like are you happy with the current flow of intelligence breakthroughs staging out getting to you a couple weeks early before something else happens? Is the current model sustainable? Is it correct or does there need to be a rejiggering there?
Matthew Prince 23:14 ↗
Yeah, I mean I would say that you know from our perspective at Cloudflare we have loved the partnerships that we've had with OpenAI, Anthropic, the other leading frontier labs. I think we've gotten trusted access to a lot of the models ahead of time and then we've been able to use that to help, you know, protect more of the web and work in coordination with that. But I do think that it's a tough problem. Like when I meet with European banks or leaders and they're like, well, why don't we get any of these things? I mean, they feel very vulnerable and it's a tough — this is a tough thing to figure out exactly what you do. In this particular case, there are a lot of people who are like, 'Well, why didn't you tell me about this PHP bug earlier?' And it's hard to get that perfectly right. The more people you tell, the more access that you give, the more risk there is that it falls into the hands of someone who will do real harm with it. And so, you know, it's a game of trust in a lot of ways. And I remember when Cloudflare was a small startup, you know, we were always like, 'Why aren't you telling us about the new security vulnerabilities?' Oh, trust us, trust us, trust us. And now, of course, we're a much bigger company. And we do get those things and I get calls from startups like, well, how can I get it, too? And I think it's tough. I don't know that there's a perfect answer. I will say that the fact that this was disclosed almost two months ago, that it gave a lot of organizations the ability to get in front of it and patch it, that's going to have mitigated what could have been just an unmitigated disaster. Yeah. And again, you know, hats off to the team at OpenAI, the team at Google and Wiz for how they handled this. And I think there will always be people who say you could have done something a little bit better, but I think this is — we're not going to be perfect and this was pretty darn good.
John Coogan 25:08 ↗
Well, what is your answer to our third final question? A mutual friend of ours texted me a minute ago asking me to ask you what is your most outlandish prediction for the internet in a decade?
Matthew Prince 25:23 ↗
The business model is going to change fundamentally. So you know we're about to have this massive tragedy of the common problem. So you know if current trends continue in 5 years automated traffic, agent traffic is going to be a thousand times human traffic.
John Coogan 25:41 ↗
Right.
Matthew Prince 25:42 ↗
And to give you some sense the internet almost collapsed when during COVID traffic doubled so a 1000x — bad going to be it's going to be you know someone there's a lot more servers there's a lot more routers there's a lot more bandwidth that has to get provisioned in order for that to work and the question is who's going to pay for it because if I, you know, go to my ChatGPT agent right now and say, 'Hey, where should I have lunch?' It might check a thousand different menus across a thousand different restaurants. And that's burning resources from all of those different places. And yet it only is going to send me to one of them. And so my hunch is that something's got to change in terms of how the internet works. So, my hunch is probably some version of micropayments that every time you access a resource, your agent pays, you know, a 10,000th of a penny to be able to see the menu. And then there's probably some sort of a trade where if you are willing to tell the restaurant what it is that you're looking for, what your agent is doing, you're willing to reveal something, that price goes down, maybe even free. In some cases, the site might actually pay you to come visit it. But that will then lead to is kind of going to be the next version of advertising, which is how do you advertise to agents? If I know that an agent is coming to my travel site and they're specifically, you know, on behalf of their user looking for, you know, a Hawaiian vacation to a five-star resort and I know that there's, you know, a five-star resort on Maui that has availability and a good price. Like matching that together, I think is going to be a resource. And that's going to be I think a big part of how we've solved what is otherwise just a massive tragedy of the common problem because otherwise like why wouldn't your agent check literally every website on earth to come back and say, you know what, for lunch today you should go to Wendy's. Yeah. So and that's not a good use of time. So, I think that's going to be the most interesting thing to figure out. And I think the most interesting question certainly of the next five years, I think we'll probably have to have figured it out before the end of the decade. Yeah. Is what's going to be the future business model of the internet and that's what we're spending a lot of time in.
John Coogan 27:54 ↗
That's exciting. I love that.
Matthew Prince 27:55 ↗
That's very exciting.
John Coogan 27:56 ↗
I had a funny moment the other day. I was doing some research on this car and I went to check the source. Like I was doing it in Chat. I went to check the source and it was on like recipes 365 and clearly someone had used AI to just like generate content for like a specific niche and I'm realizing I can't lean on this.
Jordi Hays 28:17 ↗
Hey, they're cooking up the recipe for a great car now.
Matthew Prince 28:20 ↗
At least you're looking at the sources. I mean, we're seeing that fewer and fewer people going back to the original sources and like for journalism like journalism matters. Like what you guys do matters and someone's got to pay your bills and in your case like it's OpenAI. And but I think that's probably going to be the case in a lot of cases like how you still going to need reporters that are going out there and people feeding it and we've got to have some system that allows the people who are doing that work to get compensated because I think you guys deserve to eat.
John Coogan 28:54 ↗
Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Matthew Prince 28:56 ↗
Great to see you.
John Coogan 28:57 ↗
Great to hang out.
Matthew Prince 28:58 ↗
Good luck out there.
John Coogan 29:00 ↗
We'll see you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.
Jordi Hays 29:11 ↗
Tyler had you beat there.
John Coogan 29:12 ↗
I know.
Jordi Hays 29:13 ↗
He really warmed up yesterday. By the end, he was dialed. Well, let's check in with the markets if we can pull up this video.
John Coogan 29:18 ↗
Okay. Okay. Yeah, the show yesterday was good. But I think Tyler got a little bit of a — Yeah, we'll watch this. RJC says, 'Just another day in NASDAQ.' I like how Matthew Prince is like, 'It's really important that you guys do serious journalism and make sense of what's going on. What's real? What's fake? You got to tell people.' And we're like, 'Let's pull up an AI slob video.' This is Iconic, the Muse mascot, of course, dancing and firing off a pistol.
Jordi Hays 29:46 ↗
This is the latest Alexander Wong, I assume. It's great. This is it. It really the meme has just grown so much. This is the benefit of funny mascot. Anthropomorphization of AI. It was debated for a week there. Alex Wang said, 'No, thank you. I am going full anthropomorphization. Let's anthropomorphize these AIs.' Yeah. The show yesterday was good. Tyler did a good job, but I think he had the deck stacked in his favor. You had a stacked lineup. You got Nesh Aurora on, Aiden Smith from Flapping Airplanes, Oculiar, Max from Lora. It was easy mode for Tyler. I want to see Tyler do a show with just Jordy tier list of a mansion where Jordy doesn't want to say his true opinion because he knows the guy that owns the house. That's what makes a great co-host. If you want to elevate from subhost to co-host, I think that's what you got to do. You got to put the screws to Jordy when he doesn't want to give his true take and get him to crash out. That's what I want to see. But no, fantastic job.
John Coogan 30:51 ↗
Yeah. You didn't get me to crash out.
Jordi Hays 30:53 ↗
No. No.
John Coogan 30:53 ↗
But you know who did crash out? Beat him. You know who did crash out?
Jordi Hays 30:56 ↗
Who? Who?
John Coogan 30:57 ↗
Trevor Milton.
Jordi Hays 30:58 ↗
Trevor Milton.
John Coogan 30:59 ↗
Crashed out in the —
Jordi Hays 31:00 ↗
Well, you crashed out.
John Coogan 31:01 ↗
I crashed out and he responded.
Jordi Hays 31:04 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 31:04 ↗
So, we talked about Trevor Milton's new jet company. He had an announcement, a launch, an event where the plane on its wheels or potentially the debate over that.
Jordi Hays 31:21 ↗
The plane was a full scale mockup. It was not meant to be a real plane.
John Coogan 31:29 ↗
They have a real plane separately. This is a build of the new plane.
Jordi Hays 31:33 ↗
Yes. Yes.
John Coogan 31:34 ↗
Okay. And anyway, so we posted the video and what did Trevor actually say?
Jordi Hays 31:40 ↗
He was firing off in the comments.
John Coogan 31:43 ↗
He responded to our video saying, 'Haters are going to hate. We already have more than 50 on order by real buyers.' Not bad. It might be the most successful jet launch to date. Keep on talking smack. It makes us work harder and we love the trolling hate. Living rent-free in your head. He was also going back and forth with some other people.
Jordi Hays 32:05 ↗
Yeah, he was in the comments. A lot of people were saying definitely not buying a plane from Trevor Milton and he responded we wouldn't sell you one.
John Coogan 32:16 ↗
And I go the other way. I think finally a plane exists for the thrill seeker. You know, flying private such a luxury, but we know that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you got to put it all on the line. You got to climb Mount Everest. You got to be risking it all on the track, skydiving. You got to be into extreme sports. So, a plane that's a little rough around the edges is going to bring you back down to earth. It's going to give you some thrill, some excitement, get your heart racing, and for a certain buyer, that's going to be very attractive. So, I think that's actually probably a risk to the upside in this case.
Jordi Hays 32:50 ↗
So, when others are fearful —
John Coogan 32:52 ↗
You got to be greedy when others are fearful on these planes. Okay.
Jordi Hays 32:56 ↗
Okay. Another media company, the VIP seat, said we were there for the unveil, posted about how poor the presentation was, and he started attacking everyone on X.
John Coogan 33:07 ↗
Instagram.
Jordi Hays 33:08 ↗
You're the only clown who would be dumb enough to allege that. Literally, the entire NBAA has been raving about us by the thousand and landed almost a billion in orders. What else did he say? A billion orders. Keep posting your Tesla troll wannabe comments and we'll keep building an incredible plane that you only wish you could fly. Your hate fuels us. Living rent-free in your head. So he's living rent-free in a lot of heads. The plane was supported by a post and again this was a mockup. But when Trevor Milton responded to the picture of the post and said you're literally misleading the world. See the real picture, at least report honestly, LMAO. And he posted a different picture of the plane.
John Coogan 33:57 ↗
Different picture of the plane, but most importantly understand the aesthetics of what he just did. This is elite posting because he should have photos of this plane saved to his camera roll. He didn't. He went to what appears to be Google images or something, found a landscape picture of the plane, took a screenshot of it in portrait mode to make the image of the plane extremely small. Didn't crop it out so you can see his battery level and the time at which he took this screenshot. That is just a level of elite posting that you very rarely see on the internet these days. Most people, even if they go for the screenshot, they'll do the courtesy crop before they share the screenshot. And maybe they won't crop out the perfect crop.
Jordi Hays 34:42 ↗
Yeah. Occasionally, some of the chrome, some of the extra buttons might get in there, a little watermark might sneak in, but you're still doing the person the courtesy of cropping it down so they can see the image basically full screen if they want. He didn't do that. He drops the portrait screenshot of a landscape photo. That's elite uncosting. I don't know how else to put it.
John Coogan 35:00 ↗
I was somewhat confused because the picture was posted by Preston Holland. And he said, 'You're literally misleading the world. See the real picture. At least report honestly. LMAO.' And I was very confused by this cuz it seemed like he was implying that that wasn't how they presented the plane. But I went and checked and saw actual video of the plane in the post. And so he seems to be alleging that this poster, the VIP seat, Preston, is misleading the world when in fact that is just a real picture of the presentation. Maybe the wing had a post.
Jordi Hays 35:35 ↗
Maybe it could be a conspiracy where someone went to the presentation, took a video of the plane without the post, took that video, loaded it into After Effects, Cinema 4D, Houdini, an advanced 3D modeling software, modeled a post, composited that into the video, and then uploaded the final product after blending it in. Perfect.
John Coogan 35:53 ↗
We got eyewitness reports. Zack Dbo says, 'Trevor is like the kid in school who always tries, studies all the time, and just never passes the test.' And Trevor says, 'Except I did and built the first ever production hydrogen and battery electric semi-truck from the ground up that went from idea to production 5 years before Tesla.' Yeah, the production. That is another elite misspell. Production five years before Tesla. Build six companies, three successful and three not. Broke the world speed record for light jets as a pilot.
Jordi Hays 36:28 ↗
That's sick.
John Coogan 36:29 ↗
That's — we got to fact check that but if that's true —
Jordi Hays 36:33 ↗
And launched the most advanced jet in the world. Incredible history and achievements. What have you done? And Zach just replies you're chop dunk.
John Coogan 36:41 ↗
Which I thought was a little funny and a little rude.
Jordi Hays 36:46 ↗
Trevor can come on the show.
John Coogan 36:47 ↗
Give him the benefit of the doubt.
Jordi Hays 36:48 ↗
Trevor can come on the show but I really think that he should spend time with Nathan Fielder.
John Coogan 36:54 ↗
Oh, yes.
Jordi Hays 36:55 ↗
It needs to become —
John Coogan 36:56 ↗
You can fly anything cuz Nathan's a pilot. Nathan can fly it.
Jordi Hays 36:59 ↗
That's literally the perfect —
John Coogan 37:00 ↗
It's the perfect — You can see everything, too. Oh, hopefully.
Jordi Hays 37:04 ↗
So, Trevor, you're welcome on the show, but —
John Coogan 37:06 ↗
But we do have to live with you for two weeks before you come on the show.
Jordi Hays 37:09 ↗
So, for the record setting flight, I think he was on board, but he was not the pilot.
John Coogan 37:14 ↗
Wait, what? He said he's the pilot. Dude, this guy is constantly —
Jordi Hays 37:18 ↗
That's the little fib.
John Coogan 37:19 ↗
He's constantly — I'm not going to go and say —
Jordi Hays 37:21 ↗
Maybe it's a white lie.
John Coogan 37:22 ↗
I'm not going to say he's lying, but he's veering towards fibbing at least on a couple occasions just in this one Instagram thread.
Jordi Hays 37:29 ↗
Stretching the truth a little bit. I want to see him behind the sticks if he's stretching the truth twice.
John Coogan 37:36 ↗
How much can you actually push a plane when you're the pilot? Can you just like floor it and go a little bit faster than you should? Is that an option? Can you go up high and then go down and put the engines on max and just like it's dangerous, but you can actually break the speed of sound in a Gulf Stream if you risk it. Is that possible? I don't know.
Jordi Hays 37:57 ↗
No idea.
John Coogan 37:57 ↗
We'll find out because we're going to make Tyler do it. Anyway, let's move on to CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Meta is introducing new class C stock. The plan is to distribute one class C share for every existing A or B share at —
the start of the next year. So, it's basically a two-for-one stock split. It's not a fundraising opportunity, doesn't make Zuckerberg richer, and it doesn't dilute anyone's ownership percentage, but it does have a bunch of interesting knock-on effects. And basically, there's two wildly different narratives. I sent you both of these posts, and I was like, it's the same story, but the New York Times and Semaphore have completely different rationale for what's going on. So, I wanted to get to the bottom of it. We'll do this quickly before Kevin Wheel joins at 11:45. So this is not the first time they've proposed this Class C stock. It happened in 2016. Meta, which was then called Facebook, of course, proposed creating non-voting Class C shares. The reasoning back then was that Mark Zuckerberg said, "Hey, I'm doing the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. I'm giving away a lot of my money. I'm doing a lot of philanthropy. I want to do both. I want to be able to run Meta as the sole decision maker with the super voting stock and be able to not be fireable and be able to have control over the company that I founded. And I want the super voting, but I also want to be able to sell down my economic position or donate it to Chan Zuckerberg. They can sell it to fund philanthropic initiatives, build hospitals, do a bunch of great stuff." And so he tried to do this, actually got challenged by shareholders. There was a Delaware trial that was scheduled, but Facebook withdrew the proposal in September of 2017 before that trial. And after the trial, Zuck was like, "I don't even need to sell because my stock's ripping." He actually said this. He said, "The share price appreciation in Meta has allowed me to fund everything with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative," which is probably true because at a certain point you're just like, "What? I have to deploy $50 billion in nonprofits." It's like there's only so many projects you can do before stuff gets unwieldy. And so he was probably in a pretty good place, but it was still an interesting motivation and didn't go through. Then so the goal, the overarching goal hasn't really changed in the last decade. The goal is to allow Zuckerberg to sell or donate or pay taxes with the economic portion of his Meta stake without losing control over the company that he founded two decades ago. So in the intervening years things have come up: tax bills, philanthropic opportunities, AI buildouts, and Zuck needs to manage his control against these issues as they arise. And so the NYT tells the story as basically entirely tax related, which is interesting because there's obviously a lot of different things going on. So the New York Times said Mr. Zuckerberg has been negotiating with Meta's board since July over dinner with board members on September 9th. He effectively gave them an ultimatum: if a deal wasn't struck, he would sell his home in Palo Alto and the listing would be public. And so I assume what he was doing here was like all the other Meta board members have huge homes in Palo Alto and if he sells his, it's going to tank their real estate prices. So he's saying I'm going to... I assume that that was the veiled threat.
Jordi Hays 41:14 ↗
Do you think he's trying to have his cake and eat it, too?
John Coogan 41:16 ↗
I think he is actually. I think that's exactly what's happening.
Matthew Prince 41:20 ↗
I think this might serve multiple purposes. Yes, but the market will probably say, "Yeah, go ahead. Have some cake. Eat it, too." I don't think they'll care because for a long time, you bought Meta Class A shares. So, he has Class B, which have 10 votes per share. You bought Class A shares, which have one vote per share. Now, you're going to get Class C that has zero votes per share. Never mattered because you were never going to get more than 50%. The votes never really showed... they never really sold meaningful voting stock. And so when Meta goes to the market, investors just say, what is the economic opportunity, what is the economic return? And so in theory you can go to the market with something that's preferred plus a board seat. We do this all the time in Silicon Valley. We say, yeah, we're selling 20% of the company, you get a board seat, you get information rights, you get pro rata, you get a million things. It's so much value and we're only going to charge you $100 million for that or whatever a startup's selling for. Meta will do the same thing. Sure, the shares might be slightly less valuable because they have zero votes instead of one vote. Realistically, the buyers of this are only interested in the financials. They don't care about the votes. So, it doesn't really matter.
John Coogan 42:35 ↗
So what's your takeaway? You think he wants to scratch two itches at once?
Matthew Prince 42:39 ↗
Yeah. I mean, I do think he cares about the billionaire tax and I do think that it's completely rational to get out of California before it hits. And I'm surprised that this is even a discussion. I thought that the reason he bought that Florida home was that he was going to claim residency outside of California as of 2026. It seems like this was mostly going over throughout the year, but if the tax passed, it would be retroactive. He would still be on the hook for it, but at least he could challenge it in court. But it's funny because it was like bad when... it would be litigated and then during that time he would leave. And so you would have this like worst case scenario that one-time 5%. The interesting thing is that the Google co-founders have done the exact same thing. They've done a stock split and they've maintained voting control while relocating to Florida, avoiding the billionaire tax potentially. But no one really cares because Sundar is the face of the company. The interesting thing is like the board, the way the New York Times frames it is like the board wanted Zuck not to sell his Palo Alto home because it would be a negative signal to the employees. No, not the fake reason I was joking about.
John Coogan 43:47 ↗
No.
Matthew Prince 43:48 ↗
What are you laughing at?
Jordi Hays 43:49 ↗
I'm just laughing at Trey. He wants both birds in the bush to be in his hand.
John Coogan 43:55 ↗
Yes. But let's say you're a board member, do you care if Mark Zuckerberg can't spend more than 180 days a year in the headquarters where all the researchers are, where they're building MSL, where they're, you know, building Muse? Does he need to be on site?
Matthew Prince 44:13 ↗
I think he has to just want to be like... he is the only, not the only one, of a very, very small group of people running a company at that scale that is like truly in founder mode. No elite founder that I've ever met says, yeah, I love working remotely. I love being away from my team for half the year.
Jordi Hays 44:36 ↗
And he probably travels a ton.
John Coogan 44:37 ↗
So it's much more like the reward is probably like...
Jordi Hays 44:40 ↗
Yeah, kind of do whatever you want.
Matthew Prince 44:42 ↗
Yeah, like live wherever you want, but you can imagine he's the one being like, I want to be in the office as many days as possible with the team.
John Coogan 44:51 ↗
That was not the NYT report. The NYT report was that he wants to avoid getting diluted past 50%, losing control of the company because he has to spend 186 days a year in Florida and can't be on site in Menlo Park that often and would have to be more remote. And he's like, "Look, if it's between being in the arena in the Menlo Park office a ton and losing control because of this tax, I'm choosing Florida 305."
Jordi Hays 45:20 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 45:21 ↗
Mr. Worldwide.
Potentially. That was at least the debate, the way it was put to the board, and now it's a non-issue because they are going to issue the Class C stock. So, if he does get hit with a 5% tax, he'll sell the economic stake, not the controlling stake, and he'll be able to stay in TBD Labs in the building. I don't know why you're watching, but it's interesting because both of these rationales are completely justifiable from like the PR lens of framing, which is like, of course, leave California if they're going to tax you and you can just go to Florida. And then also like, of course, issue a bunch of equity if you have a really... if there's a new technology that you can actually invest against.
Jordi Hays 46:02 ↗
Make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
John Coogan 46:04 ↗
Yes, Jordi.
Matthew Prince 46:07 ↗
Yes. Without issuing some new equity. But this was the critique of Google. They have a hundred billion dollars in cash. They don't spend it. They're just returning it to investors. They are stagnated. They're out of ideas. Now we're in the era of there's tons of new ideas. There's tons of new ways to deploy capital at a high rate of return. Go and invest. There's a debate over Meta's ROI on AI capex. But like at least the company is thinking like, let's go big. Let's not be the stagnation company and let's not just buy back our stock and pay out cash to shareholders. Let's go pursue the next great thing. Let's go try and do something bold. And so both of these stories are framed, at least a lot of people are, oh, it's bad. But I see them both as like, yeah, totally rational and very good for a leader to be doing that in tech. Anyway, we have our next guest here. But first, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Kevin, the founder of Warp Sciences, launching Warp Sciences. Get that gong ready. Kevin, how are you doing?
Kevin Weil 47:13 ↗
Hey guys, welcome back. Good to see you again.
John Coogan 47:16 ↗
Good to see you again. It's been far too long. Everyone, it's been way too long. Congratulations.
Kevin Weil 47:21 ↗
We've been busy.
John Coogan 47:22 ↗
Yeah, seems like it. Cooking. Huge acceleration. Talk about the vision, the mission of the company, what you're building, and introduce the company to us.
Kevin Weil 47:34 ↗
Yeah, I'd love to. So, Warp uses AI and robotics to help the world discover new medicines faster. We're building robotic labs to do science at scale and we're doing it here in America. There are two big things that we believe. The first is that robotics and robotic labs are going to accelerate science. Partly because you can just run more experiments when you have labs operating 24/7. But also because these kind of labs can generate data at huge scale to train amazing AI models for science. The second thing: we need to reshore scientific capabilities from China so that we don't lose our pharma industry the way that we did solar, drones, and manufacturing. And there's one solution to both of these things, which is we are building a next-generation pre-clinical CRO, a contract research organization. We're doing it here in America. It means we don't develop drugs of our own. We're building the infrastructure for everybody else who does so that they can go faster.
Jordi Hays 48:30 ↗
Yep. What's happening like over the last year? I heard some number about how much like US and sort of allied pharma companies in allied countries are spending on like Chinese licensing, Chinese pharmaceutical advancements. Like what more can you share on that front? Just how much of like the drugs coming down our pipelines were actually made outside of the country?
Kevin Weil 49:00 ↗
Almost all of them had big parts of their programs that happened in China. It very much rhymes with what we did with the manufacturing industry where in the early days it's like a bunch of sensible local decisions where you're like, "Oh, well, this is low-skilled labor, it can happen more cheaply elsewhere, so we'll move it out." And then over time it becomes not just low-skilled labor but, you know, there's innovation that happens and suddenly our muscles atrophy, there's growth, and all of a sudden we can't manufacture a lot of the things we need. There's this amazing quote from Andy Grove from like years ago when he was running Intel. He said, "Abandoning today's commodity manufacturing can lock you out of tomorrow's emerging industry." It happened exactly in manufacturing and it is on the way to happening in pharma and we can't let it.
Jordi Hays 49:48 ↗
So with manufacturing, I remember the story of de-Americanization, de-industrialization as driven by two factors. One is what you said, lower labor costs abroad. But two is, it's dirty NIMBYism. I don't want the smoky steel mill in my backyard. Let's put it halfway across the world where I don't have to see it or worry about it or think about the pollution. With CROs, is NIMBYism a factor whatsoever? I feel like no one would care. But how has that played into it or has it been a non-factor?
Kevin Weil 50:23 ↗
I don't think that's a huge factor here. I think it's been much more the first that you identified. It's the cost and it's this feeling of, oh well, maybe this won't be so strategic, and then of course it turns out that it's massively strategic. We don't want to lose the ability to turn ideas into medicines here in the United States.
Jordi Hays 50:38 ↗
Yeah. So then on the labor cost, it feels like by leaning into higher volume testing driven by robotics, you can be more competitive on the economic side. So I would imagine that within, I don't know what your timeline is, a year or two, like on a cost per experiment, you would be competitive internationally very quickly. Correct.
Kevin Weil 51:00 ↗
Yeah. And so just to step back because I bet a bunch of people don't know how these processes work. So let's say the three of us go start a biotech company. We're going to develop new medicines, we're going to try and cure a particular form of cancer. You usually start with some biological target, right? We might say it's usually a protein. So we might say, you know, maybe because of Jordi's grad school research, we've got, you know, you either want to accelerate or inhibit some protein. Sure. And you've got that idea, you find a molecule that maybe sort of does it, but it probably is toxic or it's not soluble, so the body, you know, can't process it the right way, or it's not potent, so instead of taking, you know, a tiny amount of it as a pill, you have to take a kilogram of it, which, you know, all of these things disqualify it as a drug. Yeah. And so the next step in the process is we would go through 3 to 5 years of making variations of that molecule to try to optimize it, to make it more potent, to make it more soluble, to make it less toxic. So there's this like 3 to 5 year process and that entire process is outsourced to China. And that's the problem and that's what we're bringing back. And the only way you're going to bring it back, to your point about economics, is if you do it a different way. You've got to use AI and robotics and that's what we're doing.
Jordi Hays 52:20 ↗
Talk about like how you see demand over the next couple years. I can imagine in the same way that we're seeing an explosion of new cybersecurity vulnerabilities, we might see an explosion of new like pretty promising even like concepts or ideas for new drugs. Do you imagine you're going to very quickly be, you know, even as you're expanding capacity, like turning away a lot of opportunities just because of how many opportunities there are?
Kevin Weil 52:49 ↗
Yeah. I think this is the exciting thing about where we are. This is a real existing industry. Billions of dollars are going right now overseas to these players to help develop every drug that you know that you ever see or take. And so there's already a big market for it and every player would prefer to have that done in the US where they have, you know, strong IP guarantees and everything else. And to your point, you've got lots of exciting new players in AI. Every one of the frontier labs is getting involved which I think is amazing. And you've got all kinds of new startups that are using AI to do bio. I think that's only going to accelerate. So there's not just a big market today. There's a big and growing market going forward.
Jordi Hays 53:34 ↗
On the robotics side, how much opportunity... like what is the opportunity to pull stuff off the shelf? I'm assuming there's like a ton of companies working specifically on that and you can sort of acquire existing robotic tools, or I imagine a big part of this will be building your own. But what do you think your view is?
Kevin Weil 53:56 ↗
Yeah, there'll be some of each. There is a lot happening. I mean, this is one of the reasons why this is like the why now for this company is robotics is just at the beginning of the S-curve that we've seen AI, you know, more broadly go on. And so like the capabilities are increasing at an incredible rate. For us, we're going to be super pragmatic. If there's something that we can build or that we can buy that helps us go faster, helps us automate more of the process, then for sure we'll do it. But I don't think that it's all out there ready to be bought. I think this is going to have to be a build from the ground up. Which is why we are totally vertically integrated. We have chemists on the team. We have roboticists. We have mechanical engineers. We have AI researchers. And I think that's the only way that this company's going to be successful.
Jordi Hays 54:39 ↗
Can you talk about the shape of that S-curve? My intuition is that we saw sort of a fast takeoff in software vulnerabilities because you can run PHP in a virtual machine and you can hammer it with a ton of different exploits that you're inferencing pretty quickly, inferences pretty fast. And everything can be done in this closed loop that happens so quickly. And right now in bio, maybe it's a week to run an experiment, get it back, maybe you bring that down to a day, maybe an hour, but even if there's a few minutes of timeline, you're looking at an order of magnitude slower than software. So I would assume a little bit slower of a takeoff. But am I wrong about my intuition there?
Kevin Weil 55:24 ↗
No, I think this is exactly why even as we're seeing AI completely remake software engineering, and you're seeing AI do things like solve Navier-Stokes and make progress on the Riemann hypothesis, we haven't seen the same level of sort of mastery in the physical sciences, in chemistry and biology and material science. It's exactly the reason that you say. And that's one of the reasons that it's so important that we develop robotic labs, right? It's both we need to reshore this from China and this is the way that you generate data at scale that will allow us to build the next generation of incredible scientific AI models. Right. And because there's nothing... I can't think of very many things more important than seeing that kind of acceleration that we've seen in software and math, but in biology, in chemistry, and drug discovery instead.
Jordi Hays 56:17 ↗
And it might be multiplicative, like if you shorten the time for the loop and then you're applying the models faster, you actually get an exponential there that you see results very quickly.
Kevin Weil 56:28 ↗
Exactly. I mean, the thing that's going to come when AI is able to develop and to design more drugs is then we're going to need to test way more drugs and that will I think invariably require a physical component. But that physical component also generates really valuable data and so there's absolutely a loop here.
John Coogan 56:45 ↗
How did you... did you ever explore the idea of what Ravi Gupta is doing where he acquired a business? Like you're able to raise a lot of money. You have a storied career in Silicon Valley. Did you ever go down the path of like maybe we should buy a CRO that already exists or buy some company and turn it around or expand it in some way versus build everything from scratch? Did you do the build versus buy analysis before embarking on this journey?
Kevin Weil 57:16 ↗
Yeah, it's a really good question and we did. We talked about it. I just think it's very tough to sort of remake and re-out a business that has worked a particular way for decades. Like I said, most CROs aren't hiring AI researchers and roboticists. So I think you just need to build from scratch with the idea that you're looking to automate this from day one and that you're trying to find these different loops and scaling laws in the process to get there.
John Coogan 57:44 ↗
Well, I want to hit the gong. How much did you raise? Tell us about the fundraise.
Kevin Weil 57:49 ↗
We raised... Oh, wait. Go for it. We raised 215 million.
John Coogan 57:56 ↗
You're usually on for product releases and stuff. That might be your first gong hit on the show.
Kevin Weil 58:01 ↗
Yeah, I was going to say I think it's my third or fourth time on the show. It's my first gong.
John Coogan 58:05 ↗
Yes.
Kevin Weil 58:05 ↗
Yeah. We raised 215 million. Lightspeed led. We had folks like IVP, Mayfield, Lux, Menlo Ventures, Scribble Ventures, a bunch of amazing folks. And then a bunch of angels that I have worked with and worked alongside: Fidji Simo, Brian Armstrong, Mark Chen, Alex Gorsky, Sarah Frier. So it's just we feel really lucky. We got a lot of amazing people with us.
John Coogan 58:31 ↗
Well, now we got to go build right now. Now the important part.
Kevin Weil 58:35 ↗
Of course. Of course. But we're glad.
Jordi Hays 58:37 ↗
I'm so happy you're doing this. It's really, really important work and I can imagine your phone's going to be ringing off the hook. This feels like squarely... this just feels like the need right now as so much of the industry is now focused on, hey, how do we apply this technology in a way that hopefully we'll get a better response from people than, you know, short AI videos and things like that.
Kevin Weil 59:02 ↗
For sure. Yeah. Well, I mean the response today has been awesome but now we got to put our heads down and go build and I hope we get to come back and talk more when we do.
John Coogan 59:10 ↗
Yeah. Can't wait. Congratulations. Congrats to the whole team on launch.
Kevin Weil 59:13 ↗
Thank you guys. Great to see you.
John Coogan 59:14 ↗
Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Public. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on Public. Our next guest is joining in just a minute. But we have some big news. The iPhone Duo will allow you to scroll Reels in TikTok concurrently. It was long speculated.
Jordi Hays 59:40 ↗
I was thinking do this.
John Coogan 59:41 ↗
Look, when I started seeing some of the images come out, I thought it was DOA, but seeing this, I think there's a... So Jordi ordered one just for this feature, right? No. Oh, yeah. It's brain... No, his thesis was that he will actually be less addicted to scrolling content because it's more inconvenient to actually open it up and that you will use it. It'll have some dumb phone like features and then when you open it up, I don't know. What do you think? You think this...
Jordi Hays 1:00:10 ↗
It doesn't make any sense because there's still a screen on the front so you can use it while not opening it.
John Coogan 1:00:14 ↗
But it's a smaller screen and it's a less convenient screen. So you'll be like, "Ah, I don't really..."
Jordi Hays 1:00:17 ↗
Why is it less convenient?
John Coogan 1:00:18 ↗
Oh, because it's smaller and it's like more square. It's not as like easy to just have in your hand like a phone. That's what I... I don't know. Daniel Storm has a callback. Texting is really nice on the Duo. Do either of you get this reference? So, this is texting in an Excel sheet. This is from a music video from like the 90s when maybe 2000s when... I actually don't know the full reference, but this is from I think it's a Nelly video where someone... if you scroll down you can see someone texting on a Nokia. Keep going. Keep going. You'll see the phone. Keep going. Ball knowledge elite there. That's one. This is a screenshot from a music video. I believe a Nelly video where the female character in the music video is supposed to be texting "where you at, hoe, when you get this" but is just in a spreadsheet because the crew was like we need to show her texting and they chose an Excel spreadsheet which is kind of a crazy feature for this Nokia phone back then. Who knew that you could be doing DCFs on a Nokia. Pretty crazy advanced technology.
Jordi Hays 1:01:29 ↗
I don't even think Excel works well on an iPhone.
John Coogan 1:01:33 ↗
No, this is so like the stagnation is absolutely brutal.
Jordi Hays 1:01:36 ↗
Yeah, it's insane.
John Coogan 1:01:37 ↗
Anyway, we have MC later from Cognition Industries, new initiative from Cognition joining us. Welcome to the show. The new head of Cognition Industries. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Please, since it's your first time on the show, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and then I'd love to take everyone through Cognition Industries and the strategy.
Matthew Prince 1:02:00 ↗
Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me on. So, I'm a longtime fan of the show and also a friend of Dylan of the show with whom I worked at Uniswap. So really excited to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, so I've been in Frontier Tech for a long time and tell you a little about my story. I was president of Uniswap, started a stablecoin company, sold to Coinbase, and then as I was thinking about what was most exciting in the world, I felt like Cognition was one of the most powerful and exciting companies to be part of. I'd known Scott for a couple years. He'd actually been like a beta tester of Uniswap products and they asked me to come start. Yeah, he was... yes, we had some of the biggest market makers in the world and there's one guy in a basement and that was Scott Wu who now has a very big company not in a basement. Wild. And he asked me when it comes to our Cognition Industries.
John Coogan 1:02:45 ↗
Okay. So what is Cognition Industries? I thought Cognition was the cognition industries of cognition but it seems like there's a new initiative, new group, new sub-company. What is the structure? What is the mandate of industrialists?
Matthew Prince 1:02:58 ↗
Yes, there are plenty of industrialists in the world who are all trying to figure out how they can change their businesses with AI, right? As well as small startups and emerging companies. And what that looks like is a little different for every company. And so what we found is that you guys talk about diffusion on this show all the time. And so what we found is that this diffusion needs partnership. It needs everything from partnership and what security means for a financial services company versus a healthcare company. To how you can reimagine vertical software in a completely different way and build totally new products. Now you have software abundance. So I'm hiring a team of former founders to lead each industry vertical and really reimagine what could be possible in an industry that they've been building in, selling in for a long time now that you have thousands of agents at your disposal and the world's largest distribution ready to drive change.
John Coogan 1:03:49 ↗
So, I mean that makes so much sense. There was this recent reporting that Bank of America hired a ton of people just to patch like Mythos-related bugs and there's clearly unique needs in all different industries. You're hiring a bunch of founders in each category. I think that's a brilliant strategy, very modern, but what will they be doing? What is going to be replicated across Cognition versus siloed in a particular vertical? Is it product changes? Is it marketing, go-to-market? What needs to live within a specific pod versus be shared across the entire organization these days?
Matthew Prince 1:04:26 ↗
Yeah. So we'll start with go-to-market because there's a lot of just like showing up like you understand and know an industry, right? And I think that's really important, right? So we're kind of in this era of enterprise adoption where it's like the world's best university appeared next to your company and you welcomed in all the interns but you didn't like give them projects and like direction on what to do. And so we're now showing up and saying look, I want you know our team in Cognition Industries show like someone's built a business in telco, they built a business in healthcare, they have a sense of what providers versus payers versus life sciences companies want and need, and we'll start to build out starting with go-to-market, sales and marketing, and then really packaging the primitives of Devin to build industry-specific products. But it's not a separate standalone like conglomerate or something like that. We are not competing, it is all like serving customers and helping them grow, not like building a separate...
Jordi Hays 1:05:16 ↗
Yeah, I'm sure some people shuddered and thought I don't want Cognition in my industry, some of the customers. But yeah, I just feel like the biggest thing is like right now AI is exciting to most people, also very confusing to most people, especially outside of tech. And so if you don't have that vertical approach, any customer that you're speaking to is probably getting pitched like a million AI for XYZ industry like verticalized products. The product itself might be inferior, but that person is leading and saying this is our focus, this is what we do, right? And so I think it makes sense to have somebody that can lead that and actually speak the language and bring experience from the industry.
John Coogan 1:05:58 ↗
Yeah. How do you think about the long tail of industries versus like the ones that are going to drive power law results? I can imagine that finance, technology-enabled firms are huge buyers. The long tail of like florists is probably like a smaller opportunity. But how deep do you want to go down the long tail?
Matthew Prince 1:06:28 ↗
Yeah, you're right. It starts with businesses where software is central to the business. I haven't thought about florists yet. Actually, there's a bunch that we haven't prioritized yet, but florists definitely wasn't even in the below-the-line list.
Jordi Hays 1:06:39 ↗
Intelligence for flowers.
Matthew Prince 1:06:41 ↗
Let's make it happen.
Jordi Hays 1:06:42 ↗
Dog walkers. Other niche businesses we can think about.
John Coogan 1:06:44 ↗
Oh, I got the most niche one. Ski resorts. We need to secure our ski resorts this winter. I'm actually worried about cyber attacks on ski resorts.
Jordi Hays 1:06:53 ↗
Yeah, you don't want to be stuck on the chair.
John Coogan 1:06:54 ↗
One. Yeah, bunch of people on a chairlift and gets taken down. I can't imagine the average ski resort is like that secure. Yeah. So that's the most niche category that I can throw at you.

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APA

Weil, K. (2026, October 22). Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell, Duo on Arrival, 100 Really Difficult Phone Calls, Norwegian Gold Scheme [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3118516/

MLA

Kevin Weil. "Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell, Duo on Arrival, 100 Really Difficult Phone Calls, Norwegian Gold Scheme." TBPN, 22 Oct. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3118516/.

BibTeX
@misc{weil2026_3118516,
  author       = {Kevin Weil},
  title        = {Matthew Prince on PHP2Shell, Duo on Arrival, 100 Really Difficult Phone Calls, Norwegian Gold Scheme},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {oct},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3118516/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}