How TBPN Made a Tech News Splash

12:20John Coogan:And then also what's another format that's really popular on YouTube in video gaming in non-tech categories? We have the reaction stream. Yep. The try not to laugh challenge. I don't know if you're familiar with this, but the streamer will sit there and watch TikToks and try not to laugh at funny jokes. And I figured it out even before you told me.

12:39Peter Kafka:Exactly.

12:40John Coogan:And the heavy lifting of the comedy is done by the TikTok creator. And then they are interacting with their chat. And so one of our first, like one of our first differentiators was most podcasts will come on and say, we're going to tell you the whole story of this, or we're going to tell you the top three stories in the news and have 20 minute discussions about them. We said, what if we printed out 50 tweets and reacted to them one at a time? And so it was a much crazier, twitchier, like leading with entertainment, right?

13:12Peter Kafka:Like you guys, the premise is right. That you guys have been in the world, right? You started companies, you understand how deals work, but you also understand that you want to entertain an audience.

13:24John Coogan:Exactly, exactly. So one of the first tweets that we printed out was a post by an anonymous account on Axe that would not be worthy normally. I love this account, but would not be something that starts a news cycle that gets people talking. But it was a good encapsulation of something was happening in Silicon Valley, which was that there are two types of deals that are happening in Silicon Valley. One is an Excel round where the venture capitalists get out the Excel and they say, okay, you're making$10 million and next year you're going to make 15. Okay, we will value you at a hundred. And then there are vibe rounds, which are, I like the founder, the numbers don't matter.

13:58John Coogan:I got to get in. What are the other VCs paying? And so this account was just saying it's one or the other and you need to know which camp you're in. And so we printed that out. We talked about it and we said, yeah, this is, I've in our life, in our careers, this is a real thing. I've done a vibe round. I've done the Excel round, Excel's rounds really hard. Uh, and so we joke about it. We talk about it. We give our own experience. And, but the key insight was that we, we printed out the tweet, which was unique and different format. And then we, uh, then we took the clip of the video of us reacting to that tweet and we quote tweeted the original tweet.

14:34John Coogan:And so imagine if I, if you have a tweet, You're a big account. You're a big person, but you don't get that many quote tweets with videos, right? And so you're going to see it, even if you don't know who I am. And so we quote tweeted this account. They saw it and they were like, wow, this is crazy. These two guys in suits with 4K cameras just printed out my tweet and talked about it for 10 minutes. This is like way beyond just, oh, someone liked my tweet or, oh, someone retweeted my tweet or someone, oh, someone chimed in the comments. It's like the most extreme version of, I love this post, right?

15:07John Coogan:And so we did that for a while, and that was sort of a white space. And then we kind of, you know, found more white spaces, live, three hours, daily. There's just a set of differentiators that puzzled together to create something that was like a little bit standout.

15:21Peter Kafka:So you alluded to it here, right? But the show exists in lots of different formats. There's the live stream, which is the main thing. And actually, this is just like a lot of like late night TV right now, a lot of shows, right? Like, like there's the one unit and then you guys chop it up and distribute it other places. Walk me through financially how it works. Where are you guys? You've got, you've got some sponsors. Yep. Exactly. I'm guessing you're above seven figures at this point. Yeah. Yeah.

15:46John Coogan:That's been reported. Um, we, uh, so our office or our studio is in Hollywood and I was driving home one day and I see the Jimmy Fallon show and they are advertising on the billboard that they got 2 billion impressions last year. And that's across everything, including social. And so I think the key insight is that what people are actually optimizing for in media should not be one specific number like views, because even views are measured differently on different platforms. What really matters is total watch time across everything. And so if you have an RSS feed with a thousand people that listen to 100 % of an hour long show a week, they're giving you four hours a month.

16:35John Coogan:But there is an exchange rate between that and someone who gets a bunch of random 30 second TikTok views. And it's easy for people in media to say, oh, well, TikTok views aren't as valuable as like, you know, sitting down. Does anyone say that? People say that. Yeah, for sure. And it's ridiculous. But the exchange rate is important. And I think people haven't fully crystallized what the exchange rate is.

17:01Peter Kafka:There's people inherently understand that they're spending time looking at something. If you look at one thing, you probably can't look at something else. So people inherently get that. The media business is a different story, right? Ad money always trails a long time, right? The TV business is still 70, 80 billion dollars and, you know, it's dying off every minute. Money is still going there because people know how to buy there. People finally caught on to buying on YouTube. I don't think you're generating any money on TikTok, right?

17:31John Coogan:I don't think so. We have not prioritized TikTok for the most part.

17:37Peter Kafka:So where do you make your money today?

17:39John Coogan:So we primarily make our money through significant sponsorships with companies that are kind of deeply aligned with the tech and business private markets. We have a partnership with Figma, who's a public company now. Um, but by and large, we're looking at, uh, mid to late stage growth startups. And they're buying what from you? Are they buying on air mentions? I mean, yes. So we do, uh, every advertiser gets and get a ho gets a host read ad during the stream. Um, they also get inclusion in a ticker at the bottom of the stream. We kind of had this like gonzo, overly styled aesthetic that we built into the stream overlay.

18:25John Coogan:And it looks sort of like TV, but it doesn't look like a Twitch stream.

18:30Peter Kafka:It looks like CNBC and ESPN. There's a little bit of that.

18:33John Coogan:Yeah. And when we were leaning really into this idea of like, we are pro-business. What is more pro-business than supporting companies that want to advertise? So we leaned really heavily into the idea that advertising is the best business model. It is the greatest business model.

18:49Peter Kafka:But so you guys, you know, you're doing these ads and spots in the live stream. Yes. And there's a relatively small audience. When you then distribute.

18:59John Coogan:When we clip it, that gets an order of magnitude more or two orders of magnitude more views. But those ads travel with. Yes, exactly. So there's a host read ad in every clip. And then there's also.

19:09Peter Kafka:Did you need to figure this out going in? it was a pretty obvious that this would be how you guys were going to work.

19:14John Coogan:We, we treated it. All of our partners saw us as entrepreneurs and they saw us, I think most of them took bets on us and saw that, uh, this, this team would continue to innovate and test out things and learn and explore and figure out where the opportunity was to actually make good on those, uh, you know, like, uh, make good on those partnerships, essentially, whether that's doing, I mean, we've, we brought in customers through, we've done merch and the merch gets impressions and the impressions convert people to sign with a contract. Or sometimes somebody will just through the show, come on the show and ask us about something and we'll route them to one of our sponsors.

19:57John Coogan:And so it's, it's, it's very hard to measure the impact directly on CPM, but you're,

20:03Peter Kafka:you're also new and hot and so people want to take a flyer on you as well. There's a little bit of that.

20:09John Coogan:I think that the numbers are penciling out though, especially from the early deals. Like we've grown to where those deals look very, very good.

20:19Peter Kafka:We'll be right back with John Coogan, but first a word from a sponsor.

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22:36Peter Kafka:And we're back. I have a sense of like what predates you guys in terms of this format and this audience. But you tell me, who are you modeling after? Who's influential for you, either in video or covering tech?

22:50John Coogan:So I'm not huge into sports, but what Pat McAfee has done is very interesting in taking a podcast, turning it into a three-hour live show. I think that keeping it conversational, but still getting to a point where he can do the LeBron-versation and sit down. And does bits. Has interaction with the chat, does live events. I think there's something interesting there. I don't watch as much TV as I should to get, but also I'm live. That's the point. So it's hard for me to kind of, you know, great artists.

23:26Peter Kafka:People who make TV are watching the internet all day to figure out what to talk about.

23:29John Coogan:Yeah. So I guess, yeah, the real media influence is like, what is happening on X? And can I just turn on the camera while that conversation is happening? And so whatever, like, yeah, the internet is definitely the guide. Yeah.

23:46Peter Kafka:I was thinking also about like predecessors, like the early tech business blogs, like Tech Crunch. I don't think they paid attention to those. Yeah. I mean, I read those a ton. I mean, those were usually not started by traditional journalists. They were started by kind of odd people or TechCrunch's case. That's a former, you know, IP lawyer. Oh, really? Right? Yeah, Mike Arrington, right? Mike Arrington's IP lawyer?

24:08John Coogan:Interesting. Yeah.

24:09Peter Kafka:And so, and I think a lot of those guys, if they had been more successful in their earlier career, would have never started a tech blog, but they sort of showed up there. But the other thing was they were writing for inherently a sort of like in the know audience that had to be relatively small. But then because that was influential, other folks outside that circle are paying attention to them. And that seems like what you guys have cracked a little bit.

24:33John Coogan:Yeah. Yeah. I think big fan of TechCrunch. Definitely read that when I got to Silicon Valley. Also, some of the independent stuff. It's odd because everything that starts out as independent eventually. Sure. If it's good, it scales, right? And so you can think about the first version of TechCrunch is just, yeah, Mike Harrington. But Paul Graham's blog, there's a lot of different like sub stacks out there that are interesting. Yeah, it's hard because there's just the information diet is so diverse now that I'm not as much of a student as I guess I should be. You know who the real influence is? Is Johnny Carson.

25:15John Coogan:Uh, I'm not, I'm not from that era. I watched a lot of Carson, but, uh, I've read biographies and I feel like what Carson got right was that if you pour 100 % into the content, into the show, and there's this anecdote about him. Uh, he wore suits on the show every night and his business manager comes to him and says, we should start a suit company. He says, that sounds great. I'll wear the suits on the show. I'll say, hey, go buy Carson suits. I think that's his name. It turned out he was getting completely roasted on the deal. He had no equity. He was doing 100 % of the promotion. And this just happened again and again, because he was not very business minded, but he poured so much into making the show great every night for decades that eventually he wound up getting ownership of the show and one of the greatest deals in TV and media history.

26:09John Coogan:And so there's something about just like be 100 % in on the media and focus just on your show.

26:16Peter Kafka:And this is what you guys want to do. You don't want to raise a fund.

26:19John Coogan:No fund, no spin out businesses, no, no talent management. So there's a lot of folks in the industry that have said, okay, great. I have one thing. Let me get someone else to do the thing that I'm doing.

26:33Peter Kafka:That was my next question, right? Or you have build a network. Yes. Right. Which makes a ton of sense.

26:37John Coogan:And networks literally what the N stands for, but it's a joke. We're building a show. And so if you're comping us to CNBC, I think it's like, well, that's very nice. But the interesting thing is that I truly believe that the value is in the shows and the networks are the social networks. Yeah. There's a ton of value in Spotify. There's a ton of value in YouTube, a ton of value in Twitch, X and Facebook and Instagram. And, and so, and then there's a ton of value in creators, but it's hard to be in the middle.

27:09Peter Kafka:Have you guys thought about, and again, you're early, right? This is a year you've been doing this. Have you thought about if this keeps going and we grow, you know, are we going to be the face of it the whole time? Do you want to bring other talent on? Do you want to, you know, again, you're, you're not going to age out anytime soon but do you think about or just literally like well if we're doing these three hour shows five days a week yeah we can't do other stuff can we figure out how to expand the roster so we can

27:33John Coogan:do other stuff we can lessen the load yeah i mean we've private markets are interesting there are there are folks in for a long time the barrier to creating a media product was so low that there was everyone wanted a blog everyone set up a twitter which was great and then pretty quickly it was like everyone's setting up a podcast too um there are great people who are regular guests of ours who they don't really need their own show but they should be they should have a voice and they should be a regular and so when we build out our suite of regular guests that really helps sort of like fill out the content.

28:16John Coogan:Johnny Carson would have guests those. Exactly. Um, but at the same time, it's only three hours a day. Like it's not, people are like, how do you do it? And I'm like, if I told you, you had to, I would pay you to sit in a chair and talk to people for three hours every day. And you guys are loose, right?

28:34Peter Kafka:There's a lot of like, Hey, I think this is what's going on. And then Jordi will say, no, that's not what they said in the press release. It's the opposite of that. Yeah, totally, totally, totally.

28:41John Coogan:We're reacting to the chat and we're reacting to the timeline and we're calling people and sometimes the story will develop. And by the end of the show, we've talked to more people about what's going on.

28:53Peter Kafka:You're YouTube native. Beyond YouTube, and that's where the core of the business is beyond YouTube, what's the most important platform for you?

29:02John Coogan:Well, X is actually the most important platform, I'd say. Then YouTube, then LinkedIn.

29:08Peter Kafka:So even in the Elon era where it has lost a lot of the people who used to be there.

29:16John Coogan:It is still the place where the private markets gather. And it's been very sticky in AI research. It's where a lot of the AI research labs, foundation model labs, look to for responses, how things are going. Companies do care about X. Although I agree with you, it is smaller in some ways. Although I saw some data point yesterday, the app's doing really well or something. I heard this new guy, Nikita Beer, seems like it's climbing.

29:44Peter Kafka:Depends what day you ask Elon or whether he's, I guess he's still suing Apple. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

29:50John Coogan:It's a very funny story. But yeah, apparently doing well in the app store rankings. But there has been a very large community specifically for startups, specifically for private markets, investors on X. And that continues to be there. But that group and the AI group hasn't fully replatformed anywhere else. Now, there are other valuable audiences that aren't on X and they're on YouTube and they stayed on YouTube and we want to reach them on YouTube. Same thing with LinkedIn. And then on Instagram and some of the other platforms, I think there's just a matter of like everyone is there. They're not having a conversation about tech.

30:33John Coogan:Right.

30:34Peter Kafka:Everyone in tech has an Instagram account. Exactly. They're not invested in it the way they are LinkedIn or Twitter.

30:40John Coogan:And so they might be, their personal brand on X might be about their business. And then they might be using Instagram as more of like, here's my family. And how do you think about that when you're booking, right?

30:54Peter Kafka:Because there's some VCs that are, you know, Gary Tan is a big deal to anyone who knows who Gary Tan is. Most people don't know who Gary Tan is, right? On the other hand, if you're scrolling through Instagram, you might recognize Mark Andreessen or Mark Cuban. You might not know who Alex Karp is, but he's a weird looking guy. What's going on? How do you think about sort of like inside, outside in terms of booking and sort of what your audience, your existing audience wants versus what your future audience might want?

31:23John Coogan:Yeah, I think. Almost entirely focused on that insider core community. and then let the downstream algorithms send stuff off into other parts of the internet and other sub-communities. I'll give you an example. So when we interviewed Dr. Karp from Palantir, CEO, that is an interview that most people in, even though it's a public company, lots of people in tech and business in the private markets really are interested in what he has to say. They find him entertaining. And they find what his insight is important to the private markets because he's kind of setting the tone for how the AI narrative is perceived in the public markets, right?

32:08John Coogan:And so people on X reacted to that and the play-by-play of him interacting and the Palantir versus Salesforce battle that's emerging, right? And they watched the full thing. Then during the interview, he addressed advice for young people. He addressed how CFOs should be thinking about gross margins in enterprise AI deployments. Can you imagine where one of those clips might do better? Can you imagine? So the advice for young people, that might go out on TikTok or YouTube.

32:46Peter Kafka:Will you guys literally sit through and say, this clip should get pushed there or do you just send them all out and just let the software sort it out?

32:53John Coogan:A little bit of both. But we do have an in-house team full time that is focused on exactly that.

32:58Peter Kafka:I met one of your guys at a fancy party that you guys did with Emily Sundberg. Oh, you were there? Oh, amazing. I'm sorry I didn't skip that. Well, your guy was the one guy there with a mullet.

33:08John Coogan:Oh, that's very funny. Yes, yes. He runs our Instagram.

33:10Peter Kafka:Yeah.

33:11John Coogan:And so figuring out where things fit. So if you look at the Wall Street Journal, you'll see the front page is usually geopolitics. Then the business and finance section is everything from what's going on in OpenAI, very cool to our audience, to what's going on in the oil and gas markets. Less important, but still interesting. We might talk about it if it's a cool deal. The de-merger of craft is interesting at a certain level, but it's maybe not front page news for us, but it may be front page news for the journal. And then they also have the mansion section. And so if we're talking about some massive mega mansion that just sold, that might do really well on Instagram.

33:52John Coogan:And that might be clipped up there. And so there's a variety of content that can kind of just like flow through the rivers of the internet.

33:59Peter Kafka:Real estate porn does well everywhere, I think. Everyone wants to see a rich person's house. No, it doesn't do well in X.

34:05John Coogan:No? No, it doesn't do well there. People are too nerdy. They love AI research and benchmarks, at least in our community. Yeah, I mean. I'm sure there might be, just like basketball Twitter still exists, even though I don't see it. It probably still exists. Yep, yep. Fair enough. And I imagine the death of X is like, you know, some communities left, but I don't know if basketball Twitter's gone.

34:24Peter Kafka:You guys took an oversaturated market and said, we're going to just wedge our way in. And we have particular skill set. Yep. If I said, great, replicate this, but do it for gardening. 100 % possible. And it's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. You couldn't do it, right? Oh, no. But someone else can crack this. What are sort of the basic tools you need to be able to sort of break through what is already a saturated market?

34:50John Coogan:I'll quote Marques Brownlee, the fantastic YouTuber. Everyone should go watch his iPhone reviews, which are highly topical right now. He said, make sure you love the content. If you're going to be, because he's been a tech reviewer for, what, is it 20 years now or something? It's since the beginning of YouTube, basically. And it's like, you're going to do this forever and you're going to do this if you're, like you cannot have a passing interest in the topic you're talking about. So, you know, live streaming, clearly huge in video gaming, clearly huge in politics, starting to grow in business and tech and private markets.

35:29John Coogan:You could think about TV as an instantiation of that in the public markets, but sports has done well here. So like, yes, I think it can, I think it can be incredibly niche. Uh, I think you mentioned gardening. That sounds actually like a pretty big niche to me. Um, but I think people would watch that just like HGTV exists. I would imagine that there's someone out there, but the key thing is that they brought to be really successful. They probably have to make it their full time, full time thing. And they can't be like, well, really I'm a fertilizer sales business. And I'm also have a fund that does real estate investing.

36:02John Coogan:and in my free time, I'm going to do five hours of live streaming a day. You guys are going,

36:08Peter Kafka:the reason you're here in studio is the Klarna IPO starts today. You're going to go there. You couldn't really fake talking to Klarna's VCs and CEO about their business and why it's interesting if you weren't interested in it. Exactly.

36:24John Coogan:Yeah, exactly. It would be, it's not even just that. It's just the time. Like if you, I don't know how you could be successful if you were, yeah, I mean, it's just so many hours.

36:37Peter Kafka:What's on next year's list? You've been at this a year. You want to get bigger, better, bolder. What do you want to do? That's a good question.

36:46John Coogan:Next year, you know, we've been focused so much on this year's goals, getting those bigger named CEOs that still draw attention in the private markets, but are a little bit harder to get. I think next year will really be about solidifying. We've run a ton of tests. We've done shows with no guests. We've done shows in person. We've done shows live from New York, from the stock exchange and the cadence and the flow and when to expect us to do things. A lot of opportunities come our way. We tried to say yes to as many things as possible if they've made sense, but actually understanding what is our cadence?

37:26John Coogan:How do we cover? What are we covering and how? At what level do, like Marquez Brownlee needs to go to Cupertino to review the iPhone, right? Like his audience expects that. I don't know that our audience expects us to be at -

37:38Peter Kafka:I mean, you're making this thing in LA, right? Like if you, like, there's an argument, no, no, obviously this needs to be in San Francisco or the Bay Area, right? Because that's where your core audience is.

37:47John Coogan:Yep. But I think the, I think it makes sense if you're heavily in-person guest-driven. We are heavily in-person, but not in-person guest-driven. The two EU have to be in the same place. Exactly. The two of us need to be very consistent in the same place, building out the studio, having fun in the studio, making our own show with its own look and feel. But part of the show is supposed to be hyper-topical. So I was running this. I was like, what if we had a studio on market street in san francisco and news breaks at 9 a.m we're going live at 11 can we actually get a big ceo to come up from menlo park no like probably not they're gonna zoom in with you anyway they're gonna zoom in with us anyway and so i think that uh like having the opportunistic call-ins having really strong relationships there so that we can get interesting people to comment on interesting things at the right time some of these few things are predictable and that's what I'd really like to do for next year is be thinking like three quarters out.

38:54John Coogan:Okay, well, this earnings call is going to happen. This announcement is going to happen. Okay, who are we inviting? When are we coming out? Like all that stuff. P.S.

39:01Peter Kafka:your advertisers want that schedule for me too.

39:02John Coogan:Of course, of course. And we have like 90 % of that lined up, but it can be a lot more solid. And so I think that will be the theme of next year.

39:14Peter Kafka:John Cuckerman is a fun story, a fun story to watch. Thanks for coming in. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks again to John Coogan for coming into the studio. Thanks to Charlotte Silver for producing and editing the show. Thanks to our sponsors who bring this show to you for free. Thanks to you guys for listening. If all goes well, we'll have a second episode of this show this week. Stay tuned. See you soon.

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