John Coogan, Co-Founder & Host at TBPN

24:55John Coogan:I start doing YouTube videos, trying to reconnect with the tech community. This is what I was going to ask you. When did you do the YouTube things and why? It was COVID. Yeah, COVID. So I've always been very full-time entrepreneur employed, which means more than 40 hours a week. I've never done two companies at the same time. It's like if I'm working on something, I'm working on it exclusively. But COVID was interesting because there were no happy hours. There were no VC holiday parties to go to. There were no networking events. There were no – like even family engagements were basically zero.

25:30John Coogan:So there was just a lot of downtime and a lot of people were making sourdough or watching Netflix. And I was saying, let me answer questions that I'm getting from my friends about business and Y Combinator and startups. But instead of sending them a long text message, I will just send them a YouTube video. So if you look at the first videos that I published, it was a series on startup fundraising, my experience with it, some basic definition of terms. I'm not a super expert or anything, but I've raised, I think, like 10 different funding rounds across my career. And so I had a little bit to share.

26:05John Coogan:And so I just tried to solidify that. And a lot of it's sort of repurposed from YC's documents, which are the best in the business. But those hadn't been brought to YouTube in a video essay fashion. So it's a scripted narrative that has a clear structure. And then I was also just sort of nerd sniped by motion graphics because of my programming background. And so I really liked making like animated bar charts and stuff like that. And so I was just having fun. And then eventually that sort of grew into storytelling around YC companies, companies that I admired, companies that I was interested in, even just tech trends.

26:45John Coogan:What's going on with the metaverse? Who's going to win this race? Some commentary, some analysis, a lot of history. but I sort of got to the end of that road and then was looking for the next thing. Although there was another interlude if you want to go into Founders Fund. Should we? Yeah. Yeah, Founders Fund was a great experience. So I was doing YouTube videos and I had incidentally, I'd been aware of Founders Fund. I'd pitched them, but they'd never actually invested in any of my companies. And so I was aware. Who'd you pitch? We'd pitch Peter. And interestingly, he gave us the best feedback that predicted the entire history of the company.

27:25John Coogan:And we didn't take the advice. It was ridiculous. And so that's why I was like, I got to go. I got to go. I got to go in. Because, yeah, for Soylent. So we came in and we were like, here's what all the other VCs are saying. And we agree with them. Like, we don't need to market. We just build our product. And he was like, no, no, no. You're the exception to the rule. You're not building a network effects business. You're not building the next Facebook. You're building a widgets company. You struck lightning in a bottle. You should be so thankful. Now it's time to run the playbook that every consumer packaged goods company has run since the dawn of time, which is you are selling Coca-Cola.

28:02John Coogan:You run a Super Bowl ad. You need to get great at continually marketing and distributing your product. You need to be everywhere. And he laid out like sort of the traditional consumer packaged goods playbook, which has held up for decades and was in fact not really disrupted by the internet. Of course, e-commerce is like a nice additive and there are things that you can do on the internet that are beneficial, but the iron law of like retail sales growth is still true. He recognized that. And it was interesting because it felt like talking to just a normal like MBA type, like not a Silicon Valley person, but that was the contrarian position because every other VC was saying, well, you're growing so fast on the internet without any marketing budget, why would you ever need to market?

28:44John Coogan:And we were like, whoa, okay. So anyway, he had a big guy told you so. And I was like, I'm never making that mistake again. So I got to go work with the Founders Fund folks and understand more about how they view business and technology and what they're interested in. And I mean, it was a wild experience. The first - Wait, you don't just say, I got to go work with the Founders Fund. I mean, How did you get hired there? So Mike Solana had reached out to me because I'd done his podcast. We'd talked online. A big part of my goals with content creation during COVID was just to reestablish some sort of connection with Silicon Valley.

29:22John Coogan:I was living in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. I wasn't bumping into people in tech that often, but I would bump into them on Twitter and I would bump into them on YouTube. And so there were a lot of people that were taking Twitter very seriously. There were a lot of people that were taking Substack and podcasting pretty seriously. But there was this huge white space on YouTube, and I figured out how to do something a little bit different in the sense that I was doing video essays. Gary Tan was also doing video essays. But there weren't that many, you know, what is the history of Stripe? What is the history of DoorDash?

29:52John Coogan:What is the history of Coinbase? There weren't that many videos out there about that from the perspective of someone who loves technology and business and has tried to build technology companies. and has a career in business. And so there were a lot of people who had never been to Silicon Valley and would go on Wikipedia and pull up some stuff and they didn't necessarily nail like what is actually the interesting thing, I think. And so I was able to carve out this niche as someone who could tell the story of a tech company from the perspective of a founder. And so that eventually broke through and I wound up just profiling a ton of founders fund companies because if you want to talk about DeepMind, OpenAI, SpaceX, Facebook, like you just wind up hitting founders fund companies.

30:40John Coogan:Yeah. If you just focus on like impactful tech companies and all, like the interesting stuff is in their portfolio, not just because they're great investors, but also because they've focused outside of the B2B SaaS playbook in an interesting way that coincidentally draws attention from people outside and just people on the internet because people want to know about rockets. Like watching rockets land is universally interesting. And so you can tell a much more engaging story about the development of SpaceX than you can, say, you know, another B2B SaaS company that I find interesting, but it's harder to make visual.

31:17Right. Yeah. Did you go to Founders Fund when you were trying to get Lucy funded?

31:23John Coogan:Yes. We had talked to someone and we got so close. And when I got in, I was able to look at the slacks and I was able to be like, ah, they kind of clocked one of the problems. Oh, OK. Okay. But still, you know, it would have been fine. It wouldn't have been, you know, game-changing for the fund. So, you know, I respected their investment thesis. I was just going to say, though, John, you just don't strike me as a stuffy old VC. Yeah. So what happened? So I came in as an entrepreneur in residence specifically. Yeah. And I had the opportunity to sit in on some investment committee meetings, and they were super interesting.

32:00John Coogan:But I just I found that I do not thrive in that environment of needing to make like snap expected value. Put your money where your mouth is. Like go make the bet right now. The train's leaving the station. You're either in the round or you're out of the round. I enjoy looking backwards and understanding where things might go in the future abstractly. But it's much harder to do all like the deal negotiation. So I was very much not trying to be like, oh, put me in. I would got to be on the investment team at any point in time. And I sort of expected that. But it was great to be able to fully validate that and scratch that itch that like if I didn't – if I was in the room and I wasn't like I want to stay in this room, then I'm fine to move on to other stuff.

32:51How long did you stay?

32:52John Coogan:I was there a little over two years. OK. So 2023, 2024. And then towards the end of 2024, I've been doing more video essays and documentaries, but they were becoming more involved. There was a slower pace of play. It would take me like a month to do a project. And I was flying around doing interviews, meeting people, editing. It was turning into this much larger production. and I realized that I was going to be on the road constantly, which was not working with my family plans. And then also I'd talked to some folks who make documentaries and they sort of showed me a preview of what the top of that mountain looks like.

33:31John Coogan:And they were like, yeah, yeah, like you're on a track to sell a documentary to Netflix or HBO. And I was like, that sounds amazing. And they were like, it's not. And I was like, like, and they're like, yeah, if it goes really well. You could make X. And I was like, that's not enough. And they're like, oh, and by the way, like everything that you love about the content that you make, like the creative direction, the soul that you put into it, your viewpoint on like, I believe business is good. They're like, yeah, that's leaving. It's going to be a hit piece and they're going to edit it in a bad way because that's going to be better for their business.

34:06Soul crushing.

34:07John Coogan:And so I was like, well, actually, I don't want to climb this mountain any further, but I do want to stay doing media. I still want to do interesting things. So I tried a bunch of different media products. I started a solo podcast where I would do a similar thing, but it was unscripted. I like the unscripted stuff because I felt like the more I was on the teleprompter, the more I was scripted, the more soul crushing it was. I wasn't that interested in it. I like the process of writing, but then reading it was sort of a hassle. And so I like the unscripted stuff. I liked talking to people, but I didn't necessarily want to be flying around the world constantly chasing the next big interview.

34:42John Coogan:So like the big interview show was sort of off the table. And so when I met Jordi Hayes, my current co-founder of TBPN. Which you got to tell me how you met, you and Jordi met each other. So we met through a mutual friend, Wilmanitis, who just sort of identified us as two people in Los Angeles with similar backgrounds. We'd actually both raised money from Andrews Norowitz. We both raised money from Google. We both had families and kids in Los Angeles, had been like deeply viral at certain points with Soylent and his company Party Round had gone viral many times. And so we sort of understood the internet, enjoyed the internet, enjoyed tech, but had this like arm's length relationship with tech where we were never duking it out in the big companies, in the scale-ups and the hyperscalers.

35:32John Coogan:In the arena. In the arena. We were like adjacent to the arena. And we were like, well, what advantage does this give us. If the non-negotiable is having a family in Los Angeles, well, media is actually really good in Los Angeles. And there's a whole variety of things that you can do around media if you design a show that's meant to be remote. We started in person in Los Angeles and we were able to do that because we were both here. And then eventually when we started adding guests, We structured the guest's format so that it leans into its remoteness in a way that people aren't clamoring for us to, oh, it'd be so much better if you interviewed 10 people a day in person.

36:15John Coogan:Even if we – a lot of our guests, even if we were next door to them, they'd be like, I'm not coming over for a 10-minute spot. It's like a quick interview. It's a one – there's a news item. You're coming on for 15 minutes, giving us an update, telling us about some fundraising news. Even if we were a couple blocks away, they'd probably still do it over Zoom. I was listening to you talk about like your day. You guys meet to go to the gym at 6.30, talk there, have breakfast together. And then you each do your little things. Then you come together three hours a day. And then, Carolyn, you'll love this.

36:49Jordy usually has a driver to take him because he lives a little bit far away. Sometimes he'll be like, I don't want the driver. I want to continue hanging out with John. John, you drive me home. What makes you two have such a magical relationship? It's like your old best friends.

37:05John Coogan:It is. It is. I don't know. I think it's seeing eye to eye on a lot of things and then having enough differences of opinion that there's good debates. What kinds of things do you guys disagree on, actually? So I think it would be, I think if one of us was like pro-tech and the other one was anti-tech, that would be a really hard relationship to maintain. But if we're both pro-tech, but I think that Apple is the greatest company and he thinks that Google is the greatest company. Now, that's a very friendly debate that we can go at each other's throats and then walk away from having a lot of mutual respect.

37:47John Coogan:And so I think it's hard to say that there's like one consistent debate. It's more like some news happens. What are the two sides of this? And we very quickly get to the debate over – like the debate that a venture capitalist might have, the debate that a founder might have. OK, there's this new product from this new company. How does that impact startups? How does that impact the big companies that are legacy companies that might be threatened by this new product? Is this company overvalued or undervalued? We don't really disclose like, oh, we think this startup's a buy on the show. But that's internally the way we're thinking about it.

38:27John Coogan:We're not thinking about like, oh, this company raised a billion dollars. Like raising a billion dollars is a bad thing and should never happen. Like that's just not our equation because we're pro-business and pro-tech. Right, right. When you first got started, were you just experimenting or did you think we're creating this new type of media company in a dying business? Yeah, yeah. I mean we had no idea that we would be live, no idea that we'd be daily, no idea that we'd be effectively producing a modern television show. I had a bunch of ideas. Many of them did not play out as I thought. One of them was that there was a huge opportunity for a show with no guests.

39:05John Coogan:And, of course, we have like the most guests. So we had a thousand guests last year. So that was proven wildly wrong. But I think what we did figure out was that this two host back and forth allows you to fill a lot of airtime and then creates more flexibility around not missing stories. Because you can't always get the perfect guest at the right time. I mean, we'll see this even with like we had – I don't want to name the company. But we've had a number of founders come on. We develop a great relationship with them. And then they'll get acquired or something like that. And they will just be like, look, the comms department doesn't want me to go on the show right now because I'm owned by a public company now.

39:47John Coogan:And they have a whole different process for this. And we're like, yeah, that's fine. We'll talk about it. And we'll analyze the reporting and give commentary on that. And so the audience is still getting the news, which is a set agenda of things that happen. But if you're going to TBPN and saying, like, I'm using this as a way to stay up to date on the news, and we're just, like, completely missing stories, like, oh, we just didn't talk about the new iPhone because for whatever reason, like, oh, we couldn't get Tim Cook, so we just didn't do any Apple stuff during the new iPhone release. Like, no, we'll have Mark Gurman on from Bloomberg, and he'll talk about it.

40:25John Coogan:Or we'll just talk about it ourselves, and we'll react to the tweets and the news and the Wall Street Journal articles. And so we're able to cover any story. and sometimes the coverage is amazing where we're like an exclusive interview with the person that everyone's wanted to hear from. No one knows that this has ever happened before. No one knows what to expect. And then sometimes it's like, yeah, we actually have like no one to talk to about this. So we're just gonna, you know, read you some information, do some research on our own and just talk about it between ourselves. Do you have like, you probably have like a top 20, but what's your favorite segment of all time?

41:00John Coogan:oh so there's a bunch i mean mark benioff such a character we had him on the show today and he's just he's just so much energy and we have a great like kind of back and forth where it feels like we're sparring really high energy um there's been a whole bunch of really really amazing moments uh there was this very interesting moment where uh a gentleman by the name of soham parikh was found working for multiple startups at the same time. So he had full employment contracts with something like seven or eight Silicon Valley startups as a software engineer. And everyone said that his work product was good, but then they discovered that everyone was paying him.

41:43John Coogan:And so we remarkably got him to come on our show and talk about it and sort of address the allegations live on the air. I think 100 ,000 people were watching live, which was crazy. Everyone wanted to know, who is this person? They'd never seen him. And that's interesting because we will get a huge household name, CEO, and there won't be 100 ,000 people watching because there's plenty of content about them. And maybe they don't have big news. And then sometimes we just get lucky. We did GitHub Connect, which is Microsoft's conference. And we had the opportunity to sit down with Satya Nadella. And we were so excited for this.

42:20John Coogan:and we were ready to just talk to him about his career, just get to know him, you know, talk to him about anything. What's your opinion on AI? There's a million things that we could talk to him about. But that day, the news broke of the exact ownership structure of OpenAI. And so all of a sudden, we had like the exclusive interview with Sajan Adela and it was this like celebratory moment because he is now maybe the greatest venture capitalist or up there with the greats and just produced like a hundred bagger for Microsoft. Those are his words, by the way. He calls it a hundred bagger. Oh my God.

42:53I was going to ask you, have you ever broken news? Because you said that's not our thing to break news, but clearly you did kind of. Yeah.

43:01John Coogan:In general, we like to be a commentary layer on top of breaking news. So most of the time it's news happens and you come on TBPN to further contextualize it. And if you don't come on TBPN and it's big news, we might be talking about it. And then occasionally folks will say, I'd love to break the story with you. But we always recommend that they also do a written piece with someone if they really have big news. But then every once in a while, there are just like scoops or news, even in the sense of like someone comes on the show and they say something interesting that's unique and they've never said before.

43:34John Coogan:And then that just becomes a headline. And we're now at the stage where there's a number of outlets that will rewrite things that are said in TBPN interviews and put them up as articles, which is, of course, great for the growth of our show. Of course. But it's interesting because we don't really – we just try and have the most interesting conversation possible, answer the questions that we actually have. And then sometimes those are good enough for a broader audience. And so other journalists and reporters will sort of contextualize that further. I was going to ask you if like the interviews that get the most attention or the most viewers, are they in proportion to how famous the guest is?

44:10But maybe not then.

44:11John Coogan:There's a little bit. There's a little bit of that, but you'd be surprised. And in fact, anonymous accounts often drive a lot of live viewership on X. So because you might have followed some poster like Rune, for example, for years. And I think Rune has hundreds of thousands of followers on X, but people only see the tweets. Yeah, I've never been doxxed. And also people are just interested, like, I want to know more about that philosophy. There's a natural curiosity behind the profile picture. And so we create a space where Anons can come on, remain anonymous. Even when I'm texting them, I don't even ask for their name.

44:52John Coogan:And if they tell me, I forget it because I have no interest in that. What I do want to know is understanding how they see the world, who they are, and just how they talk about these topics reveals a lot. And so, like, I guess you could put the Anons at, like, zero fame or maybe a lot of fame, but they also drive viewership. But the famous CEOs do drive viewership, but less than you'd think. Do you have to disguise voices for these anonymous folks? we we have never done that some anons have done that on their end because it's just a zoom call so you can join using whatever most of them don't don't take it that seriously okay okay um as i was doing a little bit of research i sort of felt like you were very much like yc in that there was sort of a high variance in the the tweaks that you'd make to the show oh yeah you know, but you also were very strict about sort of what you wanted to deliver to your audience.

45:54What is your North Star that's always guided you despite the experimentation or changes or whatever? The North Star, I mean, Jordy has this phrase where he says,

46:06John Coogan:what is it? It's like we're a bakery or something. And if we don't show up, the bread doesn't get baked. So that's very different than a lot of software companies where like you don't you you might not really be able to take a week off but like you can take a week off and like the software still runs that's the whole beauty of software and so yes culturally you should be there yeah you should be in founder mode we all know this but truthfully you can take a week off and the business will keep humming not only because the servers keep running and that's the beauty of software but your employees are set up to take over and manage things and you're ready Like we don't have that luxury.

46:43John Coogan:Like if we don't go live and we're not in these chairs at 11 a.m. Pacific every Monday, every Tuesday, like the show just doesn't happen. And so that's been the North Star in the sense that like we got to sit down for three hours, do the show. If it's bad and we don't like it, that's miserable. There are lots of companies where you can be producing a product that happens and you're like, yeah, my company makes five products. I'm not a fan of product number six, but I don't have to use it every day. My customers do. And these customers, they don't really care about how bad product six is. Right.

47:19John Coogan:But that's not true for us. I have to listen to the show because I'm on it. And so if there's a bad interview, I have to sit through that bad interview. Like mine. Yeah, right. Was mine the worst? No, no. Yours was amazing. I thought you meant like mine, like you have the same job. because you know from interviewing that if you have a slow interview, you're like, I want to speed this up. No, I'm saying I tried to listen to my interview. We had a great time. The one with just me, not the one with me at all. Yeah, no, no, no, that one was seminal. It was amazing. I could not even listen to it. Oh, people can never listen to their own.

47:54It was so painful. No, no, no, it was great. It was great.

47:57John Coogan:I loved, the thing that really stuck with me was the carpetbagger point because it was so interesting hearing your history and your understanding of like what happens in bubbles, what happens in gold rushes. And then also like how Gen Z and the cool kid lingo has recontextualized that and everything new is old. Do you mean grab your bag culture? Get your bag culture. That's correct. Oh God, I even got it wrong. Carolyn is like, I'm so old. I didn't know what this meant. It was so embarrassing. But importantly, you did know what it meant in like a spiritual sense and in a cultural sense, which I thought was very interesting.

48:35A little bit of a tangent, but do you remember who the dinner speakers were in your Lucy batch in 2016?

48:42John Coogan:Yes. Oh. Steve Huffman. Great. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. He was great. Yeah. I love to ask CEOs. I don't know. I don't know if it was a private dinner, so I don't know if I should actually say it. But I'll speak in vague terms. But I always like to ask CEOs, like, oh, like, what's your favorite YouTube channel? Like, Adam Masseri, what's your favorite Instagram thing? And a lot of times some of these folks are like clearly not using the products. Not Adam. Adam is deep in it. But Steve was like extremely deep. Like shared some Reddit that I found. And I was like, this is next-gen culture. And so that one stuck with me.

49:22John Coogan:And then I asked Paul Graham a question that I don't remember what the question was. But I remember his answer. And it was something hilarious just like. I give you permission to tell the story. So I don't remember the actual question, but I remember him saying like, that's a terrible question or something like that. And the whole room erupted and it was very funny or something like that. I don't remember. It was just like a lot of fun. Paul Graham is an extremely funny person. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he's another great guest because like there are so many, there's so many guests who are in like yes and mode because they don't want to like offend us or they don't want to seem adversarial.

49:57John Coogan:And PG is not that person. he will he thinks truly independently which is great yeah you guys want another similarity you guys have to yc is that you have this like hearty sense of humor about things yeah and i love that yeah what made you feel like that's okay like yeah i think that's another thing with geordie me and me and him have both been like class clown builds for a long time like class clowns i think But I was thinking about it more and I was thinking about like why do we have permission? Like who gave us the permission to like make a bunch of jokes with Mark Benioff or like some are at his expense, some are at our expense.

50:42John Coogan:Like we have this very jovial rapport extremely quickly. And I think it's because deep down I'm just a techno optimist and I'm optimistic about technology. And so I see the debates around technology as they're high stakes, but like technology has delivered a lot of really great things. And so the poking fun at these things is often a way to sort of recalibrate around the level of seriousness, but also recalibrate around the stakes in that, you know, whether this new technology gets here, whether we get the self-driving cars in five years or 10 years, like I think it's going to be good. And so it gives us a little bit more permission because it's positive sum and not zero sum.

51:25Well, and also like the whole gist, and that's true for our podcast too, is it's not about gotchas. We're not trying to embarrass you. We just want to get to know you and hear your story. Like there's, it's very genuine. And I'm assuming it's, that's true for all of us.

51:39John Coogan:Yeah, it's very, it's very interesting. We get a ton of, we get a ton of pushback from folks about like, do they ask the hard questions? And when we dig into like what the hard questions are, it's always like go, go into politics and like controversial paths and whatnot. And from our perspective, I'm like, I'm trying to ask the hardest question I can about this person's technology and their business and like, will they build a good business or are they overvalued or not? And I'm trying to, I'm trying to get into that. And so it doesn't look hard at all, but I'm not, but it's fine because I already know the path of what they're getting at, which is like drag everyone through the mud, get weight, weight into politics.

52:20John Coogan:Your show will be bigger, like much bigger. The views will be, they will come, but the audience will degrade and you'll have sold your soul. And the, and the, and the, the, the, the product and the audience will be less differentiated and it'll just be a lot less fun. And also just like, I'm just not interested in politics personally. I just don't, I do like, like I have to, I would have to force myself to like sit down and like read politics news. Whereas like you can give me a semi-analysis report and I'll just read about semiconductors on the weekends. Like I'll just do that naturally. So I have kind of a really random related question that I'm just personally curious about.

52:57You know, you've a thousand guests last year. Some of those people, like I know them and I don't like them.

53:04John Coogan:Yeah. Does that impact you at all? Are you just like, they're going to have something interesting to say. hey, I don't care if this person's a real troll or this person maltreats founders. Yes, so sometimes we don't know that they mistreat founders. But so I think you might have a little bit more information, in which case I should be running guests by you. But also sometimes, yes, there are just like people that have interesting things to say. The audience wants to hear from things. But then also like, you know, we do occasionally give people enough rope to hang themselves. There are people that we have on the show where we haven't even been super adversarial or gotcha.

53:44And they've said things that definitely made their company look worse.

53:49John Coogan:And so that's sort of up to them. And I think creating more space for that is probably generally good. Of course, you have to do some sort of second filter on is this even reasonable? Is this a serious person? Is there any value here? But we do cast a wide net and then we do have a lot of flexibility with like how we frame the interview, the questions that we ask, how much prep we do. And then also like how much time we give them, when we give them time, where their position, what's the context of the show leading up to it. So even if like if there's a whole bunch of context that happened before and it's just been guest after guest saying like this thing is bad and then we have the person on who makes the argument for it's good.

54:33John Coogan:Like I think that that creates more balanced conversation usually. But it is a constant dance, constant dance. That's a good answer. Yeah, that's so interesting. Carolyn, will you ask about the name? Oh, yeah. Tell us how you came up with your name. Yes. Quick lore. So to tech bros, start a podcast. It's a tale as old as time. Why not call it the Technology Brothers podcast? Because you'll reclaim it. We're not tech bros. We're technology brothers. There was an old tweet about comparing the two terms and how tech people should use technology brothers because it's funny. It is funny. And it's funny.

55:13It is funny. I like it.

55:15John Coogan:And so we were like, let's go over the top. Let's dial up the technology brother to 11. And so suits and champagne and all the things that Paul Graham would absolutely laugh at. And we laugh at it, too. Right. And I think people got that. And it's like, oh, they're being the most they're being deliberately obtuse about what it is to be a tech bro. And so, you know, it's like it's all these things that don't map to Silicon Valley at all and are completely outside. outside. But then there is like a seed of truth there where like when there's an interesting thing where like when you start out, you wear the t-shirt at Stanford.

55:55John Coogan:But when you've really made it in tech, you wear the suit on Capitol Hill because you're being interrogated. That's like the only time I see founders in suits is when they're in front of the government. And so there is a little bit of a deeper message there around professionalizing technology, taking what we do seriously. But back to the name, Technology Brothers, fun, you need a name, funny name. But technologybrothers.com is so long and everyone would just call us the tech bros. And so we were like, we're not really doing the thing. Like we just get abbreviated immediately. And I think the technologybrothers.com, they wanted like$100 ,000 for it.

56:34John Coogan:I'm not surprised. Something crazy. And so we were like, what if we go a little bit more sports center with this, a little bit more ESPN in style, inspired and do TBPN. And we'll kind of work backwards from it. Everyone thinks it stands for Technology Brothers Podcasting Network. In fact, on the day we launched, it was technology business because we were like, we want to open the aperture and just be a little bit more serious, a little bit more of a space where a CEO like Mark Benioff can come on during earnings and give us the first interview. And, you know, he might go on the Technology Brothers podcast, but TBPN is an easier sell.

57:12John Coogan:And so we liked that we could take it a little bit further. We liked the way the logo worked and the domain was cheap. So we got tbpn.com. We got TBPN on every social handle possible because no one had ever thought to smash together a B and a P because it's notoriously bad to do that. It's very hard to say. But the beauty is that in the modern era, you don't actually say it that often. You read it because we're on social media now and people type it. And typing TBPN is much faster than typing Technology Brothers Podcast. And so there's all these like modern tweaks and hacks that we used. But that's where the name came from.

57:50I have a few like random questions that I have to ask you because I've become like so intrigued. Lightning round. I've become so intrigued with your business as I've been spending more time. And of course, I've been watching all these interviews. If you've been doing this live every day, first of all, has one of you had the flu? Oh, yes. What happens if you're sick?

58:10John Coogan:Oh, you can go watch the episodes where we're sick. The sick episodes are the best sometimes. No, when we started the show, it was terrible flu season. We both had kids in preschool for the first time. Oh, no. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So we were so sick. But we'd figure out how to let the camera, let the team, the production team know, okay, cut away from John and turn down his microphone because he's going to blow his nose and then cut back. But we would just like, you know, sort of just like grit our teeth and get through it. Now, we haven't actually had to do it. But I do think over time guest hosts make sense.

58:49John Coogan:We have Tyler Cosgrove who's on the team now. He sits on the show and participates on the show. The old intern. The old intern, yes. Currently on a gap semester. And so he sort of sits in as the third mic. We also have a number of guests that have been on so often that they could potentially effectively co-host the show in a pinch remotely or something. But in general, we've just tried to stay really consistent with the sleep, diet, exercise, all the things that keep you healthy, and then just kind of like get through it if you're in trouble. I can't believe this, John. And don't you have like three kids?

59:27I do.

59:28John Coogan:Three boys. Who are young? How are you not getting more sick that you literally are like, Jordi, I can't come in today because I have diarrhea? Isn't there a YC adage about this? Like growth fixes everything? I don't know. Okay. Okay. Carolyn and I were wondering if you drive home in the suit or do you just hang it up? I did wonder that. I change most days. Okay. I change most days. Can we come visit someday the Ultra Dome if we're on our social radars tour? Absolutely. We're going to go see companies. Come on the show in person too. It'd be great to have you. In person is really fun. We take out the headphones and it just is a much more relaxed experience.

1:00:08John Coogan:There's not as much of a delay. And it's great for these conversations that don't need to be like breaking news. So it can be more scheduled ahead of time. But that'd be fantastic. And I'll show you the whole studio and share anything we've learned that might apply to better lighting and soft backgrounds. OK, if you are doing this live every day, you've had to have some funny disaster stories. Do you have one? Yes. Um, the stream has gone down a few times due to AWS outages, YouTube outages. There's all sorts of different systems that can go down. Uh, we've been very, very lucky. We've never had like a big guest during an interview go down.

1:00:49John Coogan:There's been little things where it's been a little patchy at the intro, but in general, we've gotten very lucky and, uh, and we usually just play it off as a joke. Uh, like, Oh, we're being attacked by people that don't want us to podcast. they're being d-dossed you haven't had a time when you're like uh i forget what i was just saying or haven't you had something like crazy oh pause there so we we learned of a hot mic moment that was extremely close to happening but we missed it because i was doing an ad read and so the guest was was technically mic'd up and saying crazy stuff i think and uh but but we dodged it and it did not happen on the show.

1:01:33John Coogan:Other stuff, I mean, there's stuff that happens every day where, oh, the camera focuses on the wrong thing, or I step up for the gong, or, you know, we've had things where I've tried to pull up one ad to different kind of, like, there's always little minor tweaks, but I see this very much as, like, we like racing-themed analogies. We've designed the brand after F1, and so I view the show as just doing laps on a track. Like, I'm at a point in my career where I think I can keep the car on the track, but every time I do the show, I shave off a millisecond or a couple of tenths of a second. And I just feel like the life's work is just doing it until you're actually on the perfect racing line constantly, not cutting each other off, asking the right question at the right time, getting good information from the guest while putting them at ease, interrupting with the right jokes at the right time.

1:02:25John Coogan:All of this stuff is just little tweaks that there's no one secret. It's just a lot of practice. And you see it in folks like Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jim Cramer, you know, Lex Friedman, anyone who does great interviews, Dwarf Cash, there's a million people who have become fantastic at interviewing. And it was, it was never just an overnight success. Yeah. And you're never going to lack for news. I mean, technology news never ends. And you just, didn't you guys just sign with the CAA? We did. Yes. Big deal. Threats. Yes. It's very fun. I mean, I know Michael Ovitz, obviously. I know more of the history, actually, and less about what we will be doing together at the time.

1:03:10John Coogan:But since we've been signed, I've learned a lot, and they've been a great team to work with. It's very interesting. Certainly not on my bingo card. Certainly not in, like, the forecast. I very much thought that this was going to be just like a tech podcast with a couple people. And like maybe we do other stuff and maybe we do it like every couple episodes a week, maybe one episode a week. And now it's like a thing. It's not just a thing. It's a huge thing. I am so happy for your guys' success. And I love the show. It's so refreshing to have like a media option that I actually enjoy, like seeing or reading or whatever, consuming.

1:03:50Like it's just, you guys are great. So congratulations.

1:03:54John Coogan:Yeah, thank you. And good luck with your life's work. And also, I mean, thank you for hopping on to during YC Demo Day. That was particularly funny because that was the second time that we've had a surprise guest. And I think the audience often thinks that I'm underselling, that I've had this surprise guest lined up. But when you and Paul Graham jumped on at YC Demo Day, I found out like 10 minutes before. And so I'm bringing the surprise guest. The other time it happened was at MetaConnect. We knew that we were going to be interviewing Mark Zuckerberg, but we didn't know that James Cameron would be joining the show.

1:04:29John Coogan:And so they bring him over. And I'm like, I'm interviewing James Cameron. This is incredible. And so those moments have been like surprises, but to the upside, like they've been fantastic. Can I tell you how hard it was though, to get Paul from like where he was, I had to go find him. I could not find him, John. I went to where I had last seen him because I was talking to your guy. I was like, I'll go get Paul. We'll come on the show. I went to where Paul was nowhere to be found. Like, I think he's eating somewhere over there. So I run, I peel him away. He's surrounded by founders peel them away i'm like we're going on the tbpn come on and and we have to go through the crowd and everyone they're like hey paul i'm like he can't talk right now we're going on the show and we literally like sat down and then we were live it was really funny i'm glad that it worked out well i got so so many text messages about that from media people being like how did you pull this off oh yeah oh yeah because i mean like the the the one interesting uh vector with like Paul Graham, obviously very well known, but not widely available.

1:05:34John Coogan:There are certain people that are widely, that are known in tech, but they're on a show every week because they're promoting something and they're just always around. And so you can get those people, but you won't be like, oh, how did you do that? And with PG, I got a lot of like, how did you pull that off? Lots of cachet for that one. He doesn't like, you know, going on TV shows. You know, that's not his bag. So I'm glad it worked out and we had so much fun. That was great. And thank you. I know like now's quitting time for you, right? It is. The suit comes off in just one minute. It's getting a little hot in here.

1:06:05You can drive home and hang out with your kids and like have dinner before you start with Jordi at 630 in the morning. I'm obsessed with their daily schedule meeting up in the gym. It's a lot of fun. So thank you again. And I can't wait for this episode to come out. Me too. Thanks, John. It was great to talk to you.

1:06:21John Coogan:Have a great rest of your day. All right. Bye. Bye.

1:06:28you