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TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to Spotify immediately after airing.
Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has interviewed Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. Diet TBPN delivers the best moments from each episode in under 30 minutes.
Chris, good to meet you.
Speaker 2:What's happening?
Speaker 3:Nice to meet you guys. How are you?
Speaker 1:Thanks, I love the background. The the logo is looking great.
Speaker 2:Is that real or is that AI?
Speaker 3:It's totally made up.
Speaker 2:Well I was like, it feels feels pretty quick to have, you know, the actual
Speaker 1:Yeah. Design. Manufacturing. It takes time. Well, take us through the thesis for ai.com.
Speaker 2:Wait. Before we Before we get into the Super Bowl, like, let's let's maybe rewind to maybe probably a year ago.
Speaker 3:Please.
Speaker 2:You see a domain on the market. I think they had been trying to sell it for a while, I imagine, and you came in as a buyer. But walk us through that whole journey.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I bought another domain, and the agent who was brokering this told me about ai.com being, you know, in a process of of being sold, if you will. Mhmm. So I immediately recognized the importance of it and just jumped on it, got on the phone the same day, got the deal done, we shook hands. There were some ups and downs through through the through the process, but we managed to to get this done.
Speaker 2:You've had some good success buying buying iconic domains. What did you pay for crypto.com? Have you ever disclosed that?
Speaker 3:I don't think we ever did, but we paid $12,000,000 I would argue that that was a more difficult decision, if you will. We were a small company back then. Dollars 12,000,000 was about a third of our capital. And it was bang in the middle of the 2018 bear market. So people were discussing whether crypto is gonna survive or not.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The person selling it to you was, like, probably, like, this guy
Speaker 1:is I'm so glad
Speaker 2:to be Of course. Of course, you ended up ended up looking I was in
Speaker 1:the Staples Center. He's right by it all the time.
Speaker 2:Okay. So, yeah, you you see this domain is on the market. Do you have any idea what you wanted to do with it at the time of acquisition or did you just think that, hey, This AI thing is probably pretty important. Maybe I should own ai.com.
Speaker 3:Look. We we're building products ever since JuddJPT launched and playing with consumer facing side, but also internal tools. So constant experimentation. And the vision from day one was, you know, we want to build a consumer product. We believe that you have 4,000,000,000 people having personal assistants that should play the role of kind of a chief of staff for your entire life with great context, being proactive, getting things done for you rather than just chatting.
Speaker 3:So the vision didn't change from day one.
Speaker 2:And then, yeah, I guess, fast forward, how did you how did you process before we get into the kind of Super Bowl and that whole strategy, how did you how did you process kind of the OpenClaw launch? It sounds like you guys are integrating the are are you building
Speaker 1:Some of those patterns
Speaker 2:at least. Yeah. At least some of those patterns. You kind of forking the project? Talk about that.
Speaker 3:So as we started building this product about mid-twenty twenty five, it was never just it just didn't click. It didn't have this you couldn't pass down a canny valley. And I think the pivotal moments where we started seeing this change is Opus 4.5 release. It started working much, much better. And we obviously saw Cloudbot going live and adding some elements of their architecture to it.
Speaker 3:I think it gets it done in terms of how it feels as a product. You just need to solve a whole litany of issues to make it consumer friendly, like how do you set it up without being technical, the security issues around your data. Those are serious, serious issues when you want to bring something to the mass market. So I think we've we are combining everything that we've built over the last, say, eight months into something that we can roll out to the end users, and we are starting doing this tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Wow. Tomorrow? Yes. Okay. Before we get into the product and kind of more of the vision, let's fast forward again to the Super Bowl specifically.
Speaker 2:How did that how did that all come together? It it felt like it was coming together quickly, but we know we ran a much, much smaller ad. We ran a regional ad. You do have to lock these things in ahead of time. But walk us through the process of kind of preparing and then experiencing the the Super Bowl Sunday.
Speaker 3:So I bought the domain in April. Mhmm. The deal closed, and we got the domain successfully. So I'm like, okay. We need to launch this, and it deserves a global stage.
Speaker 3:And in May, we were one of the first companies to actually buy the spot.
Speaker 1:Oh, no way. Wow.
Speaker 3:At that at that time, we had just the domain and idea what we want to do with it, but the product didn't exist. Mhmm. And, you know, I I know that we only have one shot to get this done correctly, and I didn't want to release the product until I felt that it's there for the end user. These things need to be able to develop an emotional connection with the product in order for this to be sticky and retentive. So I only made a decision that we're actually going to pull the trigger on this a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 3:And that's why the ad felt like it was, you know, quickly put together. It was quickly put together. Wait.
Speaker 2:So you bought so you bought the Super Bowl spot.
Speaker 1:You put it down. Youbought.com if you wanted to?
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what was the idea? Like, hey. If if we don't run it for ai.com, we have the crypto.com ad ready. We'll just run that?
Speaker 3:We have the crypto business. We have a prediction markets business. You know, we could do there's always some level of optionality, right? But this is the moment to run an AI ad, as you guys have seen. And timing is really important in life.
Speaker 3:Scale, timing and lag, a combination of these things.
Speaker 1:It's a good reference.
Speaker 2:Okay. So you put the ad together in effectively two weeks. Okay. Then you run it, and what happens then? Because I think you the attention from buying the world's most expensive domain ever.
Speaker 2:Then you got the attention of like, hey, there's this new AI product I've never heard of with a crazy domain running a Super Bowl ad. You should pay attention to it. And then you got a whole another kind of amount of of attention from people being like, wait, I just got an ad for ai.com and I landed on the website and it's not and and the website's down. So what what what what kind of happened? Did you you spent the the 70,000,000 on the domain, the 8,000,000 on on the spot and then you didn't have enough for to host it or what what happened?
Speaker 2:I'm assuming a lot of people got through, but certainly a lot of people got got stuck as well.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think we are happy with the outcome. Okay. We had about 300,000 people signing up.
Speaker 2:Wow. Wow. Let's go. That's a lot. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Can we get the can we get the Gong sign ups?
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of big numbers.
Speaker 2:That's a big number for a one day for a one day. But on on a on a more serious note, how did you how do you even prepare for that that amount of traffic? Like, how do you how do you what was going on in the war room?
Speaker 3:As you know, we've are on a platform that is used to spikes. Right? And we've got a great DevOps team, and we forgot all the stuff that you usually would expect, auto scaling and whatnot. So there were intermittent problems for some people, but largely it held up. Here we go through.
Speaker 3:So I I think fundamentally, it's the name and the fact that there is a certain amount of curiosity there, and we designed it in a a it it was a very simple call to action. Yeah. Go and and sign up. Yeah. So I think it worked.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Talk to me about consumer AI. ChatGPT has broken through Gemini and Google, they've been leveraging, you know, the Google platform and the network to onboard consumers. Nano Banana was a big moment. Sora and the Meta Vibes app sort of made a splash, but haven't been super sticky.
Speaker 1:But where do you see the gap in breaking through with consumers in a new way or just doing what consumers already expect but better, cheaper, faster? Like where is the consumer AI opportunity now that we're three years into the ChetGPT boom?
Speaker 3:I think fundamentally, you're able to actually get stuff done right now. So that's a big differentiating factor for the user experience. And we don't really know where this experiment is gonna take us take us Mhmm. Given the how the domain is is resonating with people. You know, we can introduce social network elements to it.
Speaker 3:I think the fact that every single person on earth is going to have an assistant of this sort and unlock new type of interactions and make our lives just better through serendipity, advice, staying on top of things and being proactive, really understanding us. So it's I'm pretty excited about the wandering aspect of it. We try to keep an open mind and not really be set on one thing. We will we now have 300,000 people waiting for us to give them the product. We're going to very quickly iterate on it.
Speaker 3:I'm a huge believer in moving quickly and listening to actual customers, and we will see where the journey takes us. I take a very long term view, you know, what can we do with this in ten years. I think it worked in the crypto space. Yeah. The opportunity here, the size is much, much bigger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So much of what happened in crypto was sort of permissionless, you know, bankless, this open source, these networks. Anyone can set up a node. And part of this latest OpenClaw, ClaudeBot, you know, hype cycle is driven by the fact you like, you get a Mac mini. It can talk to iMessage, it can talk to WhatsApp, it can talk to Telegram, it can go sort of wherever you go as a person.
Speaker 1:And that feels unique because maybe OpenAI can't go over to WhatsApp because Mark Zuckerberg doesn't wanna let him. And so I'm wondering about how you're thinking about the trade off between certain things that are only possible with an open source AI system that is sort of acting as an impostor as a human versus you're a company. If you wanna integrate with WhatsApp, you might have to give Meta a call. So how do you think about delivering the vision of, like, a truly universal AI agent that can do things with the realities of the business community?
Speaker 3:There are a lot of business and UX challenges here. So we'll have to resolve them one by one. And our view is we want to stand on the side of the consumer and help them make these technical choices, make sure that their data is safe, make sure that they can do what they want to do without putting themselves at risk and solving these issues with access to data, with user experience, it it cannot feel like a chore. Mhmm. And today, you need to be really technical to get value out of it.
Speaker 3:Mhmm. So there's plenty of work and it's difficult and that's part of the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One of the some unrequested feedback for me, I had kind of heard that a i.com was like potentially something like some type of relate you know, leveraging some OpenClaw technology Mhmm. And then I got hit with the Google login. And I was like, I don't have time to read through kind of the the full terms of service Yeah. Privacy policy and really understand.
Speaker 2:So I would love to see I mean, maybe there's plans for it, but I'd love to see just like being able to create account an account on the platform Totally. To play around with it just because I was looking at my Gmail, which my life is on, my work email, which obviously, you know, has its own privacy concerns, all that stuff. What you're you said you're rolling out the product tomorrow. What's the first thing that you want people to do with it?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. I think this is the big part of the product, figuring out how do you onboard people to it and get them to do a couple of things so that they can see value very quickly and connect with it. I think I think today, it's pretty hard to to get the feeling for what it can do without really connecting your email in Canada. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But we will see. I I feel that there's gonna be a lot of experimentation there, and we will look for user feedback and and truth in data in numbers of what really works and what doesn't. To a certain degree, you need to gamify it until such point where where users are deep enough that it actually gives them the feeling of, wow. This is special. This is different.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. That gamification is so important. Like, you see the Studio Ghibli moment where, you know, the latest images in ChatGP launches, and you don't even have to think. You just have something in your camera roll, and you're gonna type Studio Ghibli and you're gonna get the value prop.
Speaker 1:And then a couple months later, you're still gonna be going there for slide inspiration and stock photography and all the other things that you can do. But there's a killer app on day one that you come in and you and you get joy out of.
Speaker 2:Did you ever talk to the original owner of ai.com? I've heard he sat on it for thirty years. Thirty years. Initials, his first and last name his first name starts with a, last name starts with I, so he had bought the domain. Wow.
Speaker 2:I'm shocked that he held onto it for so long. You would think like IBM Watson IBM Watson in, like, 2010. Oh, totally. We'll give you a million
Speaker 3:bucks for it. But
Speaker 1:He held on.
Speaker 3:Look. We spoke on the day when we closed the transaction because he had a it was a little bit of a bidding war. He had a very serious bidder on the other side, and it required connecting in order to get it done.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. That's good. You're a deal's
Speaker 3:And by the way and and by the way, right after we closed the deal, I got the approach for the from the other side offering $5,500,000,000 plus, not for 500,000,000 for the domain. I think I could have pushed it to a billion if I wanted to, I didn't want to. So I think you guys need to you guys need to understand I am pot committed. I love it.
Speaker 1:I love I you. I
Speaker 2:love that you're just thinking you're you're viewing this. Like, obviously, you're taking it very seriously Yeah. But you're also taking the approach of, like, it's very early days
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:In, you know, what will be a long journey for for the project Yeah. But also the industry and you're just gonna, you know, listen to your users and figure it out. But the conviction to turn down what would have been turning 70,000,000 into 500 or or a billion in in twenty four hours is is admirable.
Speaker 1:Will you train a foundation model?
Speaker 3:I think I'm more focused on getting this to scale and getting the data flywheel going so that we can deliver for our users. Our users don't really care about which model runs in the background as long as the job gets done and their data is safe. But once you get to a certain scale, who knows?
Speaker 1:Anything's on the table. I like it.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm sure you'll be back on. That's very exciting. I'm excited to see this roll out and roll out.
Speaker 1:I'm signing up tomorrow. I might be using a dummy Google account, but I will be signing up and testing this out. I'm excited. And then I'll slowly forward myself data from my real account to give you a little bit more a little bit more to see what it can do. But I'm excited for for for for the launch tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Congratulations. I mean, a fantastic career, but also this particular project, really, really fun execution and a wonderful story. So thank you for coming to join us.
Speaker 2:You you're basically the mayor of of Los Angeles through the through the crypto.com arena. Do you do you come through much?
Speaker 1:You're a Lakers guy?
Speaker 3:I've been in DC last week, and then I stopped over in Silicon Valley. I have never been to the arena.
Speaker 2:Never been to the arena. Wow.
Speaker 1:You gotta come sometime. Catch a game.
Speaker 3:Maybe we should catch a game.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They also do monster truck rallies there. Underrated crypto.com arena experience, especially if you have kids.
Speaker 2:He's a big monster truck guy.
Speaker 3:I'm big monster
Speaker 1:truck guy. I don't really follow basketball that much, but I will be watching Grave Digger live in the crypto.comarena. Anyway, thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Chris.
Speaker 1:It's great to be here.
Speaker 2:Congrats on the win.
Speaker 3:Have a great
Speaker 1:rest of your day. Soon. We'll talk to you soon.