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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.
We're gonna get that sound ready because we got some bad news. Thoma Bravo is taking a massive write down on a software company called Medallia. Thoma Bravo is reportedly handing over the software company Medallia to creditors after restructuring negotiations failed to materialize. This is a $5,100,000,000 equity wipeout for the firm who bought the business for 6,400,000,000 in 2021. There's some background in Reuters that I think I should read through, and then you can sort of give me your analysis and your and what you're seeing on the timeline around take.
Speaker 1:So from Reuters, exclusive, Thoma Bravo nears agreement to turn software firm Medallia over to creditors. That does not sound good. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software firm Medallia to lenders, wrapping up months of restructuring negotiations. The move will wipe out 5,100,000,000 in equity. Medallia has struggled in recent months under the weight of $3,000,000,000 of debt, which it owes to Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Group, and Antares Capital.
Speaker 1:Thoma Bravo, Blackstone, KKR declined to comment. Apollo and Medallia didn't immediately return quest for comments to Reuters. So like other software companies, Medallia's valuation has been hit in recent months over concerns that its services will eventually be supplanted by artificial intelligence. What does Medallia do? Medallia provides software that collects and analyzes customer and employee feedback for companies.
Speaker 1:We've had some startups, some of them backed by Sequoia Capital, that are using AI to do this exact thing. That's a potential disruption. And then there's also
Speaker 2:rolling So their main rivals Qualtrics.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But yeah. And maybe you said this already, but you know that Sequoia was one of the big backers at Medallia I didn't when they were a
Speaker 1:private company. Oh, interesting. So
Speaker 2:they I were mean, they're still private.
Speaker 1:There's a long history of that with the firm that was before Zenefits was called like SuccessFactors. Lars Dahlgaard did that deal.
Speaker 2:Sequoia is They really important did 35,000,000 in 2012. They did another $50,000,000 in 2014. And then they later led $150,000,000 round.
Speaker 1:Wow. And then eventually, do they take it public or do they sell it for $6,000,000,000 to Thoma Bravo directly from a private Was Medallia ever a public company? That would be interesting.
Speaker 2:I think they were.
Speaker 1:You look that up, and I will keep reading from this to give some more backstory. So private equity firms invested heavily in the software sector when interest rates were low following the peak of the COVID-nineteen pandemic. We all remember 3% interest rates. It was the golden era of startups and growth. All the DCFs were massive, and then, of course, the valuations came down once the interest rates went up.
Speaker 1:So investors have become increasingly nervous about the sustainability of high valuations assigned to some of those assets and the debt raised to buy them. If you're on a floating rate or not, you know, these firms are not necessarily backed by a thirty year fixed mortgage like your house, your interest rate went up and the debt payments ballooned. And if the flow from the business has not also ballooned, you could be in trouble like this company potentially is. Blackstone KKR and Antares hold some of the debt in traded and nontraded funds. FS KKR Capital Corp marked the debt at 79¢ on the dollar in its last quarterly report, and, of course, debt is senior to equity.
Speaker 1:So what does that mean for the equity? Not good, and that's why this deal is happening. Apollo debt solutions market at $0.74 on the dollar. So a question about can they even recover, you know, the full value of that debt? The equity is obviously in deep, deep trouble.
Speaker 1:So Blackstone's global head of private credit, Brad Marshall, said on a conference call in February that Medallia had been underperforming not because of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution driven issues. So there is a question of, well, if they restructure and this company gets in the hands of creditors, maybe they can roll out AI features and become an AI winner and accelerate the top line and
Speaker 2:restructure I the saw someone was sharing that there were some sales people doing some anonymous reporting and saying a lot of the reps were struggling to hit quotas, delivering 20% of quotas, something like that. So just basically getting out competed in the market. And just go back to the earlier point, yes, Medallia went public in 2019 on the NYSE. It was taken private 07/26/2021. It had been trading around the $5,000,000,000 mark prior to the take private at $6.4
Speaker 1:So Thoma Bravo, after taking it private, installed a new leadership team in 2025. Marshall, the head of Blackstone's global head of private credit, said that they were working on a turnaround plan, and we expect there to be discussions around structure. And so people are blackmailing on the time line. Brandon says, yes, I am sure this is the bottom in software, and we won't get worse from here. Not good signs.
Speaker 1:This is potentially one of those cockroaches that Jamie Dimon was worrying about. There's another post that seems like it was deleted.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, so the
Speaker 1:some of the screenshot here.
Speaker 2:The tough thing is that everyone involved here Yep. Has been on a kind of a press tour saying, like, everything's fine. Yes. Like we're all good. Yes.
Speaker 2:AI Yeah. Is gonna be an accelerant. But even ignoring the AI question, a lot of these businesses no longer have, you know, are are founder led.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They're competing against other companies that that are founder led. And yeah, it's just kind of a credit to Jamie Dimon for his comments saying like, I don't think this is over when you had first brands and some other shutdowns.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In the previous startup era, there were I I feel like it would have been hard to raise for just like a vanilla Qualtrics or Medallia competitor and just saying like pre AI, like we're just going to build SaaS and we're just going to build a CRUD app and write software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. New player is a company Arru.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a very different
Speaker 2:Simulation. Simulation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a very different approach.
Speaker 2:And then we had another one. I'm blanking on the name. It was a YC founder. He had he had gone through YC a few years ago, but his company is taking off doing Sure. Doing something something similar.
Speaker 2:So people have been well aware Yeah. Of the opportunity that Medallia and Qualtrics have owned. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So in other debt related news, Xi Jinping wants to use the International Monetary Fund to rescue the array of distressed Chinese loans around the world. This is an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal opinion. Noah Smith is laughing. He says, lol, Belt and Road failed so hard. Xi Jinping is incompetent.
Speaker 1:That is this is very narrative.
Speaker 2:Do not go to China. Yeah. Not go to China.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is an interesting thing. But maybe a potential bargaining chip in all of the other discussions. In tech, Tyler always points out that tech is like too focused on chips when it comes to Chinese diplomacy, that there are many, many other questions around trade and what Apple's doing and rare earths. And, there are so many and just the broad history of the Chinese empire that play into what their Taiwan policy is, how they will interact in The Middle East.
Speaker 1:And we tend to focus it all on AI. It's all about the data centers and the chips. Perhaps there are more things. And this is one example of something else that is a key factor in a broader negotiation that includes chip exports and also rare earths and also talent and movements and whether or not Manus will be able to move over to meta and a million other things. And so Totally.
Speaker 1:That is the job of these world leaders is to swirl around all the different trade offs and get to hopefully a a good deal for both sides.
Speaker 2:Some Breaking news. Mariam Webster. GBT 5.5 Oh. Is out.
Speaker 1:Oh, it
Speaker 2:is. Is out. Introducing GBT 5.5, a new class of intelligence for real work and powering agents built to understand complex goals, use tools, check its work, and carry more tasks through to completion. It marks a new way of getting computer work done Mhmm. Now available in ChatGPT and Codex.
Speaker 1:I like this demo of the Rubik's cube. GPT 5.5 excels at writing and debugging code, researching online, analyzing data, creating documents and spreadsheets, operating software and moving across tools until a task is finished. GPT 5.5 delivers this step up in intelligence without compromising on speed, matches, GPT 5.4 per token latency in real world serving. There's the model card there and there are some other posts.
Speaker 2:We will wait for the reactions to come in. Yeah. We will gather them. We'll summarize them. But the team cooked.
Speaker 1:Cooked. Congratulations to everyone that worked on this.
Speaker 2:Let's head over to Merriam Webster. John, Merriam what do you Webster. Merriam Webster
Speaker 1:added a new word to the dictionary, I believe. And I feel like the But pace of
Speaker 2:actually added this?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I I mean Okay. It's
Speaker 2:in America. They have a slang section.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay. Slang and trending. They must be working overtime over there because the number of wombos, if you're not familiar with wombos, these are word combos. Things like
Speaker 2:queen Lorrain.
Speaker 1:Lorrain. The lore
Speaker 2:plus explain or queen I could tell, John. Can you Lorrain GPT 5.5?
Speaker 1:Yes. Give you the lore And explain. Tell you about what happened with 4.5, four o, 3.5, three da Vinci, give you the whole lore, but then also explain what this model is capable of. That's the full Lorraine of GPT 5.5. But we're not here to talk about Lorraine.
Speaker 1:We're here to talk about Choppelganger, which is a new word in Merriam Webster, the dictionary. It's basically the main dictionary as far as I'm concerned. Chopleganger is a term for a less attractive version of someone or something. So whoever's going out there and distilling 5.5 into sort of a chopped version of it, that will be the chopper ganger of the official GPT 5.5. So stay away from the chopper gangers unless you're really down and you're lucky And you need a Chinese open source model to do something for you.
Speaker 1:Then buyer beware because it might have some flaws. Separately, there is new news from Michael Kratzios that the government seems to be taking Anthropic and OpenAI's messaging around distillation very seriously and is setting up a task force. We can read a little bit more about this later, but setting up a task force to actually figure out how to prevent distillation at scale. As the models get bigger, it's more and more of an economic impact. When you're talking about $100,000,000 training run and a Chinese lab can distill it and sneak the weights out and sneak the exfiltrate the data, that's a lot different of an economic impact from stealing something that, I don't know, cost billions to train or billions to put together.
Speaker 1:Good news there. Hopefully, they're successful. It was also sort of a white pill to see a lot of the labs working together to understand, hey, we're seeing this weird amount of data go to this particular company. Are you seeing the same thing? Or it's a shell company, and we have five shell companies in these areas that are asking for these queries.
Speaker 1:And and then the other lab says, oh, yeah, we're actually getting something similar. And if you puzzle piece those together, all of a sudden, you're getting a really solid map of what a Frontier system is capable of. And so it feels like we, the industry, are the victim of a distillation attack, even if it might not register among a single lab because that single lab is only getting hit with like onethree or onefive of the total attack.
Speaker 2:Subject. Adversarial distillation of American AI models. United States leads the world in AI technologies. That lead that lead reflects decades of foundational research, bold entrepreneurial risk taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in annual private investment. American AI leadership drives economic growth, strengthens national security, and advances the frontiers of science, medicine, and human knowledge.
Speaker 2:The breakthroughs emerging from American industry raise living standards, expand opportunity, improve lives around the world. However, The United States has information indicating that foreign entities principally based in China are engaged in deliberate industrial scale campaigns to distill US frontier AI systems, leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information. These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models exploiting
Speaker 1:I don't like that. That sounds bad.
Speaker 2:That at all. Exploiting American expertise and innovation.
Speaker 1:Every AI researcher needs this button on their desk. If they detect this distillation attack, fire it off and the security team will come and make sure you're locked down. And it does seem like overall, all the labs are being more careful about how the APIs roll out, where how they're doing KYC, how they're doing different partnerships and stuff. And I think it's all a back and forth and a dynamic. But it's fun that this new model is available and people will play with it.
Speaker 1:And I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff, some
Speaker 2:Yeah. And QUEN 3.6
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Called out yesterday. Look. People are like, wow. It's it's almost as good as Opus four five. Like, yeah, because they they they distilled Opus four five.
Speaker 1:So Don't ask
Speaker 2:me. I'm glad that Kratios is on it, and I'm glad that the labs can coordinate and work together on this one. Yes. More breaking news.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And unfortunate, but we had talked about this previously. Meta is cutting 10% of their workforce, which is 8,000 employees.
Speaker 1:This has been tough for
Speaker 2:a while. Eliminating 6,000 open roles.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I saw Microsoft was doing something similar. They're they're offering early retirement to something like 7% of the workforce trying to to lean out a little bit. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage over the underlying motivations. These companies can be big and sometimes maybe they're too big, maybe there's AI gains, maybe there's, you know, different investment strategies.
Speaker 1:We will have to see where they are moving chips around, what projects they are actually cutting, what projects they are doubling down on because these companies are also hiring at all times effectively. Well, Christophe had some actual media ideas for the tech industry.
Speaker 2:He says
Speaker 1:there's not enough media in tech. Do you see? We need more We need more.
Speaker 2:We need more tech positive Media. Media. For sure.
Speaker 1:So he says, silent library with founders. Winner gets investment. What is
Speaker 2:Silent Library?
Speaker 1:Silent Library? So you're is this like a like a webcam that observes
Speaker 2:Silent Library is a television show. It had four seasons. It's a game show.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a game show. Game shows are fun. I can see a game show being being fun. At least different and
Speaker 2:it was Six friends vying for a cash prize. If only they can remain silent as one of them is forced to endure a bizarre stunt while seated in a library.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Okay. What else? Jackass with founders. What
Speaker 1:does that mean? How how do you make that tech related? Maybe like humanoid robots? Like, I I When I think of Johnny Knoxville, I just think of riding a bull riding effectively. And so I imagine like riding some sort of, you know, robotic bull would be it.
Speaker 1:But, you know, it's very dangerous. Like, the the the the team that worked with, like, Dan Margera and and Johnny Knoxville, they had some serious injuries from time to time. And and I I don't know if it's in your best interest to be a founder and be like, yeah. I need to I need to launch my startup, so I gotta go in the ring with a mechanical bull and potentially break my arm and not be able to code. And it seems rough, but would be entertaining and with the right twist.
Speaker 1:I I I believe it could work. Interview founders while going ghost hunting. I feel like paranormal tech content. Jesse Michaels doesn't get enough credit here. You know?
Speaker 1:He
Speaker 2:is a technology podcast.
Speaker 1:He's a it's it's in it's in the technology charts, and it charts high. Yeah. Like, it's up there. And he has an incredible pedigree, great investor, and also, you know, has, some of the best reporting on aliens and paranormal activity and conspiracy theories. And I I guess he just hasn't cracked the way to bring a founder along.
Speaker 1:But if you're if you're friends with Jesse Michaels are are in touch, maybe you just tag along for a little cameo on one of his videos and that's all the PR you need.
Speaker 2:Founders give their pitches while skydiving. Can you
Speaker 1:I like
Speaker 2:skydiving. Can you talk while skydiving?
Speaker 1:With the right headset.
Speaker 2:Have you gone skydiving?
Speaker 1:No. But I like the idea and I like the videos.
Speaker 2:Have I told you the story where I was I was in on an overnight flight back from Europe? No. I'm sitting on a on a plane. Yeah. And I'm awake.
Speaker 2:I can't sleep. Okay. And out of the shadows, John Wick. Oh. Walking up the aisle.
Speaker 2:Keanu Reeves. Yeah. The real It's like 2AM. Yeah. And Keanu Reeves is like walking at me on this plane in the middle of the night.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We ended up talking for like five minutes. Really? It was cool.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:And he went and then went back to see.
Speaker 1:And yeah. Well, he stayed on the plane.
Speaker 2:He did not Super nice guy.
Speaker 1:What else do they have here? SF Party, I'm Schmacked videos. I don't know I'm
Speaker 2:Schmacked. Wow. Unc. You're Unc. You guys know.
Speaker 2:I kind of remember, but You remember?
Speaker 1:I need
Speaker 2:to remember. Basically, was this whole you could call it a media company, but it was really a guy that would make party videos.
Speaker 1:Okay. What era are we talking?
Speaker 2:Every college. Okay. So it was really popular probably 2010 to Okay. '20
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And I will say a lot of people use these videos as a sort of college guide.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Not speeding I'm sure they have millions and millions of views at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, had some incredible predictions in 2016. Let's read through them. Summary of the inevitable understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. This was Kevin Kelly's book from 2016.
Speaker 1:According to Kelly, much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable. The future will bring with it even more screens, tracking, lack of privacy. In the book, he outlines 12 trends that will forever change the ways we work, learn, and communicate. Becoming, moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions. That has definitely happened.
Speaker 1:We're moving away from even seats. Everything's consumption based now. Cognifying, making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from the cloud. Nailed it.
Speaker 2:That is Flowing. Fantastic prediction for '20 assuming he wrote it
Speaker 1:Pre '20 he
Speaker 2:actually wrote it probably in 2015.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Published in 2016. But
Speaker 1:he's the creator of Wired. He's been tapped into tech his entire career. Depending on unstoppable streams of real time for everything, for sure. Turning all surfaces into screens, that definitely happen. Your toaster can watch Screening.
Speaker 1:TV now. Shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we have access to all services at all times. Collaboration at mass scale on my imaginary sharing meter index, we are still two out of 10. Filtering, harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires. Remixing, unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts, and then recombining in all possible ways.
Speaker 1:That's definitely happening. Coconut simulator, unironically, an example of that. Interacting, immersing ourselves inside of computers to maximize their engagement, tracking, employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. Sounds scary. Potentially a good outcome if things are done properly.
Speaker 1:Promoting good questions is far more valuable answers.
Speaker 2:What? You think total surveillance is potentially
Speaker 1:Well, says total surveillance for the benefit of citizens So and if there is a black box where my Netflix recommend where my Netflix activity exists, where no Netflix employee can see it because it's encrypted, but it can make great recommendations and recommend me the next great show that I will actually enjoy, I'm cool with that surveillance.
Speaker 2:For the benefit of John Coogan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There is there is a surveillance bull case. Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix. Okay.
Speaker 1:That one, we're still waiting on. But a lot of good interesting predictions. Jason Schuman says, wild how accurate these predictions were. And they were, in fact.
Speaker 2:Wow. More breaking news in the journal. Bob Iger is returning to where? Disney. Thrive.
Speaker 1:Thrive. No way. That's amazing. Back to Thrive. Love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think he he he's been an LP in Thrive. Yeah. Also bought a piece of Thrive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right. Robert. Okay. Well, that'll be a good next act for him.
Speaker 1:I'm very interested to see where he goes. There's a whole alumni class coming together. Reed Hastings is out and on to the next thing. We'll see where they go, hopefully.
Speaker 2:Back to Intel. Intel announced its first quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday beating analyst expectations on the top and bottom line and providing better than anticipated q two guidance on strong data center sales. Mhmm. Intel said it expects revenue of 13.8 to 14,800,000,000 for the second quarter. Wall Street was anticipating 13,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:And as of this morning, they were they they were at around a 100 a 100 times PE, and so only up for Intel.
Speaker 1:Climbing the ranks. Climbing the ranks. Tesla also released q one earnings. Revenue of 2 point 22,400,000,000 versus 21,400,000,000 estimated, so they beat on top line. They also beat on net income, 1,450,000,000 versus 1,170,000,000 estimate.
Speaker 1:The interesting article in the journal was that Elon was being more cautious about Tesla, talking, saying, I think we need to get realistic about some timelines. So he is certainly not, you know, pumping everyone up and and he's trying to sort of reset around fundamentals. And so we will see where that goes. It is a wild timeline that SpaceX, if it goes out at 1,750,000,000,000, will be bigger than Tesla, which is sitting around 1.1, 1,200,000,000,000 these days. So still both huge
Speaker 2:to Bubble Boy over on X two hours ago. He says, everyone asked me about how I'm playing earnings. He says, doubling down 25% of my portfolio is in Intel calls.
Speaker 1:Wow. There we go, Bubble Boy. Congrats.
Speaker 2:Well done. Good. Well played. Stuff. Well Well played.
Speaker 1:Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Throw that flash bang, Jordy, because we are out of here.
Speaker 2:It's been an honor.
Speaker 1:It's been Thanks
Speaker 2:for hanging out with us.
Speaker 1:We will see you tomorrow.
Speaker 2:Doing Flashbang. We'll see
Speaker 1:you soon. Goodbye.