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Technology you have inside your organization are large corporations that are, maybe they don't have an in house AI lab. Are they generally of the view AGI is real? AGI is soon, but we're going to go through a sort of slow takeoff. Diffusion adoption will be a big problem and Cognition can help sort of realize that thesis. I think the pace of progress in artificial intelligence is dramatically over, over the pace of progress of internal organizational redesign for sure. And so, you know, and by the way, this is true not just at the big Fortune 500, even the sort of startups or tech companies we would consider as fast movers. Everyone is asking, you know, do I really need to rethink everything now because of AI? And I would say it's actually one of the, one of the things that's been lucky for us at Cognition is we only incorporated in January of 2024. So our internal team set up and structure is, it's, it's very native. But every company is trying to figure this out for themselves. And I think if you, if you froze capabilities today, you have at least a decade of crazy progress in the, in the full enterprise world just to get this stuff really rolled out and operationalized. So what are, when you're talking to an enterprise, is it better.

It's very onerous, et cetera, et cetera. But there is another world which is just broader exposure through funds, and that's a lot of what's happening here. 100% agree? Yeah. Okay. Once a week, maybe twice a week, sometimes three times a week or four times a week, or even five. There's a company that I've never heard of that comes on and raises half a billion dollars, and, you know, they're maybe like one or two years old that I get a little bit wary because I sort of, like, my career came online, let's say, in 2018. I'd been paying attention to startups prior to that, but, like, really was paying attention in 2018. And we went through this sort of crazy period and then we saw a pretty massive correction. I got to sort of be on that roller coaster. And so now, while we're back in boom times, I'm just, like, much more wary than I was before because I was young and maybe overly optimistic. Right. And so today I'm just. When. When you look at the public markets, there's a lot of. A lot of valuations seem relatively reasonable in the private markets today. There's, you know, we saw Airtable, if Air Table was a. Was a waste. Just like I know a SaaS company that has a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of Airtable's current revenue that is doing a new round well beyond airtable's valuation. And it's just because they're squarely serving other AI companies when ultimately they're just as much of a software company as Airtable was. And so you see this, like, massive kind of disconnect between exits and private valuations. And so I have a lot of alarm bells going off, but I'm curious how you see it. And LPs on the platform are seeing it. Yeah. One of the most dangerous things to say in the investing world is this time's different because rarely is it completely different. So, you know, similar to you, I've had some scar tissues built up. I actually started my career in 99. I was at Silicon Valley Bank, I was at SVB, and I was lending into the dot com. And back then, you know, companies were going public based on one metric, which is eyeballs. Right. Like, how many eyeballs? How many people are visiting your site? Well, today it's ar, which, you know, as we know, can be a little creative in terms of how people are actually saying ar, what's actually true right now. So I think we have to disassociate, you know, AI as, like, this technology innovation, which I think is going to be bigger than anything we've ever seen, bigger than the Internet, bigger than mobile and cloud, and maybe the biggest innovation since the railroads. The challenge though is when you have a new technology of this size and scale, especially moving this fast, the supply and demand for those companies changes. So you have so much capital being raised, people are incentive. Like if you're a vc, you're incented to invest in the next hot air company which has grown from let's say 1 to 10 million to 100 million in revenues. Knowing that full well that if you catch the tiger by the tail and you get the anthropics or you get the open air, your career is minted. And so a lot of capital goes into these companies. And every single time that I've been through one of these, the companies that do win are bigger than ever by a massive degree of magnitude. The issue is so many expensive mistakes. You mentioned Airtable, that was like 2021. I think their peak valuation was $11.7 billion. They raised almost 1.5 billion and they sold for to bending spoons for $1.25 billion. Right. That means common shareholders get nothing. And the people that came in at the end, they may get a return on capital. But that's a horrible. I thought common shareholders were getting something because the actual, the total price, equity value, something billion. Yeah, 2.2, roughly 800 million. But again it's like a billion tiny fraction of what they would have probably marked it themselves. If that's the case, that's great. But that's not the case for a lot of those 2021 companies that raised that sometimes I was seeing 50 to 100x multiples for these companies. Now the multiples aren't that crazy this time around and these companies grow. The bigger challenge is like which one of these companies is actually durable? Like, I mean, is a big frontier model going to subsume me? What happens with open weight and open source models? Still too early to tell. So I think you're right in that you should be somewhat nerv. But at the same time, venture has always been a parallel industry. Right. 6% of total companies actually return over 60%. That's historical. I think it's even more amplified right now. But I'm in the mindset right now that I've been through these periods and people always have short memories like 2021 was what, five years ago? And it's almost like we forgot 2022 and 23. Things do not go right when you just plug so much capital with such speed. And so I expect the same thing to happen. I don't know when this changes and when gravity comes back in the private markets. Six months, 12 months, two years, maybe it's even five years. Maybe we're all wrong. But I would actually be willing to bet that within the next few years we're going to see some kind of pullback and then we'll kind of see, you know what they say, when the tide goes out, you see who's wearing the swim trunks. And I think we'll see that next year or the year after. Okay, yeah, that's a better way to put it.

What does better mean for them? And then measure those bright signals to then label correctly and then provide that as feedback to improve the models. How do you. Jordy, please. You had a follow up. I have a question. Just following up on Design Arena. How are you balancing the various downstream business opportunities that come from having a product, a platform like Design Arena? Because I could imagine you can sort of become a model router in many ways. You can do forward deployed work and be an expert and partner to companies that are picking tools like there's services as a software, there's going down the financial stack. Like there's so many opportunities, it must be hard to. Like you're sort of stuck in the idea maze longer than usual. Even after you have traction and fundraising and revenue, there's more opportunity. What have you looked at? What's not interesting, what's. What has stuck out as the obvious path. That is the best question, by the way, to be asking in this space. There are so many downstream opportunities that come from figuring out what it is that people want. What we found to be the most interesting actually is an intelligence marketplace. There are some. This is a little bit kooky, but I do believe that there will one day be as many suppliers of intelligence as there are currently suppliers of information. This feels like the early days of the Internet, right? Like where anybody can, can make their own intelligence. I don't care if that's a foundation map lab with a, with a main API or something that's post trained or something that's totally off the shelf with a skill, but there's like a million different suppliers of information. And if you can be the person that best matches the supplier of information with somebody supplier of intelligence, I should say somebody who's asking for intelligence. The same way that page rank for Google search was the critical bottleneck to get the Internet into everybody's hands. That is the position that we actually want to be in. So whatever the work it is that we do, we want it to fit into this flywheel that we have. And we want to make sure that we're not just good at value creation, like not just good at improving the models, but also good at value capture. Once the models get better at design, it's not like our work becomes less useful. It actually means our product can reach more people because they're better at design. So we care about doing things in the opportunities that are coming our way, which we're lucky to have a ton of inbound from yesterday, that it feeds into this overall flywheel that if the models get better. We also get better. Yeah. Almost $60 million of revenue, I think.

The owners of MySpace say they're planning to relaunch the once dominant social media platform. And I feel like this has happened multiple times. I'm having deja vu here. But we'll dig into it. In a recent documentary called MySpace about the company. We got another app, Lovin Cars. Axle AI. Axon Axle AI. No, it's a self driving car, but you have to play mobile games. Keep it going. That's a feature. I mean, you get into Tesla, you can play Polytopia there. Why not Clash of Clams, a big iPad and you're just playing mobile games like 90% of the way there. If you stop leveling up, the car just pulls over. You got to keep playing. Okay, we're getting somewhere. This is good. So in the recent documentary MySpace, Chris and Tim Vanderhoek, the brothers who acquired MySpace in 2011 after its decline, said they intend to relaunch the platform and with a new vision. There's no launch date that's been announced, but they say they want to build a social network that feels different from today's algorithm driven apps. They don't believe in preference falsification. They think when people say they don't like algorithmic feeds, they actually don't like them. We'll see how it pans out. So MySpace launched in 2003 and quickly became one of the world's largest social networking sites. It became famous for for customizable profiles, music discovery, and its iconic top friends feature before Facebook eventually overtook it in users and became the dominant social platform. At its Peak, though, MySpace attracted roughly 150 million monthly visitors worldwide. That's not necessarily people that had profiles, but just visitors you'd land on a MySpace site. So huge for the day, but not huge by modern standards. So the platform's ownership history mirrors its dramatic rise and fall. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Acquired MySpace's parent company for $580 million. It was like, I'm pretty sure it was a fantastic outcome at the time. Now by social media standards, it's like, what are you doing just six years later? In 2011, News Corp. Sold MySpace for roughly $35 million, though so completely got wracked to Specific Media. Led by brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook, Justin Timberlake invested in the company and became a prominent creative advisor during the acquisition. In 20, Time Inc. Acquired specific Media's parent company in a deal valued at about $87 million. Three years later, Meredith Corporation acquired Time Inc. Briefly inheriting MySpace before selling its stake back to the Vanderhook Brothers. That same year, all told, MySpace went from a $580 million trophy acquisition at the height of the social media boom to a roughly $35 million distressed sale just six years later. Today, MySpace.com is still online, primarily serving as a music and entertainment website, while its parent, while its owners prepare what they hope will become a second act. Are you bullish? What do you think they should do? What's the advice for the owners of MySpace.com? nostalgia. You gotta call bending spoons, right? Is it making any money? That's the issue for bending spoons. You gotta get one Italian teenager to run this whole thing. They're like, if you were making $500 million, we would love to buy you 1.2 billion. But since you're making less than. I don't, I don't know if they're making any money. They must be making some money. Just as, you know, a website with some ads on it or something, who knows? Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new.

To watch a Spider man brand new day promo when they start their cars up. That's the question. A lot of people were upset about this. Jordy this morning is like, this is awful. There's some nuance here. So BMW owners are debating the company's latest in car promotion after videos spread across X showing a Spider man brand new day animation appearing on their vehicles infotainment screen at Star Startup. And the reason why this fake news triggered me was back in the day in college, I was getting a Kindle and on the checkout page it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad supported Kindle? And as a college student I was like, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like I would have actually appreciated ads. Can you just flip it upside down? True. Wow. One, one simple trick. Jordy hates this one simple trick. And. But it wouldn't be ads for like Spider Man. It would be ads for random books, right? Yeah, books. That and the targeting wasn't good. So again, people don't like ads. That target was good. Anyways, what happened here, John? Okay, so venture capitalist Shield Monot wrote quite quote, when you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider man really cheapens the BMW, in my opinion. A16Z partner Josh Elman added, of all the brands I thought might bombard you with in car ads on screen right when you start the engine, I had BMW. Pretty dang low on that list. This seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand? They were premium. Yeah, I think it's a premium brand. Premium brand. Even Paul Graham weighed in though, reposting Monat's video and saying, I'm never buying a BMW. He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in an E39M. Wait, but what actually happened? You have to opt into this community. Notes Added Important context According to OneNote, the Spider man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27 through through August 10, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full screen ad. Instead, owners must tap in to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited time startup experiences in the past, including holiday themed animations. Jordy. Very, very, very different. You can just see the pop up there. Surprise. Spider man just dropped into your BMW and it's an ad. You press the Button. You have to actually turn it on. It's not. Yes, yes. But I'm saying there's a banner ad. Oh, there is a banner ad. It's just a banner. Look at the video. Start it over. Start it over. Let's see. Let's be the judge of this. Look at this banner. It's a banner. Oh, okay. And then you click the banner. Then it plays an ad. So it's a pop up that you click. Okay. And it's like, wait, what is this pop up? Why does my car have a pop up? It should probably be popped into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like, probably promotions or themes that didn't look tucked in anywhere. That was the main. That was the main. Because I'm fine. If you. If there's a. If there's a theme and you're like, I want red lighting in my car, I want blue lighting. I want Spider man theme, I want Christmas theme, go. They're literally saying, surprise. A Spider man ad. And they're not even like. They should just say, hey, we have an ad for Spider man here if you'd like one. Okay. This is right on the line. But this, this is, this is. This crosses my line. This crosses your line because you're like, what is Spider Man? What is. What does Spider man have to do with my car? And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider Man. But I just think of the consumer surplus this is making. BMW is cheaper. This is making. This is bringing. Bringing BMW. Let's look at the price of inflation. Yeah. Also not necessarily the best deal. Yeah, let's look at BMW inflation. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Really, really bad move. I wonder how much they actually made. I think you're just judging it because it's. I think you would feel completely different, completely differently if you saw a banner and it was Nitro Circus and it would just take over your car. Or if it was just a full takeover of Sam Sulek at the Arnold Classic, something like that, that would be much better received. It's not Opinion. Surprise. Spider Man™ just dropped into your BMW. Okay. The ultimate driving machine. Yeah. Not super well executed, but BMW's been going back and forth with stuff like this pretty consistently. Like, aren't they the ones that have the subscription to the heated seats? Isn't that BMW? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I remember something. They put the wires to heat the seats in every car. And then if you want to use it, they charge you monthly. And this is just like it's basically just a nerd snipe or like a, like a, I don't know, like a treasure hunt for hackers. Because if you're a DIY hacker and you can get into that and unlock it, jailbreak it, you just get, well, not free because you already paid for it. But you don't have to pay the subscription. Yeah, Techno Chief says, wait, I thought we loved ads here. I do love ads. That's true. But I think buying. Unless. Unless BMW, I think, I think if they gave the option at purchase saying, do you want to buy the ad supported manual transmission BMW M2 or do you want the ad free premium version? And there was a bit of a price difference. Yeah. Then it just feels, it feels wrong. They didn't do that. Sort of like a Ferrari TaylorMade program. Oh, like what stitching did you get? Oh, did you go ad free or ad supported? Like, oh, you went manual, cool. Yeah, I went manual. But ad supported. Yeah, manual, Yeah, I got a manual SP3. Ad supported. I mean the ads in an SB3 driver are probably very hard to reach, so pretty valuable. I would love ads there. But it's got to be ads for the most elite products. It's gotta be. You're getting your SP3 and it shows you an ad for Amangiri or something. Spider Man's doing well though, so the ads are working. So, you know, maybe the BMW owner showed up in droves because the new Spider man movie scores Hollywood's second biggest debut ever. That's actually huge. The Sony film grossed $932 million through Sunday, topped only by 2019's Endgame. That is massive. Did you realize that this movie was making that much money? I mean, if you had asked me an hour ago, is there a new Spider man movie coming out, I would say haven't heard of anything. Yeah, I haven't seen that much energy about it. I've been aware of it, but I have not. I've not seen like a massive takeover. But also I'm not driving an ad supported BMW. So maybe that's the problem. Spider man spun a massive weekend for movie theaters, flouting superhero fatigue and giving a major boost to Hollywood summer block box office. Sony Pictures Spider man brand new day open to an estimated. We got some good ideas here in the chat. So ad supported cars that get you free self driving where they. The ads take over the whole entertainment system in the car. So you're sitting there relaxing, you know the car is driving itself, but then it's just blaring high volume every. I'll take it a step further. Every five minutes, 1 32nd. What if there was a volume? What if there's a whole company dedicated to building self driving cars that was funded by an advertising company, like a company that just prints billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising, like their DNA is advertising. And then they go into the self driving. Why is no one done this before? They would have a huge advantage in terms of why has no one done this before. Yeah, they could even have a video platform where they're making a lot of money running video ads and they could take that almost like a YouTube. YouTube. Yeah, exactly. So you could have like, you know, a huge ad network, YouTube ads. And then you could have a self driving car company, put them all together. That's synergy. And maybe you could spin the company out at some point and raise some venture capital too. Spin the company out? They secretly still advertising? No, I don't think Waymo will do crazy ads. I think, I don't know, maybe a major streaming executive just text. A major streaming executive just texted me and says, okay, going to get Tubi to build a car right now. You gotta build a car, you gotta do it. What else is going on here? Okay, let me tell you about Crowdstrike.

Automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. So is BMW forcing owners to watch a Spider man brand new day promo when they start their cars up? That's the question. A lot of people were upset about this. Jordy this morning is like, this is awful. There's some nuance here. So BMW owners are debating the company's latest in car promotion after videos spread across X showing a Spider man brand new day animation appearing on their vehicle's infotainment screen at startup. And the reason why this fake news triggered me was back in the day in college, I was getting a Kindle and on the checkout page it was like, do you want to save $10 and get the ad supported Kindle? And as a college student I was like, saving $10 sounds pretty nice. And then I had to live with a Kindle that would sit on my bedside table just blaring ads in my face constantly. And it wasn't like I would have actually appreciated ads. Can you just flip it upside down? True. Wow. One simple trick. Jordy hates this. One simple trick and. But it wouldn't be ads for like Spider Man. It would be ads for random books, right? Yeah, books. That and the targeting wasn't good. So again, people don't like ads. Anyways, what happened here, John? Okay, so venture capitalist Shield Monot wrote, quote, when you start a BMW, it shows you an ad for Spider man really cheapens the BMW, in my opinion. A16Z partner Josh Elman added, of all the brands, I thought I might, I thought might bombard you with in car ads on screen right when you start the engine. I had BMW. Pretty dang low on that list. This seems the opposite of luxury and performance. Is BMW a luxury brand? Thought they were premium. Yeah, I think it's a premium brand. Premium brand. Even Paul Graham weighed in though, reposting Monat's video and saying, I'm never buying a BMW. He's never buying a BMW. What about an old BMW? They can't show you ads in a E39M. Wait, but what actually happened? You have to opt into this community. Notes Added Important context According to OneNote, the Spider man promotion is an optional startup banner available on compatible BMWs from July 27 through August 10, 2026. The banner does not automatically play a full screen ad. Instead, owners must tap in to launch a themed animation featuring music and synchronized vehicle lighting. BMW has offered similar limited time startup experiences in the past, including holiday themed animations. Very, very, very different. You can just see the pop up there. Surprise. Spider man just dropped into your BMW. And that's an ad. If you press the button, you have to actually turn it on. It's not. Yes, yes, but I'm saying there's a banner ad. Oh, there is a banner ad. It's just a banner. Look at the video. Start it over. Start it over. Let's see. Let's be the judge of this. Look at this banner. It's a banner. Oh, okay. And then you click the banner. Then it plays an ad. So it's a pop up that you click. Okay. And it's like, wait, what is this pop up? Why does my car have a pop up? It should probably be popping up and then pop into a setting somewhere. There should be an icon that's like promotions or themes that didn't look tucked in anywhere. That was the main. That was the main. Because I'm fine. If you, if there's a. If there's a theme and you're like, I want red lighting in my car, I want blue lighting. I want Spider man theme, I want Christmas theme, go over there literally saying, surprise. A Spider man ad. And they're not even like, they should just say, hey, we have an ad for Spider man here if you'd like one. Okay. This is right on the line. But this, this is, this is, this crosses my line. This crosses your line because you're like, what does Spider man have to do? What does, what does Spider man have to do with my car? And then you click it and you get an ad for Spider Man. But I just think of the consumer surplus. This is making BMWs cheaper. This is making, this is bringing, bringing BMW. Let's look at the price of inflation. Yeah. Also not necessarily the best deal. Yeah. Let's look at BMW inflation. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah. Really, really bad move. I wonder how much they actually made. I think you're just judging it because it's, it's. I think you would feel completely different, completely differently if you, if you saw a banner and it was Nitro Circus and it would just take over your car or if it was just a full takeover of Sam Sulek at the Arnold Classic, something like that, that would be much better received. It's not Opinion. Surprise. Spider man trademark just dropped into your BMW. Okay. The ultimate driving machine. Yeah. Not super well executed, but BMW's been going back and forth with stuff like this pretty consistently. Like, aren't they the ones that have the subscription to the heated seats? Isn't that BMW, you know, I'm talking about? So remember something. They put the wires to heat the seats in every car and then if you want to use it, they charge you monthly. And this is just like, it's basically just a nerd snipe or like a, like a, I don't know, like a treasure hunt for, for hackers. Because if you're a DIY hacker and you can get into that and, and unlock it, jailbreak it, you just get, well, not free because you already paid for it. But you don't have to pay the subscription. Yeah, Techno Chief says, wait, I thought we loved ads here. I do love ads, that's true. But I think buying, unless BMW, I think if they gave the option at purchase saying, do you want to buy the ad supported manual transmission BMW M2 or do you want the ad free premium version? And there was a bit of a price difference, then it just feels, it feels wrong. They didn't do that. Sort of like a Ferrari tailor made program. Oh, like what stitching did you get? Oh, did you go ad free or ad supported? Like, oh, you went manual, cool. Yeah, I went manual. But ad supported. Yeah, yeah, I got a manual SP3 ad support. I mean the ads in an SB3 drive are probably very hard to reach, so pretty valuable. I would love ads there. But it's got to be ads for the most elite products. It's got to be. You're getting your SP3 and it shows you an ad for Amangiri or something. Spider.