Speaker
John Coogan
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
TBPN's integrated ad model is so embedded that John Coogan read a Ramp ad directly to Mark Zuckerberg before his interview, reaching an audience member who normally never sees ads.
Every 1-minute TBPN clip shared on social media has brand logos and a full ad read at the end, dramatically extending advertiser reach beyond the live show.
Galloway calls the Anthropic-OpenAI reversal the fastest number-two-to-number-one flip he has ever seen in corporate history. Hays frames it as a masterclass in focus: Anthropic stayed obsessively product-driven while OpenAI got distracted. The lesson will be imprinted on founders for a generation — complacency kills even category-defining companies.
Jordi Hays thinks Meta should trade at $3 trillion but permanently trades at a discount because Zuckerberg keeps chasing new hot things — metaverse, AI, and now prediction markets — instead of compounding the greatest advertising machine ever built. Galloway disagrees slightly, calling Zuckerberg the world's greatest second-mouse genius. Both agree the discount is real.
Bending Spoons — the Italian company behind AOL, Vimeo, and WeTransfer — is pricing its IPO at $18-20B on a $2.5B revenue run rate with 88% recurring revenue. Galloway likes the concept; Coogan argues legacy brands that survived cloud, mobile, and social disruption are almost impossible to kill. The bear case: 4x levered debt and barely organic growth.
Snap is projected to do over $6 billion in revenue this year while trading at only a $7 billion market cap — implying roughly an 80% discount. Galloway says the real unlock would be spinning out its Spectacles hardware division. The counterargument: Evan Spiegel seems comfortable being the young billionaire CEO of an online nation of Zoomers and has little incentive to change.
John Coogan's advice for young people: move to the vortex of your industry early, burn the ships, live cheap and be in the mix. He lived in a one-bedroom Tenderloin apartment with three people for $1,500 a month. Then leave — because distance from the vortex gives you a perspective that people inside it can never have.
Prof G has far more downloads and views than TBPN, yet TBPN earns roughly 50% more in ad revenue. The reason: TBPN sold only annual fixed-rate sponsorships, pitched like Formula One team deals. Sponsors pay for presence everywhere — clips, merch, screens, live reads — not for impressions. When your audience controls billion-dollar budgets, one conversion pays for the whole deal.
Most podcasters treat their shows as side projects — they have venture funds or companies on the side. Coogan and Hays went full-time with no outside capital and no guests for the first 150 hours. That full commitment was the signal that unlocked bigger guests, better production, and a marketing machine that treated each episode like a product launch.
Masa Son released a new deck arguing investors are valuing SoftBank on its eggs, not the goose laying them. Galloway jokes their uncle is back on meth. Hays gives Masa credit: in 2019 he put out an equally absurd deck predicting AI-driven stock gains, and SoftBank is up 5x since. The question: is Masa genuinely memetically brilliant, or just accidentally right?
TBPN's zero-to-one growth came from a hyper-manual tactic: printing out individual social media posts, filming high-production reactions in suits, then quote-tweeting the authors. It was a personal love letter to 50 people a day. Those people, surprised anyone went that far for them, reposted and spread the word.
Before TBPN had published a single episode, John and Jordi sent David Senra a Google Drive file of a raw conversation. He listened, and told them to take it ten times as seriously as they were. That one piece of advice reframed a casual experiment as a full-time startup.
TBPN spent months publicly celebrating OpenAI's ad-supported model, running viral stunts like a Super Bowl community ad, and launching 'Claude with ads' to mock Anthropic. OpenAI noticed. The acquisition was less about the podcast and more about buying a marketing team with cultural credibility in the AI world.
TBPN deliberately targets a maximum of 200,000 people worldwide. These aren't casual listeners — they run businesses, invest billions, and spend hundreds of millions on cloud and software. That audience is more valuable to an enterprise advertiser than 10 million general consumers. Scarcity of the right attention is a feature, not a bug.
TBPN found a way to put ads in front of the most ad-immune people on earth. Before his live interview, Mark Zuckerberg sat with headphones on while John Coogan read him a Ramp ad. The in-studio screen showed sponsor logos. Then every clip shared afterward ended with a full ad read. The reach per dollar is enormous — because the audience is exactly who the advertiser wants.
TBPN spent months giving OpenAI unsolicited public advice through the show: stop the fear-based benchmarks and talk about what the product actually does for people. By mid-2024 public fear of AI was rising even as usage was growing. The acquisition was partly OpenAI buying a team that had been making this argument louder than anyone.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Business 75%
- Society & Culture 25%
Connections
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