TBPN - Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, AI Data Center Forecast Jumps, Poppi’s Pepsi Deal | Diet TBPN

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with ea...ch episode posted to podcast platforms right after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.TBPN is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comPublic - https://public.comCisco - https://www.cisco.comConsole - https://www.console.comCrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.comFigma - https://www.figma.comMongoDB - https://www.mongodb.comNYSE - https://www.nyse.comRailway - https://railway.comShopify - https://www.shopify.com/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:01 Yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this, there's a little bit of a, like, you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes being like, oh, maybe she wasn't, maybe she's not that bad, maybe there's more to the story, maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times potentially. Like maybe she's more of it. Some people might be like she's bad, but she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her. Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. There's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it to you make it thing.
Starting point is 00:00:48 It's not that big of a deal. I just can't stop thinking about like it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like put aside the fraud. Like it just seems like total slop in terms of. of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0. Totally. And the whole time I was like almost yelling at the movie screen
Starting point is 00:01:07 because she taught, the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like it's in the cloud. It's just like it's so, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she, she's making this point where I was like,
Starting point is 00:01:26 we have an invention. And our invention allows you to test blood for things. And we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up. There have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category. It's like, it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical, we invented something. It takes information and it stores it on a database that you can access through a website.
Starting point is 00:01:55 It's like, so you make a SaaS product. literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry, and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Phaeranos box, and it runs a test. And they don't go to prison for 10 years. Yeah, they don't go to prison. And she never just says, like, look, this stuff happens all the time.
Starting point is 00:02:15 It's not crazy that I'm going to be able to build a box that tests for something. Like, this happens all the time. Instead, it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not just admit. what's really happening on the field, which is that diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Starting point is 00:02:35 You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense, and it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said one of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur. And this is exactly what I was picking up on.
Starting point is 00:02:55 So between 2011 and 2015, after the release of the social network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to, to their senses. She was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field,
Starting point is 00:03:30 there is medical technology. When people ask how far she, how she got so far, it is largely explained by the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up. And so there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So if you're a founder of a medical device company, like what you are going for is FDA authorization. That's marketing authorization. That's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell it, to market it. And so that also includes, like, you can't, you typically can't go on podcasts and media and say, oh, yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like, we can't
Starting point is 00:04:11 say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. Spoiler. You don't want to hear spoilers. Just turn, leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down. Yeah, and we'll just talk away. What spoiler do you want to talk about? So, Billy does this side deal to get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what that's exactly called. Yeah, points on the back end. Points on the back end. So he does this thing. Incredibly good. And then later, after the movie's totally been, like, finished, he decides, ah, this is going to look pretty bad, backs out, right? Damage has already been done. And then, done, right? Like he looks, he looks, he doesn't look great. And Elizabeth is trying to say,
Starting point is 00:04:58 like, oh, I don't really know much about the details. So one thing, like the damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's going to continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. And I can't imagine being 60 years old being like, I'm going to turn on some Nathan Fielder, just take me back to the good old days. But the funny thing is, do you think that Billy, do you think it made sense for him to do the same? ideal because she has, she claimed in the show she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So of course, she wouldn't want to make, even if she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it. So she would want to route it through Billy. It's a good question.
Starting point is 00:05:37 There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married, in which case it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors. That's what I'm saying. I think you might be on to something there. She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding. Yes. And so is your point that if she's in on the deal sitting there being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it. That's more tricky from a restitution perspective. Totally. I imagine, I imagine a judge would be like,
Starting point is 00:06:16 Oh, that's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that. Yeah, a judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't care. Yeah, I don't care that you did. Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's, yeah.
Starting point is 00:06:26 He's going behind her back. Huh. Yeah, good point. Good point. I mean, the wildest part about the whole you can see everything, Theranos thing,
Starting point is 00:06:35 is that one, I've talked to Billy on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. But he sort of gave me the pitch
Starting point is 00:06:49 for Theranos 2.0, and I was like pushing back, being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic, go for like do this. Like I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400 million in a very short amount of time. Like this is tractable. And then he was like, when did you have this conversation? I talked to him like last year. And so my pitch was I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I want to see some great calls about biotech. because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. From a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve
Starting point is 00:07:33 and then watch that happen and be like, oh, wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to tell me what's happening. The crazy thing about the movie, though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science-related. I completely agree. It was just, it was Billy. That's the point.
Starting point is 00:07:51 Learning about mitochondria. Yeah, that's my point. Like, if, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting thesis around that. One simple trick that the medical industry hates. You can actually do that. That happens. And I want to, I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027, give me your AI 2027 thesis.
Starting point is 00:08:16 Let's watch it play. out if you're right. At the very least, a market map. At the very least a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche-Marmer-Squels is doing. A tier list. A tier list. A tier-list. A tier-list of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah. Show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in. Right? Yeah. Watching Nathan have that light bulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos 2.0. Yeah. And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase there and I was 2.0 to describe like massive things that they perceive might be massive fraud. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I just also, when I got to YC in 2018, my visiting partner was
Starting point is 00:08:56 Diego Ray, co-founder of Gene Weave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device, and it was basically just a lab testing machine. Previously, size of a dishwasher, at a lab down the street, you shrink it down to the size of a box. and you put it at the actual hospital, and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria. They developed a chemistry. It's not rocket science.
Starting point is 00:09:23 It is hard science, but, like, it's not magic. It's not future sci-fi magic. And if you can get that data in an hour, as opposed to two days, everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother, and people are going to be a little bit healthier. And you're going to sell your company for $425 million, which is exactly what happened. They raised $25 million.
Starting point is 00:09:41 It's a great outcome for founders, employees, Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. So in 2019, it got, it got authorized for the co-bos Vivo DX MRSA test, which is like not going to be on the stage at TED anytime soon. But it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward. That being said, I came away from the movie, right, feeling like, okay, Sunny had done some side deal and got way less. No, no, no, Sunny Balwani, the other co-founder.
Starting point is 00:10:12 My impression was that he was getting way less jail time. Yeah. Elizabeth is going to jail for like 11 years. Yeah. It seemed like Sonny, they were positioning it as like they, Sonny was able to pin it on her. Yeah. He got out.
Starting point is 00:10:26 Yeah. Or at least he got a reduced sentence or whatever. And you told me afterwards, Sunny is in prison for like 12 years or he had like a year 12 years, 11 months was a sentencing. Elizabeth got a 10 year sentence. reduced originally from 11 years and three months. According to the internet, Sunny didn't sell secondary either. I know.
Starting point is 00:10:48 That's ridiculous. So none of them, they both go down with the ship. They both don't make money. That was the jaw-dropping moment for me. I was like least shrewd person in the world potentially. No secondary selling, 11 billion. Doing fraud purely for the love of the game. What are you doing?
Starting point is 00:11:05 What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like it wasn't a fraud. Like it was. It was very clear that like, Everyone there, Sunny heard, they knew it didn't work. They didn't have the revenue and the profits. That's really like the TED entrepreneur. It goes to prison.
Starting point is 00:11:20 For the love of the game. For the love of the game. Insane. Just for the vision. If you do want to sell secondary, there's one neat trick. One neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you want to sell $10 million a secondary, $100 million a
Starting point is 00:11:36 secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. before so you've you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions you don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like oh he's like selling out she's selling out like that's not good uh that's not a good sign so what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt so you get like a hundred million dollars of debt yeah then you sell the secondary sell another hundred million of secondary pay off the debt and then you can tell everyone look i just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.
Starting point is 00:12:10 Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh, 50 credit card debt. They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was a equity-backed $100 million line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part, but you can still get away with $100 million out of the gate. It's possible.
Starting point is 00:12:27 I wonder if anyone's doing that. It might be happening. Who knows? Anyway. What's semi-analysis? Raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43. Two. 50 gigawatts.
Starting point is 00:12:40 Wow. 50 gigawatts. 50 gigawatts. That's a lot. That's a lot of, a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this, right? Did Gersner say it was too much?
Starting point is 00:12:51 Something like that. It seems like semi-analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of... The semi-analysis said... So we looked at the data. They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like,
Starting point is 00:13:06 they were papered a lot of, long time again, even if the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not going to stop people from actually pulling out of the building. I sent you this, I sent you this morning from RevCap, which is semi-analysis saying if you're worried about demand, air, don't be, because there's going to be even more supply than you realize. Of course, semi-analysis is also saying that they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about ARR growth over the last two weeks, that semi-analysis is coming out and saying, don't worry, there's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months. Yeah. Yeah. I believe them on, I believe them on supply.
Starting point is 00:13:54 That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the NASDAX sold off 5% last week, like, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks, we're not building this thing. Like maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and the rates go up, like some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals would get unwound. But like right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead. It's just like it's a train.
Starting point is 00:14:28 You can't slow it down that quickly. Like, it's just going to keep going. on the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of $1,000 a year for inference related to like their semi-personal, pro-sumer life, shopping and all the little agentic features? Now, I think the tech is incredible. I've been using Dot a ton, and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing.
Starting point is 00:15:08 It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do, and it just sends me a little message being like, hey, like, you asked for this, and you should follow up because, like, they said that they would do it. You used it to cancel your roadster order, too, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like little things like that. It's just a better interface. Like, I love interacting with the open web through an LLM,
Starting point is 00:15:31 It's amazing. No cookie pop-ups, no ads. It's truly like the best consumer experience. There's a lot of controversial stuff downstream of that. But as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact, it's so much better to just have it. Oh, put it all together with the exact quotes. I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is, like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange?
Starting point is 00:16:06 Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a $40 billion market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify. No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks, automating certain roles or extending the capabilities of people, right? because we're in this era of obviously there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours, talking about somebody's having a 26-hour day. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:16:36 Because they need to stay out. She's changing and manipulating time because they need to be online and available to keep their agents productive. Are you saying she's crazy? I'm not saying. She's not crazy. You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day. That's right. not 26.
Starting point is 00:16:57 But anyways, it's like the next leg up will probably be... She's a special case. She's an entrepreneur. Yeah, the question is like for the 90% of Americans that aren't in... But that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there just with a capabilities increase.
Starting point is 00:17:22 And then what you're saying is like the other 99% of business. is how are they going to be, how is their spending going to ramp? Will it ramp beyond the, you know, $20, $200 a month subscription? Yeah, yeah. I mean, in the business side, like the Jensen take of like, you know, a software engineer who makes $300K should also get $300K in tokens or something. Like that seems to be happening, basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient,
Starting point is 00:17:50 very efficiently and like at a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a sales, person. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep $50,000 a month in inference, like, is there something that they could do with the best models to actually generate $100,000 in value that they wouldn't have otherwise? Like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business. I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs. No, and I'm just saying we don't pay for all. this cat, like the CAPEX is not going to be paid for by consumers. Yeah, yeah, I think you're right.
Starting point is 00:18:33 So you're saying that's not, that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B2B beyond what it is. It has to, it has to 10x. So, so like the small company that has, you know, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan and they're maybe spending $100,000 on maybe 10 mil top line, they need to go to a million dollar. in France a year, even though they're a, even though they're a $10 million business. Maybe they go to $15 million of top line. Speaking of $1 million budgets. What we got?
Starting point is 00:19:07 Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a muse or an instinct or a dot. And they gave away or tried to give away a million dollars of pizza. I believe it was on Friday. You just had to download an order from the Hark app. And I don't know that it went well. I think the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the second.
Starting point is 00:19:43 Yeah, I mean, clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like, I think it wasn't working. People just don't want to give them the data because it needed to be able to. No, people were giving them the data. You have to give them. Google Drive files? Yes. In order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return. See, edit, download, and permanently delete your contacts. See, edit, create, and delete all of your Google Sheets spreadsheet. See, edit, share, and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose, and send emails from your Gmail account. See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all of these were required. Yeah, sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say, like, No thanks. I don't want any notifications.
Starting point is 00:20:28 Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues. And so used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Farrer, that's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with the FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that?
Starting point is 00:20:50 No, file a complaint with the federal government. It submits FTC complain about a Hark pizza promotion. On October 16, 2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1 million free pizza giveaway promoted on X and stated users could claim it by
Starting point is 00:21:06 typing order a free pizza in the Hark app. Crazy. Yeah, interesting. I'm so curious why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of figure because the whole, like, I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise.
Starting point is 00:21:30 Yeah, I mean, Elon kind of created the playbook, right? X-AI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds. You get, it's a way, it would be hard for SpaceX to go to top AI scientists and say, we're going to give you $5 billion of equity. Now Zuck has kind of broken that glass and been like, I'm just going to do it. But the way you get the way you get, you know, the multi-billion dollar outcome is you give a co-founder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. So I think it's probably that.
Starting point is 00:22:04 I don't know. Is there another? The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets prior to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that makes more sense in the fullness of time. Democratic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth. Because what if inflation is at like 40%. That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You've got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth. You think that's low? You think that's high? There's somewhat at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The lowest was 6%. Basically no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom
Starting point is 00:23:05 within the building. Agree? Disagree? Bullish. Bully. Dringing the Kool-Aid. I don't know. Just out of the FOMC, the FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government. Anthropic staff are obviously the most bullish. Like, they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2%, typically. They're saying 17, huge economic explosion, unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic.
Starting point is 00:23:38 Like, if we grow at 17%, like, if we grow at 17%, like, It is so positive some. There's so much to go around. You can do everything, basically. You can build new roads. You can give people health care. Everything just solves itself because a rising tide lifts all boats. Where would you really put it, though?
Starting point is 00:23:56 I'd put 200% GDP growth. I want to be tripling every year. Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting. This is manifestation. I want to manifest it. Site visitors said 12.5%. again, staggeringly high.
Starting point is 00:24:14 But interesting, U.S. adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is, again, way above where we've been. So, like, everyone is bullish. The American mind must be said. Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry, but 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief in Anthropic. What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced for reality?
Starting point is 00:24:38 They're smoking cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes. Lung cancer will be solved. That was reported from, we talked about this a little bit, but that was reported from Trump Sankar, and has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe on Bloomberg or CNBC.
Starting point is 00:24:54 But I don't think this is, I don't think this is unique to anthropic. Yeah. I think, like, clearly the average American is already insanely. Exactly. You're looking. And so if you go to the labs, anybody who like really truly believes in this current revolution and and that probably is like an average across the field. There was a funny, there was a funny exchange in the Tyler Cowan, Dwar Keshe Patel interview on interesting times.
Starting point is 00:25:26 He was guest hosting for the now departed, not passed away, but he russed out that laugh for, I think CBS and the free press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwar Keshe Patel were going back and forth about AI. Tyler asks Dworkesh, like, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Dworkesh is like, oh, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon. 2028. I'm very bullish on this changing the economy, but I just, I can't predict how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop beach towels in Walmart.
Starting point is 00:26:06 Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like, you know, AI video slop. We have signs. We have signs. We have signs of signs. Yes, we have signs of signs. Like, like, the AI slop economy is thriving right now. But the AI slop is being sold.
Starting point is 00:26:27 And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think if they want to get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini, Coontosh, or Lamborghini Hurricanes. in Miami. You got to get into the mind of the course seller, the drop shipper to understand how AI is changing the real economy. Because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like, there is definitely AI, AI instantiated products up and down the stack all over Facebook, Instagram, Reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the show. And Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says the games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd earn back will soon become possible.
Starting point is 00:27:09 as well the game the game's developers wanted to build, but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming. Yeah, I like that he is taking the white pill on AI. Three Blue and Brown also put out a big, he's a math YouTuber, does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of difficult math concepts. And he put out a video saying, like, it is the best time to go into math, very optimistic about. it. And so obviously very divided organizations, but I love that Tim Sweeney went, went back and forth. And I saw another, I saw another post by him talking about like, look, I had to migrate
Starting point is 00:27:52 from C to C++, from 2D to 3D. Like I've been through so many tech migrations. This is another one. I'm very excited for it. And he'll, he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, adapt, adapt, overcome. If people are rolling their own, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser, decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's going to find a way to participate in the upside in some way because he is innovative and flexible. What about this poppy deal? Have you seen this? Yeah, I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like they sold their company for $1.9 billion. Yeah. And.
Starting point is 00:28:33 So wait, let me set the table. So Poppy is a beverage brand. It's a soda, probiotic soda company, sold to Pepsi for $2.2 billion. $300 million of that $2.2 billion was an earnout. So they got $1.9 billion on the day the deal closed, and then $300 million waiting for milestones. Now, Pepsi announced that instead of paying $300 million, based on the deal, on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying $12 million. And the dunk is like, oh, that stinks.
Starting point is 00:29:09 They didn't get their earn out. But yeah, they got $1.9.12 billion. It's still an incredible amount of money. And people are like, yeah, like, here's how you negotiate an earn out. It's like, it seemed like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well. The disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. 300 million for the company and 1.9 in earn out.
Starting point is 00:29:31 And if they didn't get that earn out, it would be. It would seriously change the economics, but it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Still pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy. Amazing outcome. But yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, a quarter is what you should expect in an earnout. Most of the time right off that second bit, that second bite to zero. You shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earnout. Because companies have lots of resources.
Starting point is 00:30:02 They control the budget, the distribution, all the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny. And so if you put all the chips with them, they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Thank you for tuning into TBPN. You can close out the show with us. Hit the gong again. One more time before we.
Starting point is 00:30:22 Hit the gong again. One more time to close out. Sign up for our newsletter. TBPN.com. We love you guys. Goodbye. See you tomorrow.

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