9 Lessons From TBPN's $100M+ Exit

**John Coogan** (0:00)
Hey babes, it's Paris Hilton. So I was checking my points balance in the Hilton Honors app the other day, and yeah, I've got about a billion, which feels excessive, even for me. Just kidding, you can never have too many Hilton Honors points.

**Colin** (0:12)
And I wanna do something iconic this summer, so I'm giving away all my Paris points.

**John Coogan** (0:17)
Just find somewhere you've always wanted to stay, then go to my socials or Hilton's and tell me about it.

**Colin** (0:22)
Just make sure you're a Hilton Honors member, and I might be sending you Paris points, because when you want points that make your summer even hotter, it matters where you stay.

**Samir** (0:30)
Today's guests are John Coogan and Jordi Hays, the hosts of TBPN. It's actually the second time they've been on the show, but the first time since some major news broke in April that their show was acquired by OpenAI for hundreds of millions of dollars.

**Colin** (0:45)
Excuse me, could you say that again?

**Samir** (0:46)
Yeah, it was pretty crazy. It was actually one of the most shocking things I've read in our industry, and probably one of the most notable things that has happened in the creator economy since its inception.

**Colin** (0:57)
One of the major reasons for that price tag is because they are two of the smartest marketing minds on the internet. These guys are truly incredible.

**Samir** (1:07)
This conversation comes from our event Press Publish LA, where we covered the intersection of Hollywood and the creator economy. And what's interesting about these guys, they actually built the show in a studio in Hollywood, and they call themselves Neotrad Media, basically adopting traditional television techniques, like looking at this live stream show that looks and feels kind of like Sports Center, but bringing it into a new world using Twitter as the primary distribution, looking and feeling kind of like a live streamer, and honestly, approaching the world of what maybe we consider podcasting in a completely different way, daily, live, no editing, niche by design.

**Colin** (1:52)
Okay, so in this conversation, you're going to hear the nine lessons from John and Jordi, all about how they actually were able to launch TBPN and in a matter of just two years, sell it to OpenAI for over $100 million.

**Samir** (2:06)
These guys are truly some of my favorite people in our industry and some of the sharpest minds in media. So I think you guys will really enjoy this conversation. Here's our live episode with John Coogan and Jordi Hays of TBPN.
What's up, guys?

**John Coogan** (2:23)
We're doing well.

**Jordi Hays** (2:24)
Thank you for having us.

**John Coogan** (2:25)
Thank you for having us.

**Samir** (2:26)
So I don't know if you have confirmed the news, but I remember seeing the headline. Funny enough, it was on April 2nd.

**John Coogan** (2:33)
Yes.

**Samir** (2:34)
That OpenAI bought your show for reported hundreds of millions of dollars.

**Jordi Hays** (2:39)
We thought about doing April 1st. We were ready to do April 1st, but that was going to be even more confusing than it already was even on April 2nd.

**Samir** (2:48)
So for people who haven't seen the show, because it is niche by design, explain the show, where it's distributed, who it's for, all the above, TBPN in a nutshell.

**John Coogan** (2:59)
Yeah.
It's a live stream three hours a day from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific.
Covers technology and business and with a focus on startups in the private markets, really Silicon Valley where Jordi and I sort of built our early careers. And then a little over a year ago, we were both in between projects and thought we should start a podcast. Very common. People think there's an opportunity. But very quickly, we realized that we had so much fun doing it, and we had the opportunity to take it incredibly seriously. And so we sort of burned all the other ships and focused full-time, just like it was any other startup, and viewed it as an opportunity to build something not alongside something else, not in service of something else, but actually as a first-class media product that was going to be our entire focus. And that really started the compounding very quickly.

**Jordi Hays** (3:56)
I think we were lucky in our category too, because we weren't the first two guys in tech to say, hey, we should start a podcast. We're probably the millionth. But we had the benefit of the people in our category were using content purely as marketing. So they had a startup and they wanted a podcast to promote their startup, or they had a venture fund, and they wanted to get in front of founders and LPs.