John Coogan, Co-Founder & Host at TBPN

**Jessica Livingston** (0:00)
Carolynn, we have such an exciting guest today. I have been looking forward to this for a while. We have John Coogan from TBPN on the show. Hi, John.

**John Coogan** (0:12)
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

**Jessica Livingston** (0:13)
Thank you for coming after a long day of live TV. TBPN, as we all know, is this daily live video and podcast focused on business and technology. So we're gonna do the interviewing this time. Great, looking forward to it. So we go pretty far back, and we were just talking.
Soylent is what I first remember you with, but I was talking to Carolynn right before you came on, and I said, they pivoted into Soylent. I do not remember for the life of me what John was working on in summer 12 Tell the story.

**John Coogan** (0:52)
Yes, it's a wild one. So I grew up in Los Angeles, studied economics in college, got the programming bug thanks to Hacker News and the Y Combinator community, learned enough to be dangerous in Python, a little bit of Ruby on Rails and said, I'm going to go to Silicon Valley and start a tech company and figure all this out. And I went out and was, at the time, I didn't know anything about any particular industry. So I grabbed a friend from high school who I had a really good rapport with. He's now become my business partner for over a decade. We've been working together.
And we said, let's build an educational technology product. We know education. We've been in the educational system for 20 years. Maybe there's a problem that we can identify and build something that we want and then share that with the world and get some customers. So we applied to Y Combinator and Imagine K12. We got into Imagine K12, which at the time had a few partners in common, a very similar structure. And so we were on a cadence of, we were in Imagine K12 summer 2012 So we had a demo day.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:03)
Can I interrupt really quickly and just say Imagine K12 was the only accelerator that had Y Combinator's blessing. It was started by Jeff Ralston. We said we want to help you because we want there to be an accelerator for ed tech companies.

**John Coogan** (2:18)
Totally.

**Jessica Livingston** (2:19)
I just wanted to throw that out there. So we had a very good relationship with that.

**John Coogan** (2:22)
Yeah. Actually, PG came and spoke at our Imagine K12, one of the dinners. It was a very similar format. And so when we got to Silicon Valley, we were sort of crashing on the couch of a friend of a friend. And they were definitely not in the startup mindset. They were more in the relaxing corporate job golf on the weekends. And that was sort of oil and water because we needed to build a business and we were running out of money.
Back then, I think Imagine K-12 was still on the older funding model. YC had moved to, I think, 150,000. We only had 17,000. So we had 17,000 for two people to live on. We didn't come from any money. I think I had $5,000 in credit card debt. And we had no other income streams or any savings because we were straight out of college to Silicon Valley to let's try and build something. And so we had $17,000 and we were like, this is the most amount of money we've ever seen. This is incredible. We're ready to build. And so we showed up in Silicon Valley with a broken down 1995 Chevy Blazer that didn't have air conditioning and a box of books, literally just a bunch of books about programming and all sorts. And you just grab a book when you want to learn something.
I eventually started looking online for solutions. But that initial living situation wasn't really working for building a company and being up late and working around the clock and turning down dinners and all the different things that you get dragged into when you're just living a somewhat normal life. And so we go on a website that existed at the time that was kind of like the precursor of vibe coding. So it was called Padmapper. I've heard of that.

**Jessica Livingston** (4:01)
It's a C startup.

**John Coogan** (4:02)
Yeah.
And so Padmapper was amazing because it took Craig's listings and Airbnb listings and put it on a Google Map. Of course, this is in every single product today, but back then, these products didn't have their own mapping features. So someone built this feature as a product. And we looked on there because we wanted to be near YC in Mountain View. And we saw a company on there that said, hey, we're a startup. We're in Y Combinator. And we're like, this is perfect. They'll be on the exact same schedule, same mindset. They have demo day. We all understand the pressure. We all understand the life cycle and what we'll be doing. There won't be many distractions. Let's do it. So we go, we tour this place, and the listing made it look palatial. They said, we got a pool. We got a jacuzzi. It's exactly like the social network.