Snap Specs, Taste, Midjourney Hardware | Eric Newcomer, Merrill Lutsky, Carter Reum, Swami Sivasubramanian, Thomas Suarez, Mark Gurman, Ryan Daniels, Isaiah Granet

**John Coogan** (0:01)
You're watching TBPN.

**Jordi Hays** (0:02)
Today is Wednesday, June 17th, 2026
We are live on the TBPN Ultra, on the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

**John Coogan** (0:19)
Big show today.

**Jordi Hays** (0:20)
Big show today, lots of guests coming on. We got Newcomer coming on, Mark Gurman's coming on, Carter Reum, Merrill Lutsky, SpaceX, I am super excited for Eric to join. Yeah.

**John Coogan** (0:32)
I don't have time to listen to that many podcasts, but I love listening to Eric's podcasts.

**Jordi Hays** (0:36)
He's been on an absolute tear. His Kara Swisher interview was very good. His Ed Zitrin interview was very good. He's been through a lot of the tours.

**John Coogan** (0:45)
He throws on the gloves.

**Jordi Hays** (0:45)
Yeah, and he shows the conversation.

**John Coogan** (0:47)
And he's almost like a matador. He's almost like a matador, right?

**Jordi Hays** (0:50)
Yeah, and it's interesting because, yeah, I don't know, he just has a very balanced view and keeps the conversation going and pushes people and gets things going back and forth. So very excited to chop it up with him. Anyway.

**John Coogan** (1:03)
And then we have Merrill from Graphite who made one of the plays, the absolute greatest plays of the year.

**Jordi Hays** (1:11)
Truly.

**John Coogan** (1:11)
Selling to Cursor, which of course, shortly after that, sold to SpaceX and is now up even further.

**Jordi Hays** (1:20)
Yeah. So TBPN in fact, really.
Graphite was a sponsor, of course.

**John Coogan** (1:27)
We did as much as we could. We have Carter.

**Jordi Hays** (1:30)
90% of the hard work.

**John Coogan** (1:35)
Then we have Carter from M13, Jump it On. We have Dr. Swami from AWS joining, and then the Gurmanator, of course, and a number of other founders.

**Jordi Hays** (1:46)
Yeah, big show. Anyway, snap, snap, Spectacles. We talked about it a little bit yesterday. Feedback has been mixed, not good. People don't like it. Pull up the picture from DJ Cow's glasses. What glasses?
Not this one. The next one.

**John Coogan** (2:08)
It's really tough because if a startup ship these, everyone, they would be able to raise capital.

**Jordi Hays** (2:19)
After you're seeing this one, go back to the other photo. Looks really normal now.

**John Coogan** (2:23)
There you go.

**Jordi Hays** (2:23)
Honestly, the funny big exaggerated version makes me feel like these actually look really cool now.
That's too much. But you flip back, I'm into it now. It's actually inoculated me to the, oh, they're big because I saw a bigger version and I like these. They're a little bit blocky, yeah, but it's like a style choice. I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting pilled. I might pick up a pair.

**John Coogan** (2:46)
Here's the thing.

**Jordi Hays** (2:47)
I might pick up a couple of pair.

**John Coogan** (2:48)
If a startup launched this product, yes, and was able to do the demos that they can do. We've tried this product.
We've done a number of the demos. That startup would be able to raise at, I would say, easily a billion, just based on current market conditions. But a startup is evaluated a lot differently, of course, than a public company that has spent somewhere in the range of $3.5 billion building this product. So, yeah, the feedback from the market has not been great.

**Jordi Hays** (3:21)
Stocks down 92% over the last five years, and just in the last five days, down another 8.5%.
And Evan Spiegel has been having to defend his decisions, his investment here.
We'll see where all this goes. The question is, how expensive is this effort? How core to the business is it? How many Snap employees are working on this? They have a great ads business, a great social media with a network effect. Should be an AI winner. Just increase the ad load, increase the ad targeting, run a really lean, thin operation, and you should be able to be a very, very profitable enterprise. The era, clearly a lot of these investments were greenlit in the early days when the stock was up, when the market was booming, and now we're seeing them roll out and everyone's asking a wildly different set of questions because we're in the AI era, not the wearables era. But-

**John Coogan** (4:18)
Tyler in the chat says, snap down 92% since peak.

**Jordi Hays** (4:21)
Yeah, peak.

**John Coogan** (4:22)
So you can imagine a lot of the work that was done on these was done when they were a much, much, much bigger company.