33: TBPN (John Coogan & Jordi Hays) - Inside Tech's Water Cooler
John Coogan & Jordi Hays are the hosts of TBPN (X, YouTube, Spotify, Substack), a daily live show covering the technology business. TBPN was launched only about a year ago, but has become a mainstay in tech culture and a center of gravity forterminally online technologists.John was previously an EIR at Founders Fund and tech YouTuber. He co-founded Lucy Nicotine and Soylent. Jordi has co-founded and invested in many business including Party Round/Capital and Branded Native, a podcast and youtube ad network. We cover the origins of TBPN, or the Technology Business Programming Network, from its beginnings as "Technology Brothers" to the interplay between John's love for technology and Jordi's for business. They share how they've built a media business in an era of infinite competition by leaning into high volume and constant iteration, all while treating media as the "main thing." We discuss brand building and innovating on form by borrowing ideas from outside the tech industry—from Formula One and SportsCenter to Hollywood films—to avoid tech's tendency toward circular references. We also talk about their focus on X/Twitter and a niche, highly informed audience, rather than trying to go too wide. We also chat about what makes their partnership work and how they take the work incredibly seriously while not taking themselves seriously at all.Transcript and all links available at https://dialectic.fm/tbpnTimestamps 00:00: Opening Highlights 03:18: Intro & Background 06:08: Technology vs.
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Speaker A: I mean, the early thing was that we both had years and years of experience in the things that were important, which was YouTube, but on different sides. Speaker B: Yeah. Speaker A: Me on the actual content creation, you on the ad sales side. Speaker B: John's one of the few people, and certainly like at the top of the list of people where when I talk about the things that I'm good at, like he's consistently bringing ideas that are better than my own. To come to John with an idea in a, in a space that I'm good at generating ideas in, let's say it's a, it's an advertiser that we're working for and and I'm like, I want to pitch them on this concept and I come with an idea and he's like, okay, what if you did it this way?
Typically when I pitch those ideas to people, they're just like, that sounds great. You're not getting one-upped. And I'm not, I'm not getting one-upped. And so when you have a partnership, it's like you want to be getting one-upped like all the time. The other thing that's real is like we never run out of things to talk about. If it's like a Friday and John is like driving to Santa Barbara, I'm going to Malibu and like instead of taking my driver, I'll just send the driver home like separately and I'll be like, I'm riding with John.
Like John, yeah, we gotta hang out more. John goes out of the way because we're like, Ah, like I didn't get quite enough time. Speaker A: We've been growing this newsletter. Every day I write a couple hundred words just to kind of summarize my thoughts on like the current thing or whatever is in my mind. And I realized like we posted on X as well and we're kind of writing for that audience and I have a vague idea of who's on the newsletter subscription, but I'm not super in there. And I was thinking like, really, like I'm writing this for Jordy.
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