Jul 28, 2026 · 34 min · 13 segments
"Companies are bought, not sold." That's the mindset John Coogan and Jordi Hays say got them a nine-figure acquisition from OpenAI, without ever trying to sell. Recorded live at Press Publish LA…
Jordi HaysGuest
John CooganGuest
Colin RosenblumHost
Samir ChaudryHost
So I don't know if you have confirmed the news, but I remember seeing the headline.
Funny enough, it was on April 2nd that OpenAI bought your show for reported hundreds of millions of dollars.
We were ready to do April 1st, but that was going to be even more confusing than it already was, even on April 2nd.
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, TPBN in a nutshell.
It covers technology and business with a focus on startups and the private markets, really Silicon Valley, where Jordi and I sort of built our early careers.
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.
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.
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.
And so by coming in and it was very easy for us to take it 10 times, 100 times more seriously than everyone else and build a lot of momentum really quickly.
So I don't know if you have confirmed the news, but I remember seeing the headline.
Funny enough, it was on April 2nd that OpenAI bought your show for reported hundreds of millions of dollars.
We were ready to do April 1st, but that was going to be even more confusing than it already was, even on April 2nd.
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, TPBN in a nutshell.
It covers technology and business with a focus on startups and the private markets, really Silicon Valley, where Jordi and I sort of built our early careers.
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.
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.
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.
And so by coming in and it was very easy for us to take it 10 times, 100 times more seriously than everyone else and build a lot of momentum really quickly.
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