The Idea: In October 2024, two former tech founders had a simple but bold idea: treat tech news like sports. John Coogan - co-founder of Soylent, a Founders Fund EIR, and a YouTube creator who'd built a following dissecting business models - linked up with Jordi Hays, who'd built and sold a fintech company to Rho Technologies. Their insight was that Silicon Valley had no equivalent of ESPN's SportsCenter - a daily, fast-paced, insider show where top CEOs actually came to say real things. So they launched TBPN (Technology Business Programming Network), originally called "Technology Brothers," and committed to three hours of live content every single weekday. No outside investors. No safety net. Just two founders going all in on a format nobody had tried in tech media. This was the beginning of TBPN.
The Execution:
- October 2024: Coogan and Hays launch TBPN as a daily live show on YouTube and X, immediately committing to the most ambitious production schedule in independent tech media.
- Early 2025: The show catches fire across Silicon Valley as a place where CEOs can speak candidly with hosts who are genuine insiders - Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff, and Sam Altman all appear in the first year.
- Mid 2025: The New York Times profiles TBPN as "Silicon Valley's newest obsession" - legitimising the show to a mainstream audience and unlocking a wave of blue-chip sponsors including Ramp, Plaid, and Google's Gemini division.
- September 2025: TBPN hires Dylan Abruscato - former president of Postmates and HQ Trivia - as president to scale the business side, with a target to triple ad revenue from $5M to $15M in 2026.
- Late 2025: The show signs a partnership with the New York Stock Exchange, giving them access to the exchange floor like CNBC - a huge validation of what they'd built and a signal of where they were headed.
- December 2025: TBPN closes out the year with $5M in advertising revenue, profitable, and with zero outside investors - a rare achievement in media.
- April 2, 2026: OpenAI announces the acquisition of TBPN - its first ever media acquisition - for undisclosed terms. The show will sit within OpenAI's strategy organisation, maintain full editorial independence, and continue to run every weekday. Sam Altman posts that TBPN is his "favourite tech show."
The lesson? Coogan and Hays didn't build a podcast - they built the sports desk for tech. The format was the moat. Three hours of live, daily, insider commentary is genuinely hard to replicate, and the guests they attracted early created a flywheel that no amount of money can simply buy. In media, consistency and authenticity compound the same way equity does. Show up every day, go deep on your niche, and eventually the most powerful organisations in the world will come knocking on your door.