Two Founders Talked to Each Other for 150 Hours to Earn an Audience
Instead of chasing big guests, they printed strangers' posts, reacted in suits, and sent each writer the clip.
The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway · Why OpenAI Bought a 17-Month-Old PodcastJohn Kugan and Jordi Hayes, the two founders behind the tech talk show TBPN, started with a stack of paper, two suits, and no guests.
They printed out posts they had found in newspapers and on social media. Then they sat down in front of cinema cameras, held up the pages, and talked. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes a single post sent them off for 10 minutes. A typical session ran 90 minutes and bounced through 30 to 50 topics.
That was the whole show for a long time, about 150 hours of just the two of them talking. When they told friends, in the founders' words, "we're going full-time on a podcast," friends said they were excited for them and that it was awesome. The founders said friends privately seemed to be thinking the pair were down on their luck and could not come up with a startup idea. Full-time podcasting was still low status to some degree in tech circles.
The printed pages gave them a way to answer each writer directly. After recording, they clipped their reaction to each post and replied to the original writer with the video. On a day when a writer might get a thousand likes that blur together, a filmed, thoughtful response stood out. The founders called it a love letter to whoever posted the original idea.
It worked person by person. About 50 posters a day got a small signal. The founders said the message to each writer came down to, "Hey, we exist. We liked what you said and here's our commentary." Some clicked, watched two men in suits taking seriously something they had dashed off in the shower, and followed or shared the clip.
The founders said they had found a way to get noticed early on, built on two bets. One was format. No one else had two hosts riffing on wild ideas for 90 minutes, so they had, in their words, a monopoly on that. The other was treating the show like a daily product and obsessing over marketing it through clips rather than waiting for big guests to bring an audience.
By the time they invited anyone else on, the audience was already there, built one printed post at a time.
Questions people ask
What is TBPN?
TBPN is a daily tech show hosted by John Kugan and Jordi Hayes. It started in 2024 as a long, live conversation about tech news and online posts, and it later added interviews with founders and executives. In 2026, OpenAI acquired it.
Why did suits and nice cameras matter for such a small show?
The suits and high-quality cameras made a reply hard to ignore. A stranger might get many quick likes, but few people print out a post, discuss it for minutes, and film it well. The effort signaled respect, so writers were more likely to watch and share.
Why start with no guests at all?
Guests can bring a one-time spike, but early on the hosts had no leverage to book big names. Talking alone let them publish every day, test what worked, and turn every post they covered into a chance to be discovered. Once the clips built a following, bigger interviews became easier to get.