Media and the Machine

My guest today is Nic Baird, co-founder and CEO of Koah Labs.

Koah is building what Tom Tunguz of Theory Ventures calls the AdSense for AI.

Nic breaks down:

• AI token economics in plain English: why serving an AI user can cost 100 times more than serving a web user.That’s why he thinks most AI apps cannot reach global scale on subscriptions alone.

• Ads are coming to AI. The question is whether they’ll be useful—or terrible? Nic says the best AI ads won’t look like pop-ups, banners, or pre-rolls. They’ll be part of the answer.

• Where people will first see these ads: ChatGPT, Copilot, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and the agents and apps outside the frontier models.

• Whether Claude can really stay ad-free forever?

• We get into privacy too. How do you use AI in ads without reading people’s most personal chats and creeping them out.

And Koah's fundraising story is wild. Tom Tunguz reached out before Koah even had a product And after passing on 150 adtech companies he made his Series A decision in 24 hours.

Nic is also an 8-time national sailing champion and his dad won the America’s Cup and is in the sailing hall of fame. We talk about Nic's scariest sailing moments and how he got to meet Larry Ellison on the world’s biggest private superyacht.

Special thanks to Tom at Theory Ventures for putting Koah on my radar.

Please enjoy my conversation with Nic Baird.

Thx!
Rob