John Coogan
Entrepreneur
“An engineer can easily justify a $100,000 token budget a year if they're making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 in their comp package. Jensen's floated like a one-to-one ratio. And that doesn't seem that crazy for certain roles. Much harder to justify for a lawyer right now.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · November 2026
Context
During a day when AI stocks sank, the hosts discussed investor worry about 'what comes after AI coding' for lab revenue. Coogan explains where large per-person AI spend makes sense today and where it doesn't yet.
Transcript
…call them wrapper companies, but like the companies that are in AI enablement, AI diffusion, AI for law, AI for finance, these types of companies, you add up all of that. Even if the labs were able to just immediately get that revenue, it doesn't move the needle that much. And so the next
they are getting a lot of the revenue. Oh,
yeah, already they're getting a ton of revenue. But what I'm saying is, like, an engineer can easily justify $100,000 token budget a year if they're making $200,000, $300,000, $400,000 in their comp package. Jensen's floated like a one-to-one ratio. And that doesn't seem that crazy for certain roles. Much harder to justify for a lawyer right now. I think
he floated more aggressively.
Yeah. But it's that right now, everyone who has a marketer on their team, everyone who has an in-house counsel, everyone who has a CFO, they would all love to be able to go to them and say, yeah, your budget for AI is $100,000 a year. Go spend it. And let's make sure the ROI is there. But we're…
Yeah.
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