Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel - deel.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist LinkedIn - linkedIn.com/twist Today's show: Jason sits down with Brynn Putnam, CEO and founder of Board, to learn more about her company's tabletop gaming console. The pair talks about how to raise capital for yet-to-launch hardware projects, the screen-time debate, and how Board is approaching building or buying IP for its family-friendly games. Next, Alex got Heremus's AJ Piplica on the horn to chat hypersonic, autonomous jets. The startup's technology bridges the gap between rockets and airplanes, and may represent the future of warfare, yes, but also fast freight! Guest Links: Brynn Putnam https://x.com/BrynnPutnam Board https://board.fun/ Board Series A announcement https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/02/board-the-new-game-startup-from-mirror-founder-brynn-putnam-raises-20m-has-already-sold-thousands/ Mirror https://www.lululemonstudio.com/ AJ Piplica https://x.com/AJ_Piplica Heremus https://www.hermeus.com/ Heremus Series C announcement https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/hermeus-reaches-1-billion-valuation-with-350-million-raise-to-build-todays-fastest-aircraft-for-the-american-warfighter-302735273.html Timestamps: 0:00 Board's Brynn Putnam joins the show 2:54 Board's proprietary AI software stack 6:43 Why Board manufactures in Mexico (not China) 9:21 LinkedIn: Thanks to our partners at LinkedIn! Post your job for free at https://linkedIn.com/twist then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant. 9:42 How to raise a Seed round for hardware without a finished product 15:26 Brynn's daughter and the mermaid example 17:09 Can Board limit screen time fears? 18:47 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 22:54 Selling the first 10,000 units 28:38 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more. 29:42 Why Board is steering away from simple ports toward native IP experiences 35:32 Hermeus's AJ Piplica joins the show 35:32 What is Dark Horse? 43:48 Commercial applications: Cargo, organs, flowers, and trans-Atlantic in 90 minutes 47:47 Commercial applications: Cargo, organs, flowers, and trans-Atlantic in 90 minutes 57:00 Dark Horse range and the "reusable first stage" analogy 58:42 Dark Horse range and the "reusable first stage" analogy 1:02:42 $350M Series C led by Khosla; total funding now exceeds $500M 1:03:39 The SpaceX model: get customers to fund your R&D 1:07:47 Closing: the American Dynamism pitch Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Twist This Week in Startups. Very excited to have Bryn Putnam on the program. She is the CEO and founder of Board. Welcome to the program.

• 0:10Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me, Jason.

• 0:12Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Deal. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more. Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks in 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist. And thanks to our partners at LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/twist, then promote it to get access to LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant.

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  I saw you going trending. I think my friends over at USV, Union Square Ventures, did your Series A, I'm assuming?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 0:57Jason Calacanis?

  Or a big seed. Congratulations on that. I've been friends with Fred Wilson. He was hired me to read business plans for him in 1995. Just to massively date this. Yeah, he was doing something called Acme Ventures with Jerry Colonna, which became Flatiron, which then became Union Square. But he's been at it for a long time and I've known him since I was 24 years old. Great investors. But my Lord, what an amazing demo sweeping the interwebs. Maybe you could tell everybody what Board is and maybe we could look at a launch video or whatever you have here. Because I saw this and I was like, oh, my God, I'm buying three of them.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  I love it. That's what we want to hear. So Board is the first face-to-face gaming console. It's a 24-inch touchscreen that sits on a table. And what we've done is we've trained the touchscreen to recognize physical game pieces. So it delivers an experience that's like board games meets video games, where everyone can sit around the same shared display, interacting with the screen using these incredible game pieces.

• 2:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so it's a giant iPad. But it has some sort of way of knowing what's on the screen that you put on there, whether it's a chess piece or whatever it is. And this is, this technology has existed in iPads for a little while. Yeah, what is that? No, it hasn't. So what is the underlying technology here that lets the board know about the pieces? Because touchscreens have existed for a long time, obviously.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  What is the technology that's having these pieces? Because I know I saw something that worked on iPad, but I'm not sure how the technology worked. And it might have been like a decade ago. It was some sort of a Disney thing, but I can't remember.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jason Calacanis?

  You tell me.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  So touchscreens recognize 10 touchpoints. So if you put two fingers on, it recognizes 10 fingers, but the 11th or 12th finger, it doesn't recognize. So our challenge was recognizing unlimited touchpoints as well as physical objects. So the way that we do that, we actually made you a special piece, a special Jason mix.

• 3:02Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, look at me. I love it.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  To those true to our purpose.

• 3:06Jason Calacanis?

  Put me in, Coach Brown. I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be in. I always, I always wear a pair of high tops, just in case Coach Brown puts me in the game.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  You're ready to go.

• 3:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm ready to go.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So the way that our pieces do that, they don't contain electronics or sensors. They have a unique conductive pattern built into the surface that uses a special blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic. And there's a unique manufacturing process that we've developed in-house. And then our custom software stack processes the raw data from the board's touch sensor using embedded AI to detect and track the pieces. So it knows this is the JSON piece. It's over here facing this direction. It's shooting a basket. And so we can play games where the pieces are actually controlling the digital screen in real time. And all of that is built entirely from the ground up. So our models are proprietary,

• 3:57Speaker 01

  trained on our own custom data set. You know, we leverage open source frameworks, but really, everything is unique to our platform.

• 4:04Jason Calacanis?

  How many years have you been building this? And what does it take today to build a hardware product like this to the level of refinement you got to? Because people used to always say hardware is hard. I don't want to touch a hardware startup. Most hardware startups failed brutally. Now everybody's like, oh, hardware is the moat. This is amazing. Can you add hardware to your SaaS product? And it's like, it's slack. I don't know. What hardware would you like me to add to HubSpot? You know, it's, but it's funny because Square had that little hardware device. So Jack was way ahead of his time. So tell us a little bit about how long it takes from, you know, prototyping,

• 4:42Jason Calacanis?

  you know, getting out the first thousand Kickstarter's, if you took that route and, and, and building a, a modern hardware company in 2026.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  It took us about two years to get to launch, which was remarkably fast. I think frankly, because we had sort of the right Avengers building the product. My last company was called Mirror and it was an interactive smart mirror that streamed workouts to people in their homes. So I was very familiar with screen technology and how to get those types of products built. And then my CTO Ryan has a deep background in TV and machine learning and worked in computer vision, self-driving cars at his previous startup. So he sort of brought his, his team with him and we had a bit of a head start, as it relates to kind of solving the challenge of the, the screen recognizing the pieces. So I think we were fortunate just to have that kind of unique combination of experience.

• 5:34Jason Calacanis?

  So let's take Mirror and how long that took and how long it took to build that hardware footprint versus this one. What's changed? And I'm assuming you're going to Shenzhen or somewhere and working with these hardware, you know, intermediaries or consultants, maybe take us inside that piece of the business when you have to go find contract manufacturers or a factory to build this and what it was like when you did Mirror, which was, I think, like, that was a pretty good decent time ago. Yeah. Versus now. And I know Shenzhen has changed. You had 2017. Shenzhen has changed a lot since I went there 20 years ago to ask my wife's father if I could marry her.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Oh, amazing.

• 6:18Jason Calacanis?

  This is 20 years ago, 22 years ago. And it was one hotel in Shenzhen. And just huge swaths of open dirt plots waiting to be building stuff. But it's changed a lot, yeah?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  It's definitely much more evolved. With Mirror, actually, I had no experience building technology at all. My background was a, I was a professional ballerina here at the New York City Ballet. And then I moved into bricks and mortar gyms, fitness studios, and sort of took that IRL knowledge and turned that into Mirror. So Mirror was my first tech company, tech product. And it was really a napkin sketch. You know, I had the idea for the experience and we built a prototype that was completely non-functional, but just to validate that you could see a screen through a piece of one-way mirror and that the experience was really engaging. And so from there, I had heard a lot of sort of horror stories about people spending all this time sort of designing these pieces of hardware.

• 7:13Speaker 01

  And then by the time they got to manufacturing, they'd either run out of money or the manufacturers couldn't make the designs because there was a mismatch between what a factory could do and what had been conceived. And so pretty early, I started working with a local manufacturer just to build a prototype, just to understand how we would tackle some of the challenges of our custom mirror and the framing and things like that. And then eventually, we produced actually in Mexico because with Mirror, it was such a large and heavy object that sort of the shipment from Asia really cut into sort of the benefits of producing overseas. So we produced in Mexico.

• 7:49Jason Calacanis?

  That was cost competitive because of the shipping issue.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Because of the weight and the size.

• 7:54Jason Calacanis?

  And the quality was there. I've heard mixed things about like people trusting, you know, maybe Vietnam or Shenzhen versus Mexico or other labor forces. And I'm not sure if my information is outdated, but high-quality manufacturing of tech items in Mexico, yeah?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  Incredibly. And the factory there had worked on a digital picture frame prior. So they had sort of a similar experience with a smaller product and they did a lot of digital signage. And it was actually a factory run by a woman, operated almost entirely by women. So as a female-operated company, it was really an incredible experience to feel like there was this amazing workforce of Mexican women kind of driving our growth.

• 8:33Jason Calacanis?

  You know, not this isn't a political show. This is This Week in Startups, not This Week in Politics. But when you think about it, if we're trying to have more resiliency in our supply chain and not, you know, and if there are geopolitical issues with China in the future, it does create a pretty resilient way for you to get product, avoid the shipping containers and avoid tariffs and other issues if it's that close. What did it take to build this product in terms of like timeline compared to that first time? Is it half as much time now to build a hardware product? Is it half as, you know, and what would a founder listening to this say is the minimum amount of money required to get to like a functional prototype that you could show

• 9:18Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:00Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:19Speaker 01

  This time, it did make sense for us to manufacture in Asia and we worked with a tier one CM out of Thailand, who had a lot of experience with display products, working with folks like Peloton or Portal or Nook. And so we were fortunate to be able to leverage kind of their experience with the core element of our product, the touchscreen. And so this time, we worked really closely in collaboration with the manufacturer to get to a prototype more quickly, leveraging their experience as opposed to the first time where we were owning the entire supply chain and sourcing and managing every single component that went into the device. And so that definitely shaved a large amount of time off of our process. I think for me,

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Perhaps because I'm not a, I don't come from a technical background, I've always focused on trying to validate the experience for investors. And so really, we built early days a product where the technology wasn't fully there, but it really showed off what it was to sit around a shared experience, playing with physical pieces as the controller. And we did that through a series of hacky, hacky ways. And that's how we raised our first round. And so I generally recommend that you don't over engineer your early startups. You actually try to show and deliver the experience that you're trying to give to your customers and then build into that once you have more capital.

• 11:39Jason Calacanis?

  And so you did a seed round before the USV round, I'm assuming. And in your mind, if you can basically show the product and people can get excited trying it in a VC boardroom, or an angel investors boardroom, or I don't know, a seed funds boardroom, that's enough to get you the money you need to get to that next stage, yeah?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to make the experience come alive, the brand you're creating, who your customer is, the, you know, it's storytelling, fundraising is storytelling, just like talking to your customers is storytelling. So you have to build what you need to tell that story. And you obviously need to have a clear understanding of how you're going to build the end product and make it fully functional. But I, we've always sort of leaned into, you know, do the bare minimum to show what the experience will be like for the customer.

• 12:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And the cost of this item, and then I'm assuming there's an app store where I either rent or buy games, where I get some sort of a subscription with some number of games. Tell me about how you price things in today's world. Obviously, I'm wearing a Whoop here and Whoop is ungodly expensive compared to like buying a Fitbit back in the day where you didn't even have a premium account. You just bought it. These, I think, are $300 a year and they were upselling me on having like four members of the family. And I was like, wow, if all five of us were on this thing for $200, I'd be spending $1,000 a year just on Whoop for my family. And I said, cheap, actually, for the value I'm getting. So how do you think about pricing in 2026 for a product like yours?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  So the board is $399 and includes seven games so that you get a flavor for the experience. From there, we have a game store where you can buy individual games at around $35 and they come with their own custom piece sets. And then we have a subscription product that's launching at the end of the year that gives you access to basically creator tools to allow you to create your own games and custom pieces onboard. So right now, people are using our SDK with, you know, their favorite AI coding tools to build their own interactive experiences and we're building a more formal product around that, that will be a subscription product as an add-on to the base.

• 13:41Jason Calacanis?

  So it's not cheap. It's valued, it's priced, you know, 400 bucks is like buying a Chromebook or, you know, an Android phone, but if you were to divide it by the number of hours, which is how I look at entertainment, is like Netflix, they always say like, this is the greatest value. I mean, if you played with this thing for 10 hours a month, 100 hours a year, you know, now you're at $3 an hour, it's, it's free, basically, is I think the way to think about it. Why make people pay upfront? Do you have to do that because of the hardware? Or could you eventually just do what Whoop does and, you know, abstract the hardware into the cost of the subscription? And you must have had a debate about that internally, yeah?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we're definitely trying to get the hardware down to the lowest price point possible. And obviously, we're only about seven months out from launch now, so the price will, you know, continue to gel over time. So for us, it really has been about, you know, selling the product at low to no margins and looking to the games, the accessories, so things like cases and piece storage and premium pieces that unlock new experiences in the game, as well as the creator membership as a way to really build long time LTV off of the customer. But I think agreeing with you, you know, 85% of our members are active monthly paying, playing over 30 sessions per month. So for us, you know, it's the average trip for a family of four going to the movies

• 15:05Speaker 01

  is $100 or $150, once you factor in popcorn and candy and more. You know, I think, I think it's really, it's a really high value experience.

• 15:16Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think that's something the movie theaters have to really reconsider in the studios is. The how accessible their product is and they haven't figured out subscriptions yet. Or how to utilize downtimes. I mean, it would be so commonsensical for them to just come up with a $99 a month plan for families to go to the movies two or three times a month. If they get there before, you know, not on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they just, you know, a weekly thing or whatever.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, off peak hours.

• 15:45Jason Calacanis?

  Off peak hours would be such a great, you know, I mean, if it works for Claude Code. Using Jokins, like, what is the movie theater think? They're dying and they have no ability to innovate.

• 15:57Jason Calacanis?

  There was something kind of sneaky in there that you dropped that I caught on, which is sneaky in a good way, like sneaky brilliant, clever, which is the unique pieces in the game. My daughters were addicted to the Shopkins thing for a little bit or popping cooking and you know, a lot of folks are unpacking packs of baseball cards, a cracking packs or whatever they call it on live streams, etc. It's like a hobby. This could be amazing if you were able to do a deal with LucasArts for Star Wars and make the famous Millennium Falcon, you know, game, the hologram game, or, you know, add other pieces.

• 16:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that could be really fun, right?

• 16:44Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's just, we have so many businesses in one. We're sort of like Nintendo meets Roblox meets Lego meets a great collectibles business. And that's obviously the challenge of running the business, but also the incredible opportunity. Particularly when you start to think about creation. So, you know, over the weekend, my daughter used the Creator product to make a piece that looks like herself that is a mermaid. And, you know, I sure as heck, I'm gonna pay whatever it takes to get that piece delivered to her. Because she sat there and she created it and she used her imagination to come up with something and then that piece is gonna unlock new games and experiences for her, which she'll be able to create even further.

• 17:21Jason Calacanis?

  There's a lot of orthodoxy in this space, like the Will Wheaton crowd and, you know, they play board games on podcasts, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. And I did see some of the feedback being like, well, technically, it's not a board game if you, you know, have a screen and you can't do that. And there's like the whole, like, you can't do that crowd. You have to have your conviction. You're not going after these board game lunatics who are, you know, oh, this is sacrilegious to them. Yeah, you're, you're trying to expand the board game market here, I'm assuming.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this is very much, this is sort of the area I always play. This is new category creation. So we take the interactivity of video games and we take the tactile feel of playing with physical pieces and sitting around a shared experience. But we're creating something that's fundamentally new. And I think for some people who are in the board game community or in the video game community, we don't fit what they're looking for. But I think for lots of people, what they're looking for is a really fun way to build memories of people that they love. And this fits the bill. And so that's really our North Stars. We're looking at fun, accessible, full family entertainment. So regardless of your age or your gaming experience or your taste, you should be able to sit around together and have a really great time where the screen is not taking you into your own isolated

• 18:38Speaker 01

  experience, but really bringing you together. And so, you know, there's, there's obviously so much value in all sorts of play, but we're creating something new.

• 18:47Jason Calacanis?

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• 19:28Jason Calacanis?

  all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, independent, regardless of where in the US you're operating from. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes. Kind of the brilliance of it, if you think about this on a generational basis, I'm Gen X. You know, I've got two 10-year-olds and a 16-year-old, and then there's, you know, my nieces and nephews who are millennials. We all know we're using these devices too much. And the fact that the device goes in between you and I and, you know, just kills the facial expression thing. This is very troubling for parents. Parents are trying to get their kids off devices. I got all the controls, the number of hours, which devices for my 16-year-old?

• 20:11Jason Calacanis?

  I'm down on the app level, like, okay, I'm gonna give you eight hours a day of audible. You can have unlimited audible, Spotify for two hours. I'm like thinking about this, but what I most of all want to do is bring back the memories of doing things together. And I think the young crowd also, I don't know, I was talking about it with Sue at the top of the show from Brilliant, and you two are both brilliant, you should make friends. I should have done a little crossover here and had you, um, because she's one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time. And what you're both doing is kind of using this technology for good. I don't know if that has anything to do with the fact that you're both female founders and that you're thinking, is this good for society or not? As opposed to, is this good for the bottom line of the company?

• 20:55Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, maybe there's something a little bit there, but I love the brilliance of it's on the table, we're all looking at it. And there's like silly, practical things. I was just playing a board game with my daughter. It's like some game where you move beads around from these 10 different, um, little crevices in a piece of wood. It's like some ancient game and-

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Monkala.

• 21:16Jason Calacanis?

  Monkala, thank you.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:18Jason Calacanis?

  She's 10 years old, she played Monkala at home. She doesn't know exactly the rules, but she's like, this is the rules I want to play. And I'm like reading the rules and trying to understand Monkala. I've never heard of this, I know Go, I know chess, I know backgammon. And, um, we had an amazing, hilarious time doing it with her rules.

• 21:36Jason Calacanis?

  But eventually, you want to play by the rules. Strategy games have rules for that reason. And this just, for the tutorial portion of, you know, Settlers of Catan, or whatever that's called, that everybody gets into. Like, I tried to play that two or three times with people. It's just way too much. It's like learning to snowboard or golf or something. Like, the first five games are gonna be brutal, and then I'm sure you have some opening up moment. But maybe you could talk a little bit about the skill level and onboarding people to these games, because that seemed to be the hardest part of getting into a new board game, is getting five people around to learn the rules.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the genesis of board. Is, I left Mir, and my life looked very different when I started Mir. I was pregnant with my first child. Now I have a three-year-old, a nine-year-old, and three stepchildren, eighteen, twenty, and twenty-two. And so, you know, trying to get that range of ages and interests together for family time is virtually impossible. You know, we would try to play video games, and I don't know if you've played with a modern controller, but there's about twenty more buttons than the last time I played Mario, which was, you know, incredibly challenging.

• 22:44Jason Calacanis?

  Kids, yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  You know, we'd play board games, and it was the exact experience that you said. We would sit there, and we'd either play the same game over and over again, or we'd read twenty pages of rules to try and fight about them, to try to get to a game. And then invariably, it would be too hard for the youngest, or too easy for the oldest. And so, we really think about that when we're making games. We want, for example, we've got a kitchen game, similar to Overcooked, where you're all collaborating to manage a busy kitchen. And my littlest one, she's the cleaner. She manages the sponge, and she has a great time. And the oldest girls are there, trying to memorize the recipes, and think about the strategy of sequencing the tickets to get the optimal payday. And so, that's really kind of where board shines, is experiences where everyone can come together

• 23:29Speaker 01

  without too much setup, and no one feeling left behind.

• 23:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right, do me a favor. This is like, the third time I've heard about Overcooked. Explain to Unc, I'm like... People are starting to call me unk now. I think it's like a compliment slash joke. It's like six, seven or something like that. But what is overcooked? Cause Jalen Brunson was playing overcooked after a Knicks win, I think. And I'm just like, well, if the captain's playing overcooked and my daughters are telling me I'm cooked all the time. I need to know what's going on here. What is overcooked in the phenomenon here?

• 24:02Speaker 01

  It's a cooperative cooking game. So you're working together to manage a kitchen. And there we go. So you get guests who come in and they have specific requests and you have to figure out, you know, who does what in the kitchen to deliver these dishes before the guests get angry and leave. And so you're rewarded for the speed with which you're able to deliver on the guest satisfaction.

• 24:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God, this is like the bear. Yes, chef.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yes, chef.

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God. I, it's funny, I was at the French Laundry last week and we had a party for Paul and in this liquidity conference we do. And they were putting, like, they let us walk into the kitchen and they created stations. So I just went in and I just started saying, service, hands. And I just started like expediting. They thought it was either hilarious or totally cringe. But my understanding is now, I don't know if you're, I think you're a millennial, but you should embrace cringe is what I'm understanding now. Like embrace your personal cringe.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  This is what, this is what my, my teenage stepdaughters say, that you should lean into what makes you a little bit odd. That's, that wasn't what I grew up with though. So I'm, I'm.

• 25:09Jason Calacanis?

  No, you were supposed to hide the odd stuff.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Exactly. Hide your crazy.

• 25:13Jason Calacanis?

  Hide the crazy. Try to be normal. Here you could just be like, I love board games. I'm going to do this. So when will this be available? How do people get one? And how do you think about distribution this early on? I like that you have premium pricing for the first year or two, you know, make sure the company's profitable. You don't run out of money. Everybody, man, every hardware startup I've ever been involved in is like, we want everybody to afford it. I'm like. So you want to be the Sony Walkman in your 40, month four, like always a bad idea. And you probably learned that lesson, I think, maybe with Mira, which was a huge success, right? You sold it for a half billion dollars to somebody I can't remember.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Lululemon.

• 25:52Jason Calacanis?

  Lululemon. So you felt good about that? I mean, it was a good sale?

• 25:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think we got, people don't realize, we actually sold about a week before COVID. So I think it was certainly would have been an interesting, an interesting outcome if that conversation happened a year later.

• 26:09Jason Calacanis?

  Timing is everything. Yes, that would have been a different timeline, but no regrets.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  No, but an incredible experience and to be able to watch a public company that's that beloved sort of operate from the inside was really fascinating.

• 26:20Jason Calacanis?

  So tell us a little bit about like availability and how you think about distribution. Did you do a Kickstarter for this? That seemed to be like a requirement for hardware companies back in the day is to run some sort of a Kickstarter.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  No, I mean, I think we, we felt like we didn't want to use a Kickstarter to fund development. You know, we really, we wanted people to have confidence that the product was going to ship and that the product was going to be really high quality. And so we didn't, we didn't do a Kickstarter. We launched D to C for holiday of last year. And, you know, we sold out of our 10,000 launch units within a few weeks of our launch, which was really exciting. And then from there, you can get Bored still at bored.fun on our website, which is the core channel.

• 27:02Jason Calacanis?

  Is there a wait for these or could I just buy one of these to take on my summer trip? It's just available now.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  Available now.

• 27:09Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. I am so stoked for this. I was like, oh, man, I'm gonna have to like, I'm gonna have to use my, my celebrity, my micro celebrity to get one of these early because I was talking about it with my daughter, one of my two twins, and they were losing their mind over it. But I don't need to try to leverage a tweet or something to get one. That's good to know. I'm gonna order one now for our trip. The games that are on it.

• 27:39Jason Calacanis?

  Omokase, that's your cooking one, I take it?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Chop Chop is our cooking one. Omokase is a strategy game where you're sort of building different sets of sushi. Blue is sort of our interpretation of lemmings. This great physics puzzle game where you're trying to save these little blue characters in this reverse platformer.

• 28:00Jason Calacanis?

  I remember that, yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we have a retro arcade game, so things where you're shooting asteroids with spaceships or trying to use robots to steer snakes to eat fruit.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  SpyCraft is like our escape room in a box, so it's a puzzle game. You're working as spies to unlock this kind of global mystery. Mushka's our virtual pet, so sort of similar to Tamagotchi, who you have to care for and play with. In a couple of weeks, our next game that's launching is called Heist, where you're using mirrors to route lasers to sort of get burglars in and out of various heist puzzles.

• 28:38Jason Calacanis?

  Founder scale faster on Deal. That's the deal. You can grow your company without borders and you can set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere, like a moderate startup or large company does, and Deal is gonna get all the visas handled fast, so you can get back to building. There's a great talent war that's going on right now, and you need people with superpowers for your startup to be competitive, to beat your competitors, to get your products to market. But anytime you try to grow your team with overseas hires, oh my lord, you've got to reinvent the wheel, and you gotta navigate a tangled web of international laws, regulations, and you can't get these things wrong, folks. You wanna onboard new staffers in other countries? You wanna get them set up on your network, nice and secure, IT access, all that good stuff? You wanna manage their benefits?

• 29:22Jason Calacanis?

  Trust me, this is all a nightmare unless you partner with Deal. They are the people stack for startups. They're gonna take care of all the onboarding, payroll, HR, IT, benefits, everything you need, quickly, in one place, done perfectly. So visit deal.com/twist. That's D-E-E-L dot com slash twist. You know what's interesting about what you're doing? I remember getting pitched early on about casual games, and it didn't fit in a box, right? Like, there's gaming, and like, okay, you have this Nvidia card, and you get your keyboard, and then, you know, consoles. It just didn't fit anywhere and then it became bigger than everything Candy Crush, Plants vs Zombies, all that stuff. I kind of feel like you have that potential here,

• 30:04Jason Calacanis?

  which is it's hard for people to understand where it lands, but um, once they do, it'll probably feel to them like a, an obvious use of 30 bucks. Oh, Tharos.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, Thrasos is a similar to Risk.

• 30:23Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, to Risk. Perfect. So yeah, this is one of the interesting things about gaming, you know, any of these formats like a recipe, not copyrightable, the name obviously is, but not the, the game functionality. So you can make these, but what about um, and you have an API, anybody can put a game in the store. Great. So that's an app store. You take half the money, 30% of the money. Do you have a model yet?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Um, so our first community game launches next month. It's a, a pinball game using the robots and spaceships from our arcade game and the model differs based on game by game. In some cases it's a rev share, in some cases we're buying the game outright. Um, but it's a, it's a marketplace where people submit their games for review and then they get posted in the community section.

• 31:06Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So TBD, like what the sustainable business model there is, uh, in terms of like, you'd have to be careful that it's, since you don't want it to be an open platform, you want some level of quality.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  I think for us, we feel really excited about the fact that building a game on board to some degree is one of the most fun games on board. So I think for lots of people, they'll use the Creator Studio to build experiences for themselves and share them with their friends. And then for people who want to share it with the broader community, it'll go through our review just to ensure it meets sort of our quality and safety standards. And then that will be, in most cases, a rev share model.

• 31:40Jason Calacanis?

  Fascinating. Yeah, that, that is going to be great potential. Now, talk to me about like premium IP. There's huge businesses out there licensing IP constantly. Uh, LucasArts was probably one of the most famous. Uh, Marvel, before they were inside of Disney, wasn't completely licensing and tragically so. They licensed their characters across five movie studios and had to go recollect them all. But how do you think about IP here? Because LucasArts loves people to make games for them and my lord, I mean.

• 32:14Jason Calacanis?

  If we could have an Ashoka, Mandalorian, Grogu game, I mean, we probably wouldn't leave. And there's 10 different games you can do because you could give me a chess game for that. There's Lord of the Rings. There's so many different amazing collections of IP. Is that like down the road or you're talking to folks already?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've been in conversation with sort of all the large players that you mentioned. I think for us, we are really excited about sort of like Monopoly Go strategy where you take IP and characters and worlds that are really beloved and you reimagine them for board in a way that feels native and true to the technology, you know, where the pieces in the digital worlds really make sense. So, early days, I think, you know, investors and customers even were encouraging us to do sort of more ports, just bringing Monopoly over, bringing checkers over. And I think we've steered away from that really in service of trying to figure out places where IP partnership can really deliver something that is new and native and authentic to board. And those will release in the next few years.

• 33:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man, this is going to be such an amazing startup. I think, like, don't sell this one. Never, never sell it. I think you're going to crack. I think you're going to, like you said earlier, like, you're going to create a new category that on a platform basis, you know, as you could just, I mean, look at what services has done to Apple. Apple was kind of stagnant and then services just layering, layering, layering on all these different opportunities. So, yeah, this has got to be the patient. Go for the IPO. Never sell this company.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  One of the benefits of selling a company is I think you're probably less likely to do it again. You're more excited about other outcomes.

• 33:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's funny you say that. I now own 100% of my firm and the projects I do, have complete control, don't take on investors and go for a 10, 20-year vision. Like, why not? If you, and you have patient investors in USB. I mean, they were in meetup.com, Scott Hyferman's company for a long time. You know, patient capital, super important. I don't think you'll ever need to raise money again. You know, the way you're doing this, if people are willing to buy the next version ahead of time and you'll release a new version every year or two, I would assume you'll have some sort of a cycle and the size could get bigger or different. You could build a table. I mean, so many different hardware profiles you can do and.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we launched a D and D product, a table, a tabletop product comes out in July, which obviously really lends itself to a larger, you know, a larger surface, a larger map. So I think we're excited to see how that community receives it. And if that's positive, there's definitely an opportunity for a much larger.

• 34:54Jason Calacanis?

  Did you ever play Dungeons and Dragons when you were young or were you?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  You know, I, I did it young, but my son really got into it. And so we had a, a GM who would come to our house with a bunch of kids and they would do sessions in our, you know, in our dining room. And it's been really fun to watch him just use his imaginations to create stories. It's incredible.

• 35:12Jason Calacanis?

  I can remember when I was like 11, 12 or 13, growing up in Brooklyn and we would play Sunday nights. And I would just be counting the hours. I would wake up thinking about playing Dungeons and Dragons on a Sunday morning. And then we got together at like three or four o'clock for this Dungeons and Dragons game. I would just have to be on pins and needles. I can't wait to play, kind of like poker now. Like if I'm going to go to like Tremont to play poker, I'm going to play poker in a game. I'll just, I was talking to my friend Sky and we would be at work 20 years ago and thinking about going to the casino in LA, Hollywood Park down in Inglewood. And he'd be like texting me and we'd be like, oh, two more hours to go and we can go to the casino and play poker and learn strategies.

• 35:54Jason Calacanis?

  There's something just great about playfulness and my Lord, what a brilliant idea. And man, if I had a nickel for every founder that came through Stanford, MIT or Juilliard and the dance program, it's like, seems to be the three major paths to being a successful founder. It's either you're a scientist from MIT or GSB or a ballet dancer. Those seem to be the three big funnels and you're one of one from ballet to.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Loving my, any, any dancer I've ever hired has been an incredible success. So it's been number one of my hiring criteria. Any, any ballet that's out there, love hiring dancers.

• 36:32Jason Calacanis?

  They seem to be a bit obsessive, yeah? Like, and resilient and they're able to deal with pain. It seems like an incredibly painful thing to do.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  You'll run through walls, so it's a good fit for startups.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  All right, now is this background, I have to ask, is this background, are you in Paris right now? Is it a fake background or do you have an extremely cool bistro office that looks like it's friends?

• 36:58Speaker 01

  No, I'm in New York, so just a wall.

• 37:03Jason Calacanis?

  It looks like you might be in a Parisian cafe. Listen, I'm watering one like literally when I get off the, actually, I don't even have to do that. I have people, hey, can somebody buy me one of these and ship it to the ranch? I'm going on this great vacation with my kids and I'm like thinking of things to do between going to the Louvre and getting a Croque Madame, you know, I want to sit in the park or do something at night in Hawaii or in Paris, or you know, two of our destinations this summer. And this is like the perfect thing to travel with. And man, a larger version, ooh, for like Dungeons and Dragons, that would really be cool.

• 37:40Jason Calacanis?

  You should look at the poker table space. There's like, anybody who's into poker buys a specific poker table. Like there's the octagon one, there's the nine seat one, and like you can get them all customized and stuff like that. And there are some Dungeons and Dragons and board game ones. I think people are going to want like,

• 38:02Jason Calacanis?

  there'll be an aftermarket, you were talking about like accessories.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Lux tables, yeah, embedded.

• 38:06Jason Calacanis?

  There's gonna be some, you know, some idiot whale like me is gonna be like, is there a thousand dollar version or a two thousand dollar version that make all the kids in the neighborhood want to come over and play with my daughters? That's what I'm always trying to do is have our house be the hub.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:20Jason Calacanis?

  Like I want the the version that's like absurdly large and all the kids can't wait to come over.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  I love it. I love it.

• 38:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. All right, listen, continued success. Everybody go to board.fun. Is that it? Board.fun?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Board.fun.

• 38:34Jason Calacanis?

  And a fun, what a fun domain name. I didn't know dot fun existed. It's the first startup I've ever heard. Listen, continued success with this and everybody go buy one.

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 38:44Jason Calacanis?

  My lord, it is so great to see all these great entrepreneurs making new products and a lot of lessons there from today's interviews for founders. Number one,

• 38:56Jason Calacanis?

  Really understanding your customer and finding spaces where maybe it's not clearly defined, which means idiot VCs or entitled VCs. The, the issue with venture capitalists in a lot of cases, not all, and you know, people like to dig on VCs, which is kind of lame in and of itself because they dedicate their lives to supporting founders and getting a bunch of capital from around the world and providing it. So it should be a little more symbiotic and there should be a, a love of VCs and you know, the, the part they provide in the ecosystem. But there is a valid criticism that if it doesn't fit into an existing TAM, very hard

• 39:37Jason Calacanis?

  for I think some young inexperienced VCs to understand this. When you look at these two companies, like online tutor doesn't exist, digital board game doesn't exist and the people who like the existing board games hate this and the, you know, serious gamers, it's not serious enough and the Dungeons and Dragons people, they get sacrilege. You, you have to ignore all that and you have to ignore people who are trying to create a TAM for something that doesn't exist in the world. The TAM for Airbnb was basically zero. They induced a market to exist. The TAM for ride sharing, the TAM for eBay. You know, eBay was like flea markets, but you couldn't really assess it to flea markets because it was global.

• 40:21Jason Calacanis?

  All of this is to say, listen to your customers and build a product that delights them and everything will be fine. High order lessons here.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Hey everybody, welcome back to Twist. My name is Alex. Now, if you're watching this show, listening to it, I presume you are interested in technology and that means you know about great human projects like the Concorde, the world's first supersonic passenger jet. Now that's pretty far in the past, but some companies are trying to bring it back, one of which is called Boom, had them on the show a couple of times. They want to build the modern supersonic passenger jet. But what if you wanted to go faster and with fewer people? That's what Hermes is working on. They're trying to build a hypersonic autonomous jet and hypersonic means five times the speed of sound. So we're not just going over the limit by a little bit, we're blowing past it. I wanted to figure out how they're building this, what technology still needs to be put together, when it's coming to market, what the use cases are, and also, how much more money do they need?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  So please join me, welcome to the show, it's co-founder and chairman AJ Piplicka. AJ, how you doing?

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Great, Alex, happy to be here.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  And just because we can't start anywhere else, you are currently on camera, and you're in front of what appear to be a lot of trust cranes. So where are we and what's being built behind you?

• 41:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm in our factory here in Atlanta, Georgia, and behind me right now is our Quarter Horse Mark 2.2 airplane. So it is our second supersonic jet that the company's built. Should be out of here, hopefully in the next few weeks.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  I can't wait. I'm actually literally counting down until the news about that. But, look, look AJ, I want to get to the entire Quarter Horse program, and the recent iterative and impressive progress the company has made. But I think what we should do is, is set kind of the North Star, what you're building towards, and then we'll go back to the technology and how fast you're progressing. So, maybe the thing to understand is, what is Dark Horse, which is what you're building towards? And why is it an exciting and worthy technology project?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Sure, so Dark Horse is a hypersonic reusable aircraft, faster than the SR71, smaller than the SR71 with no person on board. So as you can imagine, you know, put that in the hands of our military leaders, the ability to operate basically with impunity in almost any airspace in the world. That is the type of asymmetric advantage that our Air Force and our allied partners are used to having. You know, we've had that type of advantage for many years through stealth technology, and precision guided weapons and those kinds of things. But as we look forward into the future of modern warfare, and especially things over very long distances, dealing with adversaries like China, being able to fly very far, very fast, and efficiently,

• 42:52Speaker 03

  is an important piece of that because it allows you to stay alive. And oh, by the way, don't put your airman at risk by putting them in harm's way. So, yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Not to be rude about it, but we've seen a number of, let's call them, high-profile military aircraft crashes lately. And it would be great if instead of seeing people pass away, no one got hurt. That would be a dramatic upgrade. The unmanned element to this is very interesting to me because when I think about it... About going faster, I think about the need to make even quicker decisions. And on one hand, it seems like it could be a great time to have a human there so they can drive the plane. But on the other hand, at that kind of speed, I wonder if humans are even fast enough in reactions. So why, why is it useful to have this be an uncrewed aerial system? And keep the humans out of it?

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I mean, I'll give you a couple relatively recent, you know, pieces of news. You know, we had two F-15s shot down over Iran. You know, created a really difficult search and rescue operation that thankfully was wildly successful. But imagine where we would be today in the negotiations if that wasn't successful. And if, if those pilots were captured and it became POWs. I mean, a POW being captured from an airplane getting shot down is almost the whole reason the SR-71 existed in the first place. Because Gary Powers got shot down in the U-2.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  And then, you know, same kind of thing with the, you know, the helicopter pilots that were rescued by, by an uncrewed system from, from Sironic.

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Shout out Sironic. I love that company.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Love what Dino's doing there. But, you know, as you look at the, the modern battlefield, be it, you know, Ukraine or the conflict in Iran. Automated systems are by all means the, the future of, of warfare.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  So for sure. But when I think about Ukraine, I'm thinking about FPV drones and trailing fiber optic cables. So that way they have, you know, low latency, 100% available steering ability. When you're going Mach 5, it's a little bit trickier. So, uh, these systems, are they going to be entirely autonomously driven? Or will there be a human somewhere in a bunker or a crate with a stick?

• 44:51Speaker 03

  No, they'll, they'll, they'll be uncrewed. I mean, they'll, they'll fly the way that, you know, rockets fly today. Rockets fly very fast in the atmosphere on their way up and on the way down. And they do that with no human pilot in the loop whatsoever. Now, how they fly is a little bit different. They, they adjust to their environments, you know, within some constraints. You know, modern aerial warfare is, is a bit more challenging. And then that's why I think you see the type of investment that you see in the US Air Force making in its collaborative combat aircraft program, you know, on the software side, especially. Um, you know, to create autonomy capabilities that can actually apply to real airplanes at a real combat. So, um, yeah, I do not expect there to be pilots in the loop. Maybe decision makers on the loop, but they're not there flying the airplanes.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  They're making high level command and control decisions.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  The rocket analogy is very interesting because earlier you called it a reusable aircraft. And I'm like, of course it's reusable. It's Nerka, not a rocket. And you're like, it's just like a rocket, actually. So we're kind of, we're between the two, it feels in a way, because we've taken out the humans. And we've taken away the human control, which smells like a rocket, but it definitely looks like a plane. And it flies like a plane, so it kind of walks, talks and quacks like a duck. Uh, maybe we need to have a middle category that's not just like drone or jet. Maybe you're inventing something like a third way, if you will.

• 46:09Speaker 03

  Maybe, you know, I always have fights with people on the internet about what's an airplane and what is not. Um, you know, I think we're all, we're all very eager here to break some records around airplanes. Uh, you know, the SR71 speed record is, uh, is the one that we all see in the, uh, in the headlights. But, um, yeah, I mean, there are, there are a lot of fundamental differences there. You know, like we flew rockets before we flew supersonic jets, like the V2 flew before we flew a supersonic. We flew a supersonic rocket plane in the, you know, the, um, uh, the X1 is the first aircraft or vehicle to break the sound barrier. And that was powered by a rocket because it's, it's easier to do that in a rocket. So, um, I think it just underscores the challenge and difficulty in building a supersonic, you know, jet powered aircraft. Um, it's, it's tough.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  There are not that many, uh, you know, companies out there that have, that have been able to do it.

• 46:55Speaker 02

  We're going to talk about how you're making it go so fast in just a second, but I'm thinking about applications in this. Because clearly as someone who grew up playing, you know, Jane's Flight Simulator and taking a couple of hours in private planes and such.

• 47:06Speaker 03

  I think I only flew the A10.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Well, that's because it has the world's best gun in it.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  If you don't, if you don't know what we're talking about, look at the A-10 Warthog. And two things about it you need to know. One, look at how the pilot is protected in their little cocoon of metal. And then look at the gun in the front and look at the stats about how fast it can fire and the amount of lead it can put downrange. It's tremendous.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Notice, this is like literally an airplane designed around a gun. Like the main, the nose landing gear is off center because of the gun. So, yeah.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  The gun's huge. I mean, okay, people joke that Russia is an oil company with an economy attached. I think really the A-10 is essentially a rotary cannon with some wings bolted on. But those things are tough.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Still are.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Now, A-10s, A-10s, slow, close to the ground. You know, I mean, these are anti-take aircraft essentially. You're building kind of the opposite, but I'm curious, outside the military context, what we could do with this. Now, I started off by bringing up Boom because everyone kind of gets that. I want to go to Paris fast. I'm going to get in a Boom, off I go, viva. But when I think about what you can do with unmanned hypersonic plane, like, I mean, you could bring like a donor kidney anywhere in the world in like some small amounts of time. I'm not going to do the math in my head, so I'll get it wrong. But to me, it seems like there's a lot of applications for what you're building that are, that are possible if we can get the per-flight cost down. So AJ, I'm really curious, do you see Dark Horse and other similar flight platforms that you're going to build down the road

• 48:31Speaker 02

  becoming cost possible for non-defense, non-military application?

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I certainly think there are commercial applications down the road. You know, cargo is, is the like natural entry point, number one, because you don't need to put people on the platform. So like, you know, you're still flying over people, you're still flying over your long distances. So there's, there's certainly an element of safety there. But, you know, because you've built this military business along the way, it's not your first rodeo. It's not the first iteration of the aircraft that's going and getting, getting certified.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  So there's a, there's a handful of things that like to fly around the world very quickly. I, I looked this up a long time ago. It's pretty funny, like the, the things that people overnight around the world. It's like somehow still like legal documents. I don't know how that's still a thing and we haven't gotten rid of that, but apparently it is.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  People say DocuSign is just a vibe-coded app with a big sales force. Well, no, friends, because people are still overnighting documents.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, so there's, there's that. Flowers and lobsters. These are like the things that people ship around the world and, and they want to be a move around more quickly. So, great. And like the thing that you, the really, I think the real way to think about. You know, Mach four, Mach five travel, like it really takes the world and makes it regional. You know, across the land, it goes in 90 minutes at the same time from like Miami to New York today. Um, so you're, you're really taking these economies and you're bringing them closer together at any time in history that you've done that. Uh, by whatever technological means, be it, you know, steam power and shipping or railroads or the high, the interstate system in the U.S. Um, it's always driven economic growth. So.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Trans-Siberian Railway, I mean, just the advent of containerization as a way to move goods more quickly with the easier transfer. I mean, faster equals better and cheaper for everybody. And that's why, like, even though we're going to talk probably mostly in a defense context today, I wanted to put that seed in people's heads because I think that what you're building, and I know it's hard. You're not done yet, but once you get it up there and you're ready for the second version, I'm, I'm optimistic that you'll find some cool, uh, use cases there. Now, uh, you hinted at rockets are good for going fast, but you guys aren't actually doing that. Instead, you've built a Chimera, which is a great name for this because it's kind of a two in one system. On one hand, you have the turbo jet, which I think people probably understand. And then here's the, here's the thing that blows my mind. It converts into a ram jet, uh, mid-flight and allows you to go even faster.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  I'm going to pull up a picture of this that you guys put out, but explain to me, one, how hard this was to do. And then two, what it, what it unlocks for your program that off the shelf engines wouldn't have been able to bring to the company.

• 51:00Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in terms of the challenges associated with a turbine based combined cycle engine, the fancy term, uh, that they, that they use out in, out in the air force for these things. Um, number one, you have to get a, an off the shelf existing gas turbine engine up to about Mach three. So you have to get it to go maybe 30 to 50% faster than it was originally designed to go. Um, and we've done that through developing a pre-cooler, which cooled down the air, uh, that's coming in so that the thing doesn't melt. Um, and you get, do a pretty good performance of it, those, those high speeds out of the gas turbine. And then the other piece you gotta, yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  Can I ask a question about that? So, uh, you're cooling down the air intake because at those speeds, the air gets kind of compressed and therefore heats up. So you have to effectively air condition the air before you let it on fire.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Yes, a little bit counterintuitive. So at Mach 3, if you take air that's flying at Mach 3 and you slow it down to a stop, which happens at the front face of a gas turbine engine, that air will heat up to about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which will melt aluminum and lots of other things. So like, yeah, it doesn't work super well when your engine's just fragging out along the way up there. Not to mention the performance that you get, because the way turbojets create thrust is they raise the temperature of this high-pressure flow and then exhaust it through a nozzle. The temperature coming in is already pretty hot. You're not getting as much bang for your buck in terms of generating thrust. So, yeah, those are two big pieces of that. And then...

• 52:26Speaker 02

  And then, once you're over Mach 3, then the real magic can begin.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right. So, actually, I actually think it's much more simple. So like, a ramjet is literally the simplest aeropulsion device you can think of. It is the first thing in the textbook. Literally, you open the air-breathing propulsion textbook, it's ramjets before anything else. Because they're literally a tube with fuel injectors and a nozzle. That's it.

• 52:51Speaker 02

  It's a potato cannon that goes very frequently.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're using, instead of mechanical compressor blades to compress the air, you're using shockwaves, which naturally occur when you're flying faster than the speed of sound. Those do the compression for you. And because you have no mechanical compressor, you don't need a turbine, a mechanical turbine, to generate the power to drive that compressor. So you remove those two components from the system, and there you go.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  Kind of. You don't actually remove them from the system. You just route the air around the original turbine, which to me sounds difficult, because you're talking about a lot of volume and a lot of inertia moving very quickly. So, one, has anyone done this sort of hybrid turbojet/ramjet before? Not just in a lab, but I mean actually out in the sky. And how long did it take to figure out how to swap between modes?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Yep. So it's never been done in the sky. It's been done in the lab. Lockheed and Aerojet-Rocketry had a program that did it. It took them like six years and, I don't know, like $250 million to do it. But the closest thing that has existed and actually flown would be the J-58 engine. Which powered the SR71. They bypassed some of the turbine, but not all of it.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Well, we all know the SR71 famously worked, so I'm glad you're barking up the right tree. Now Chimera, as far as I understand it, has reached the point in which you have these in the air, yes?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  No, we haven't flown them yet. So we've tested them on the ground at two scales. The airplane that you see behind me is the first one where we will fly the pre-cooler. So we'll do that later this year.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 54:22Speaker 03

  And then pretty soon we'll be flying the Ramjet piece two.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  All right. So then let's, because this is a little technical and I've already gotten a point of it wrong. Let's go back to the beginning and talk about your quarter horse program, which is, I think a fair way to say it is the iterative process by which you're adding complexity to your kind of smaller sized jets to work your way up to dark horse down the road.

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Quarter horse is the program by which we're de-risking the technology for long duration, high speed flight. So we do that in an iterative way, building roughly one new airplane per year that de-risks the next step. You know, famous adage from Kelly Johnson, you know, famous founder of Skunk Works and greatest aircraft designer ever to live. One miracle per program. And, but like that's kind of.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  One miracle per year though, AJ. I mean, that seems like a little bit more.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, you know, Kelly Johnson put 41 aircraft into production in his 40 year career. So like, we're not, we're not like, we still have a ways to go to, to meet what, you know, the ideal that they set back then. But, um, yeah, you know, they'd like, the way we set up the program was like, step one, teach rocket people how to build airplanes. That was the first piece. Cause like, there was nowhere we could hire from, like where in the world could we hire people who had built a brand new airplane a year? In their career today, like nowhere, they're all dead. Like we used to do this back in the 50s and 60s, but they're all, they're all dead. So we had to rebuild it.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  The inverse of Boeing today, essentially.

• 55:42Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. Now in the rocket world, they do this all the time. You know, this is exactly how SpaceX was, was built. Rockets, spacecraft, satellites, you know, even, you know, over, over Tesla with cars.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  But we, we have to build that workforce and that, that discipline from scratch. So the first airplane that we built wasn't even an airplane. It was a jet powered go-kart. It's the size of our first airplane, but the goal was really just drive around an air force runway at 50 miles an hour. And do it in a very short period of time. So that was the quarter horse mark zero. And then next step was, okay, now go fly. So that was quarter horse mark one, which flew in May of last year. Fly is a, we like, I think skirted the definition of flight as best as we could. It was about a 30 second flight, 50 feet off the grounds, but it achieved the outcome of fly the airplane. And get all the approvals and everything required.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so that was the earliest stages. Now I know that the quarter horse program and it's two, two dot one addition is actually breaking the sound barrier. So what's the latest flight you've done? And then what's the next flight you have coming up?

• 56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the last flight we did with quarter horse 2.1 was its first supersonic flight. So that was achieved 364 days after mark one flew, so less than a year. So kind of exactly hitting that, do you risk one new thing on an annual basis? The next things that we'll want to do is we want to push the speed up higher. We hit about mark 1.21, so want to get that up a little bit higher, maybe 15, a little bit north of that. And then we, we've already integrated, we call a weapons rack. So these are the, the racks that you start integrating stores and missiles and things on. So that's been integrated. Want to start flying with those in the relatively near term and start dropping things in the airplane.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  A question, so everything that I know about ordinance for, for jets is so much slower than the speeds we're talking about here. So can you rack mount, let's just pick a missile beyond though, sidewinders on the wings? Or do they go in a bay because we're going so fast that you can't afford the drag on the actual wings?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so one of the nice things about having an F-100 engine in there is that we have an immense amount of thrust.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  Okay, good.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  So that allows us to carry a lot of things externally, still at these high speeds. So the aircraft will be capable of releasing stores like an AMRAM. So AMRAM is a bit bigger than a, than a sidewinder. But you know, the longest range air to air weapon that we have from high speed and high altitude. And what do you get when you release these weapons from those conditions? They tend to go a lot further. And that's a pretty big value proposition of, of these types of aircraft. The ability to extend the range of existing and new weapons, because like the name of the game, whether it's like the Ukrainian conflict or around the Pacific is range. Like if it's just like boxing, like if you've got a longer arm, you're probably gonna win.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Same thing goes with basketball and defense. So let's talk about range because I'm really curious about what you think you're going to get. So let's go to the future. We've handled all the yearly miracles. We have Dark Horse, the Air Force, or the Navy, or whomever is gonna put it into use. How far can it go on one tank of whatever magic juice it's gonna run on?

• 58:59Speaker 03

  So the the Mark II will have a range. It's actually pretty similar to existing fighter jets, maybe a little bit more, but nothing wild. The the big thing is the range that you get out of the weapons that it can launch. So, you know, existing weapons, double-ish the range, maybe more. And then we've got some other things up our sleeve that go beyond that that I can't really talk about just yet. So we'll have to talk about that next time we come on.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  If if this thing is a platform to bring munitions, especially missiles, closer to potential targets, does that mean that it's really just a reusable first stage?

• 59:31Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  This is, I'm actually

• 59:33Speaker 03

  I told you we were building rockets.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  I'm not sure if you're building, well, you're not, but you are, but you aren't, but you definitely are, but definitely you might be. This is weird. I thought I had your company kind of figured out before the show, but now I'm actually more confused than I was before. Okay, well, anyways, I'll learn more as you guys keep building. Now, Quarter Horse 2.3, I think you're gonna bump up the speed to like Mach 3?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yep. So that one will not only have the precooler in it, it'll also be, it'll also have a high temperature airframe. So these airplanes, this one behind me and the first one that we flew, they're all aluminum. So the next ones will be high temperature metallic that can take the temperatures up at up in those conditions. And, you know, also have all the fuel that's needed to get up there. So, yeah, big thing there is get up into the Mach 3 range where you can start a ramjet engine.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  And then, I'm gonna stick with your numerical nomenclature here, does Quarter Horse 2.4 bring Chimera up to the clouds?

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  So actually, Mark III will be Chimera. So the the Mark II series is just the F-100 plus the precooler from a propulsion perspective. And then we move on to the next kind of family, still similar scale, but now we bring in the full Chimera engine with the ramjet and the precooler and the gas turbine together. But the airframe itself is actually pretty much the same as 2.3. So that step is actually quite small from, you know, the aircraft that will fly next year without the ramjet to the one that will fly with Chimera maybe a year or so later. It's not that big of a difference.

• 1:00:55Speaker 02

  And then after that, once we get the new airframe that can take higher temperatures, once we get the the ramjet in place, they can go even faster. What's left to sort out before you can start to build? Let's just call it 1.0, the final production version.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for the kind of dark horse style concept like, you know, high speed airplane, the the next big thing and kind of the last big thing is long duration, high speed flight. And that's the single most challenging bit of the the whole thing. Can you fly for a long time at, you know, Mach three to five, handle the thermal environment in a closed loop?

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  And then reuse it like quickly and, you know, for for many, many cycles. That's the the last chunk.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  So when I think about thermal issues, I I think mostly about kind of like orbital reentry. How good of an analogy is that to the heat that we're talking about when we're going Mach three to Mach five for one of your aircrafts?

• 1:01:46Speaker 03

  It's a great question. So I would say it is an equally challenging problem, but the nature of the problem is flipped. So for orbital reentry, you spend a very short period of time, like you're only in these high temperature conditions for maybe a few minutes, because you're screaming down through the atmosphere. Which means like the total heat load, the total amount of heat that comes into the system is not that bad, but the peak heating, the peak temperature that you have to take is ridiculous. Now.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  But if you're going to fly, you're going to keep building up heat constantly at that level. So you have to have simply an amazing way to dump heat out of the aircraft.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Picking it up.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  Which where are you guys going? Dump or just don't pick it up?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  There are lots of ways to do it and like it'll be a combination of the two. So, yeah, you gotta you gotta manage it. Once it's on, but once, once it's in the system and you want to keep it out of the system as as best you can too. So.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Could the precooler precool the plane?

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  Uh, that would be.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Maybe. I don't know, you have the little cooler in there already, like, can't you just plug that into the, you know?

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  It would be, I think it would be like pretty inefficient to do that for long periods of of time, and it just takes a ton of energy to do that. So, um, like, yeah, good. I don't know that it would make the the right system level trade though.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  All right, I want to talk about a couple of other things. First of all, you guys recently raised a $350 million C R E C led by Coast Look. Congrats, by the way.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Quite a lot of capital. Glad to see that venture funds can kind of put up that kind of funding. I'm curious about if you look a couple of years down the road, if venture capital is going to have enough muscle to provide what you guys need. My guess is that this is going to be an expensive project to get over the finish line, which is kind of a compliment, because I think it's worth it. But are you guys going to look at other capital sources as you grow? Or will venture capital kind of take you all the way to church?

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the way we're building this company, you can build it privately with sufficient access to capital, so long as that stays good to do what we need to do. And I think a perfect example of that is like compare SpaceX and Anduril. You know, Anduril has raised, I think, like $11 billion of equity financing in the private markets. So like quite a bit. So like, there's plenty of capital out there for these types of businesses. But look at SpaceX. Prior to the IPO, they raised $10 billion. Everything that they did.

• 1:04:01Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  And like, how much of that was liquidity, not actually working capital? Like, it's insane, the level of capital efficiency that that company has been able to create. And the way that they did is because they effectively got their customer to pay for their R and D by paying them to fly rockets all the time. Like, how do you get the data to learn how to land a rocket? We fly rockets a lot. And you get your customers to pay for it. It's the greatest hack in the book. So for us, like, we get paid to fly our airplanes by our customers all the time, which gives us the data that we need to move on to the next step and the next step, the next step. And that'll be the same for production down the road. But like, capital efficiency is the name of the game when you're doing something this hard. So I don't expect the numbers to be small. Like, there will be billions of dollars that we'll want to raise. But the revenue numbers that are coming alongside that will be equal, if not more.

• 1:04:45Speaker 03

  And I think that allows us to persist in the private markets much longer than, you know, you might otherwise be able to.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  I'm really glad to hear all of that. You also have some deals with the Defense, oh, the DIU.

• 1:04:58Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Defense Innovation Unit. Innovation Unit, thank you. Sorry, my brain just. Okay, so the DIU recently bumped up its contract with y'all. Essentially, as far as I can tell, just to learn and de-res hypersonic flight. Does that provide a equity capital-like infusion to the company? Or should I think about that deal as something entirely distinct from this part of the conversation?

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you you look at that deal as we are monetizing the tech de-risking that we're doing. You know, with the equity capital that we're raising. So we're developing these products with private capital. And then all of the testing that we're doing to expand the envelope and push beyond what's been done before. That data is very valuable and we're delivering that data to, you know, to the Department of War. Under this contract, which is exactly the type of contract that SpaceX set up with NASA in the like the original commercial orbital transportation services contract. And like, you know, I've literally like been walking around the Pentagon like a Jehovah's Witness with like the the report from that that says this is how you do this. I've been doing this for, you know, almost eight years now. And now, like, you know, DIU and the Air Force specifically are starting to understand this.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  They're starting to see the technical progress that's being made and they like the tiny, relatively tiny amount of capital that they're having to put forward to do it. And they're they're seeing what happens and like we, you know, SpaceX wouldn't exist without that. Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Think about what, okay, look, I don't want to cast, you know, stones or throw aspersions, but let's make fun of Raytheon. Why not?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Well, they're they're investors, so I won't make fun of them too much.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  Name name a prime who hasn't invested in you.

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  Choose others.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  That one, that one, that unnamed prime. Imagine how Raytheon would have gotten this done in three days for $5. We all know it, but any other prime would have taken so much longer, so much more capital. I wonder if we just have a structural advantage for startups like you guys because you're not, I don't know exactly what their ills are other than, you know, inertia, organizational drift, lack of efficiency, poor incentives, et cetera. But like, it's just so refreshing to hear that we're going what it feels like three times faster than we used to or five times faster. Four less money AJ, that is.

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, there, there is a reason there has not been a new fighter jet manufacturer or like large military aircraft manufacturer founded in this country since the 1950s. General Dynamics was the last one. And like Peter Thiel talked to Elon about this, you know, when he was thinking about investing in SpaceX and, you know, he was asking like, hey, like you, you got this Tesla thing over here. Nobody started a successful US car company since when? It was like, well, Jeep in 1941. And people, everybody saw that as like, oh, this is the reason not to do it. And yet the inverse is actually paradoxically the correct thing. This is the opportunity. If you are willing to take the risk to try. And that's what we've done here over the past, you know, seven and a half years and proved it out.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  And now I think we've got pretty good moat for ourselves that we hope to continue building. But like, there's no other help coming when it comes to aircraft production in this country. Like, the F-22 and F-35, they each took 20 to 25 years to develop and like 30 and 60 billion dollars just for development. So.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  A bajillion dollars apiece and they can't make more than two per year. And look, the F-22 Raptor is gorgeous. We can all agree. It's a beautiful plane that took too long to build and cost too much money. That's why I'm excited about you guys. So AJ, I guess we'll have to have you back on every three to six months as you have new announcements. But I'm incredibly hyped and you're building this here in the United States. And I think your last couple of paragraphs are pretty much the distilled pitch for American dynamism. So thank you for coming on and spreading the good word. Go fly, go faster. And then as soon as you're born with a seat, I volunteer as tribute.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  Perfect. We'll, we'll put a saddle on for you. How's that?

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  I'll hang on to the fricking wing, dude. Let's go. I like, I like things that go fast in the sky. So I, I'm a natural fan. All right. This has been Twist. He's AJ. The company is Hermias. Check it out. See y'all next time.