Monumental Makes Construction Bots Play Nice Together | E2217

This Week In Startups is made possible by: LinkedIn Ads - http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Vanta - https://www.vanta.com/twist Pilot - https://pilot.com/twist Today's show: Did you know there's actually a shortage of US bricklayers? It's TRUE! So feel free to marvel at Monumental's brick-laying robots. They're not putting anyone out of work, but filling a much-needed gap. Join Alex and Monumental founder/CEO Salar al Khafaji for a deep-dive on how the startup is making construction robots play nice together by maintaining separate "zones" of operation, why Salar thinks startups need to focus on truly complex, real-world problems to truly blossom, and the secrets of fundraising in Europe. PLUS Alex chats with Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan about designing the next generation of autonomous marine crafts. (That is to say, ocean drones.) From their home base in San Diego, the company is trying to get completely independent of all Chinese parts. Find out how it's going, how they're overcoming the "wildly negative" ROI on maritime tech, and why we have so few defenses against tiny, agile drones. All that AND Jason takes some of YOUR Founder Questions. Timestamps: (03:23) How Monumental determined what kinds of robots construction sites need the most (06:49) How maintaining "zones" ensure that the robots all play nice with one another (07:52) There's a shortage of bricklayers, so Monumental's NOT taking anyone's job (9:16) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. (13:21) Why startups need to tackle large-scale, complex, real-world problems to really grow (15:44) Why Monumental is building in The Netherlands, and running pilots in the UK (19:07) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (20:44) Why construction is unique among applications for automation and robots (26:01) Salar argues that fundraising in Europe is not as hard as you may have heard (27:55) We don't just need housing, we need BEAUTIFUL housing (31:11) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. (33:25) How the Scout autonomous boat challenge inspired Seasats (35:28) Trying to make drones into an "iPhone Style" project (37:39) Why Seasats is focused on endurance and staying power more than launches (39:15) The complexities of working with fuel cells (42:27) The importance of beautiful design even when working on government technology (45:51) Why they're building Seasats in beautiful San Diego, CA (47:29) The challenge of getting entirely free from Chinese components (53:52) "The Power of Small Things Has Changed" (55:18) The "wildly negative" ROI on most humanoid robotics companies also applies to maritime tech (59:09) Why there are so few defense nets against people with tiny but agile drones (01:02:32) FOUNDER Q's: Is a founder working 24/7 a red flag? (01:10:11) How bad is it to use VC money to pay off credit cards? (01:12:49) A look at Cursor's unique recruitment strategy. (01:19:57) Should young VCs go to startup conferences? Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500: https://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/ * Thank you to our partners: (9:16) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit. (19:07) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist (31:11) Pilot - Visit https://www.pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We built three types of robots that work together. They actually share one platform. The main one obviously is doing the bricklaying. But we also immediately decided to build one that supplies the bricks and then one that supplies the mortar. A big part of automated construction is actually about automating like the supply chain on construction side.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Is it kind of like end to end automated? Or do humans still need to do any loading or unloading in the workflow process?

• 0:24Speaker 00

  Right now, we decided to have like our core focus is as we call it like the wall autonomy. Like as you're building a facade, basically. And so the loading and loading currently is still done by an operator.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  So basically, even though there's still a little bit of humans required to make this work, the process is basically entirely machine driven and the human inputs are going down. And even currently today, they're minimal. So you guys are almost there, it sounds like. Do they already play nice with one another? Or do you have to kind of keep them in separate zones so they don't, you know, butt arms?

• 0:52Speaker 00

  They can play together. They're nicely. Yes.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  This week in startups is brought to you by Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC two report fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist. And LinkedIn ads. Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 free when you spend at least 250.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Go to linkedin.com/thisweekinstarups to claim your credit.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Hey everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. This is Alex and we have an absolutely packed show for you today on this fine Tuesday. First up, we're going to talk to a couple of Twist 500 companies. And then after that, Jason is going to answer a number of venture capital questions. So stay tuned if that is your jam. Up first, a company called Monumental. Not only do they have a cool software story, not only are they a cool company based out of Europe, they're also building autonomous. Construction robots, which means lower housing costs, which means more family formation, which means maybe we'll get that birth rate fixed all around the world. Then we're going to talk to CSAT, a company that got its start right here in my native Rhode Island, but is now based elsewhere in the US, building all sorts of autonomous drones for the sea.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Both commercial and defense context come into play here. If you want to know about the state of the art in drone boats, this is for you. Great founders today, a great chat with Jason, you're gonna love it. Let's go. Today, we are going to take a field trip out to the real world. We're not going to talk about something that's buried in the back of a data center. We're not talking about a chatbot interface. No, we're talking to a company called Monumental and they are building robots that use AI to make house building autonomous. It's going to lower the price of construction. Everyone's going to have an awesome home and we're finally going to be able to have kids all around the world. It's going to be fantastic. So please join me in welcoming the show, Solar from Monumental. Solar, hey.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Oh, my absolute pleasure, man. First of all, I want to give you five public points for dialing in at 10:00 PM from Amsterdam due to this recording. So thank you for staying up late. I really appreciate it. And I want to start with, just tell me about the actual robots that you guys have built. Cause there's a couple of them and I think it's a good place to start the conversation.

• 3:24Speaker 00

  We built three types of robots that work together. They actually share one platform. So we basically started building an autonomous ground vehicle, basically just like, you know, any, just like any delivery robot you'd see on the streets these days, but made for construction sites, right? It's rugged, has like the right wheels, it has compute, it has networking, it has all the things you need. And then on top of that, we built three like variations of it. The main one obviously is doing the bricklaying. But we also immediately decided to build one that supplies the bricks and then one that supplies the mortar. Because a big part of automated construction is actually about automating like the supply chain on construction sites. If you have ever been on a construction site, you'll notice a lot of people are spending time with wheelbarrows or whatever, moving stuff around. And so we realized that if you don't actually include that in your like product offering,

• 4:09Speaker 00

  you haven't done, achieved anything.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  Do the robots take bricks off the pile, put them on the carrying robot themselves, bring them over to the robot with the arm and then put them on? So i- is it kind of like in to? End automated or do humans still need to do any loading or unloading in the workflow process?

• 4:26Speaker 00

  So the vision is to obviously do end to end automation. Right now, we decided to have like our core focus is as we call it like the wall autonomy, like as you're building upside basically. And so the loading and loading currently is still done by an operator.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Okay, but is that the only human you currently have in the loop for building these walls?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Just to give you a sense of like progress, like we have these operators and initially they have like multiple tasks. So you they have to like load and load that point the walls pointing is like when you clean, you know, make the mortar look nice. Basically, in the markets where we operate, you have to put in like wall ties. All of these things were automated tasks and then a couple of other things like actual like literal corner and edge cases that we have to deal with, right? Like in the non-computer science sense of the word.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, literally cases involving the edge of bricks, not the edge of probability.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, the actual corner cases, the actual edges. And so what's cool is that over the last like year, we've actually like slowly been kind of like automating all of these away, right? And so like pointing has been automated by us, these wall ties, which is really a really hard problem, by the way, has been automated by us. All these current edge cases slow like one by one, we're automating. And so like that is like, this is one of the few remaining tasks. And to give you a sense, like we actually like these supply wagons are made so that they can basically, they contain like one to two hours of like material. And so like on a normal, like average day, like on a normal shift, you'd probably need to like reload them like maybe three or four times only.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  So basically, even though there's still a little bit of humans required to make this work, the process is basically entirely machine driven. And the human inputs are going down and even currently today, they're minimal. So you guys are almost there, it sounds like.

• 5:59Speaker 00

  We feel like we're almost there, like interestingly, like we track, we obviously we track like our core internal metrics in this company are around like, you know, uptime throughput. Like, you know, just like, how good is this robot working, human interventions, like all the things that any autonomy company would see. And like, I think the last six months have been like the period where we've really seen this like start to work and like kind of feel the magic on us.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  So so talk to me about throughput here because I've done a little bit of Brick Lane myself. I'm poor at it and slow, but I'm familiar with how hard it is to get right, especially if you want to move quickly. So how fast can your robots put down bricks to your level of quality?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Our benchmark actually is to be like similar or close to like a human mason.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  One of the reasons for that, we've built the robots to actually be kind of like as agile and flexible as mason. So we can deploy many of them. If you need like whatever, like some crazy number of like bricklaying on a day, we can just deploy like five or 10 of them.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Do they already play nice with one another or do you have to kind of keep them separate zones? So they don't, you know, butt arms.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  You do need to keep them in separate zones because of the way you actually do construction. Like even human masons can't, like it's really hard to work together on the, obviously just like the way you do bricklaying or requires you to. But obviously they can play together there nicely. Yes.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Okay, that's fantastic. And then just thinking about comparison to human speed. Are the robots today faster, slower? I'm just not sure if that's something you're actually tuning for, but.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  So I think like an average human mason would probably like, would tell you something like, you know, if you ask the mason, they would say like, oh, I do like six, 700 bricks a day. And then if you ask their boss, they're probably gonna tell you like, oh, we calculate like four to 500. We actually just like a week ago, we, you know, we hit a record with like over 850 breaks in a single shift, basically. So doing basically double that, but we actually target an average of like four or 500 as well. And obviously this is one of the metrics where we are aiming to push like, you know, way beyond that in the coming year.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I think it's interesting to talk about your company because we often discuss anything that uses artificial intelligence. And we'll get to Atrium in a second as a potential like risk to, to human jobs. But given just labor shortages in the construction industry around the world, this feels like a completely non moral question. This is just, we need more houses. Let's go build them. I, it probably helps you sleep well at night that you're not gonna wipe out an entire section of the economy.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Funny enough, and it shows that like you did your research. I think the joke entirely at our company is most like the most worried group about this, for some reason, are journalists who like just think about like, oh, are you taking people's jobs? We've never had anyone in the industry, like actual construction people worry about this because they're trying to hire these people and they're like, we can't find them. So they know how bad the problem is, obviously.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Let's be honest, laying bricks is not. I mean, it's difficult and physical work. And if you had to do it every day for eight to 10 hours in the sun, I mean, it's not, it's not a job that people like super aspire to, you know? I think this is a fine place to automate.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  It is a tough job. And actually, like, one of the things that I think a lot of people don't understand is why is the labor shortage so severe? It's like many reasons, right? But if you look at Western Europe, for example, there are all these demographic trends, right? Like that are kind of like creating labor shortages in many categories. One of the reasons is the worst in construction is actually because people are retiring at like age 50 or 55, like a full decade ahead of other jobs. Because it's still physically debatting, right? And so like, it's actually like kind of a double whammy.

• 9:17Jason Calacanis?

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• 10:39Speaker 01

  Well, in Europe, you're describing the population pyramid, which is tilted towards older folks and you're not going to get pensioners to stand up one day and go lay bricks. So I think this makes a lot of sense. A clarification, though, there are companies out there that want to do essentially layered concrete pores in like an outline and then build up that way. That's different than taking the brick-based approach that you guys are pursuing. So can you just explain to me the why bricks and mortar are the right building technique for your robots to approach?

• 11:09Speaker 00

  Let me talk, you know, take one step back about how we thought about building this company.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  So I think there's like two really key insights that we had that kind of like interlocked. So the first one is our kind of like go-to-market model, which is we are actually working as if we're a subcontractor, right? Like, we actually are not selling or leasing the robots. And related to that, we decided that to basically succeed in a pretty conservative industry, and I actually think it's conservative, like people use it in tech, use that as a bad word, but I think like there's something good about being conservative here. To succeed there, you need to actually like plug and play into like the supply chain that people have kind of already like opted into. So think about it this way, think about it as if you're doing an enterprise sale and imagine if I would come to you, you're like you're buying your, you know, a house and you're like an average kind of like, you know, it's going to be the biggest purchase of your life, right?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  Are you going to bet on a new material that has like not been used or like has not been used for more than a couple of years that might have not had like, you know, or just had like some whatever, like fire safety or like sound insulation certification or like how comfortable would you buy that home for the next 50 years? If you're a real estate developer, how comfortable are you going to be to like bet on a whatever hundred house development using new materials? My point is now that I'm skeptical of these materials, by the way, but think about, you know, the kind of person who's making these decisions. Think about the entire value chain, all the everyone, like every stakeholder, the architect, the developer, maybe like regulators.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  Everyone, when you're using new materials, it's going to be like, I'm not sure. And so you get so many headwinds, right? As you're trying to do something new. And so we decided to pick, to basically not change anything in this equation. And then within that framework, you know, bricks and mortar suddenly make a lot Sense for many reasons, right?

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Tried and true. I mean, we've been using Drift and mortar as a species for ever.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Millennia, yeah, literally millennia. Yes.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  Okay, so that makes a lot of sense to me, but you actually brought up something else that I really wanted to touch on, which is just the the business model here. When I talk to companies that are building robots, most of the time, they are looking to sell them. Or maybe in early production, they might do some kind of lease or partnerships. But you guys seem to want to take on the actual jobs yourself. So I um, talk to me about the economics of that. It seems from where I sit, Solar probably wrong, but expensive and difficult.

• 13:20Speaker 00

  So it's actually the other way around. So I have a fear like, you know, you're taking on operational complexity. Let me start with that, right? Like, there's definitely downside to doing this. And I think interestingly, that's actually true for a lot of companies I I respect that are very successful, right? You know, you could argue the same thing about like, why is Uber now just licensing their taxi companies? Why are they doing with regulators and like, you know, actually like having all this pool? Why is Amazon running their fulfillment centers and doing like last mile delivery? I think it is actually like, it is very, very difficult. I'm not, you know, we don't think it's going to be easy. But I actually think this is the game you need to play if you want to build like a really, really large company. So but why does it work? I actually think in construction, this might be for other things.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  It is easier to get, you know, a 50 or 500 K contract. If it's basically project cost, right? Like if they're going to basically funnel 500 K to subcontractor. And you're basically doing the same job as that subcontractor. A contract like like a general contractor will be very comfortable following that money to you, that amount of money. If they feel like you're going to do the job, like just, you know, if you can deliver it.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  But if you try to sell them a robot, then it's probably 18 times as hard.

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Exactly. If you're like, hey, outside of, you know, from your own like, kind of like profit, profit and loss. Can you, do you want to pay like 5K for this SaaS product? Or do you want to pay 5K to license this robot? It's going to be really, really hard sell, interestingly, right? For for kind of obvious reasons, as I'm saying this, I think you kind of get it. But like, and I think that, so is it expensive? I'm not sure. You actually get access to like much bigger revenue streams. Again, you take on operational complexity. And then if your fundamental product works, so if you get the autonomy metrics right, you actually. You know, we believe we actually will see like software like margins on these massive revenue numbers. I think that's where it's going to get really, really exciting. Like, we're already seeing kind of like fifty to sixty percent gross margin on what we're doing. And we have like visibility towards like eighty to ninety percent gross margin.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  And so, again, like that is what autonomy is supposed to do, right?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  You can compare this to like Waymo cars as well, right? Like, you know, they could license this to other companies, but like, why do they do it? If it works, it's gonna be like a really good business.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Well, in the case of Waymo, I feel like, and also Uber, I feel like they were taking on the regulatory complexity. Essentially, it does a way to make it a viable option. In your case, though, I feel like you make a super solid point. I mean, why not take on the contracts, make the money? And as long as you can handle the operational complexity, which sounds like you guys can. But this is a good segue to just geography. I know you guys are working in Holland, and I believe you have some pilots in the UK. Is that correct?

• 15:50Speaker 00

  Yep, that's right.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Where are you gonna go next? And why were those the right two places to start with the company?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  I'm lucky enough to have some connections to the Netherlands. And I think one of the unique things about the Netherlands, it's actually like a very dense country, right? Like, it's like, it's a really, really high population density. And there's a lot of construction there. So you get a lot of construction density in a single market. And that point's underrated. Like, the entire country basically has like one building code. It's like a single, it's like completely like homogeneous, which is not even true for, say, Germany, like neighboring Germany. It's like, I don't know, it's like, it's like basically like different markets. Every region has like different construction style. And so, like, you can't actually like approach it. Even the US, right? Like, you know, the typical advice is like, go launch in the US. The US is the best market. I love the US. But the US in construction is obviously not a single market. Rather like California, it's not gonna be the same rules as like Texas or like Florida. And so.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  LA is not the same rules as San Francisco, which is not the same as Palo Alto or Modesto or San Jose.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah, exactly, exactly. The other disadvantage you get set, like, you could pick a state that's actually like a massive market, still bigger than the Netherlands. Like, say, Texas, like, with, you know, with a really good business environment for this, for what we're doing. But the density honestly sucks, right? Like is actually like still not, you know? So if you think about just like where you're sitting with your headquarters, you're doing your first pilots. You're literally driving like six hours to get to like, you know, your pilot's side. We drive like thirty minutes to where we need to go. And I think that makes it a really good market to launch. Obviously, we will still go to the US, but I think in terms of just like sequencing and staging your company, we feel pretty good about the sequencing we picked.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  I didn't think you were going to come to the US. I was just curious why the UK over a continental country, just given where Holland is.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  So the UK actually has the most from all. So the honest answer is just like traction. We've just like had insane inbound. We don't do any sales. We don't do marketing. We literally have contractors emailing. This is like, hey, when can you come to like, when can you help us? We get contractors who send us drawings of projects like here's a school. Here's like, hey, you just do this for free. And so, and we've had that the most from the UK. The UK, if you look at the statistics, actually has like the most severe bricklaying shortage.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Passing costs, but actually, actually like specifically bricklayers. I think the stats are something like twenty five to thirty thousand missing jobs, basically. Like that alone is a massive market. Think about like the labor value of those missing jobs. And I think it's been accelerated by a couple of things, right? Same things as like continental Europe demographics, et cetera, but also Brexit. Removed kind of a lot of Eastern European immigration, like all these factors coming together. Has made it actually like a really, really attractive market for us. Bricklaying is huge in the UK, obviously.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, you just look at any picture of row houses in the UK and what do you see?

• 18:19Speaker 00

  It's all bricks.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Bricks. Yeah, exactly.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  It's like a five billion market to give you a sense of like skill.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  How many robots do you guys currently have? And how many will you have maybe in a year's time? Because I feel like just in those two markets, you could have probably hundreds at work full time and still not be meeting all the demand.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Early this year, we were like sub ten robots. We're still kind of like in the early phases. We're now at like twenty five to thirty, like we're literally bringing online like the next kind of like batch of five as we speak. We target by the end of the year to go forty, but like we're actually starting to invest, which takes some time. Towards kind of like the next big leap where we're going to go into like hundreds, like triple digit kind of like fleet, but towards like end of next year. Because supply is actually our biggest bottleneck, right? Like we have like so much demand, but like actually. To building the supply is the delivery muscle and like building these robots is the key thing we need to figure out.

• 19:07Jason Calacanis?

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• 20:13Speaker 01

  I would love to spend the rest of our time talking about your supply chains to build these robots, but I think we really have to talk about Atrium, which is kind of your end-to-end software stack. So as far as I understand it, Solar, this is the platform that you guys use for everything from the actual articulation of the arms and effect? Effectuators, what are they called?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  End effectors.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  End effectors, thank you. And then that information is fed into sensors and then that is also that the interfaces with the desktop software. I have a gif I'm gonna play. While I play this, explain to me Atrium and how it works.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  You actually explain really well. Atrium does like a couple of different things. The thing you need to understand about construction, which makes it different from everything else, like all the other robotic applications is you do pick, which is, you know, similar to warehouses, but the place is really hard. You need to know where to be in physical space, in an unstructured space, and every object goes to a new location, right? Like to where like an Arctic drawset, you need to have a full semantic understanding of what you're building. Like, does the next brick go next to the current one, the one you just placed? Or is there like a window frame that actually like just asking where does the next brick go? Requires you to understand the entire building, basically. And so all of that has been modeled into Atrium, all of the robot kinematics, all the, you know, autonomy code that drives the robots around. Like all these factors are built in there.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  But then it's actually also like basically, you know, our, our data loop. So you build a wall, you lay a brick, you want to know if it's good. So there's like a vision system that actually looks at the bricks, sees if the quality is good, if the mortar is good, if it literally measures like all the kind of like every pose of the brick. And that feeds back both into like the direct quality of the current, you know, project you're doing, but obviously also into like our machine learning system to improve it for the future, building an actual data mode, right? Like, I don't have like stats on this, but like, I actually think we're likely to be one of the companies or the company with the most data now on construction size, just by the sheer amount of we've, we've spent there in the last year and a half.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  I mean, that's probably valuable in and of itself, right? I mean, people are talking a lot about doing hyper realistic 3D modeling of job sites. There's companies that just have drones that do that. There's, there's actually a robot company that just is like marking out of like plans on floors. It's, it's, there's a ripe market for construction data. I- is that a ancillary business for you guys down the road?

• 22:19Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I think it is something that's going to be like really valuable for us. And I think it's going to be like a flywheel also to like develop future products and improve our current product and basically like get to a point where it's going to be really hard for other people to catch up. But I, I don't know if there's like an actual market for it. Who knows? We'll see.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  We will see, especially as you guys get forty to a hundred robots in the market. I mean, the pace at which you'll be getting more data is going to be absolutely insane, which I presume is going to help the whole stack. So which was harder to make? The actual physical robots that do the bricklaying? Or was it harder to make the software that works from the, uh, the robot all the way up to the human level?

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So I'll tell you this, interestingly, I think the hardest thing is the intersection of those two things. So I think that the, the joke that we run in the office is that you know, if someone is serious about robotics, like whether it's like, you know, you're hiring someone or if they become completely obsessed with the boring, it kind of seemingly boring question of calibration, which is where these two things come together. So you build hardware, you could kind of get something working very quickly. You can build software and sim, you kind of get something working pretty quickly. Then you try to run it, you're like off by like three millimeters here. There's like a small angle here, like why is that? And then you kind of like go into this rabbit hole where like, again, these two things intersect. And that, that is like, I think, I, I feel like we've kind of like collectively have as a company, like the most pain or like whatever, like in that section.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  And because it's kind of like cross-functional between these two. It's actually really hard hard to even know like who you're gonna put to work to fix that problem.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  So I read somewhere on your guys' site that you can do sub millimeter placement of bricks now. And so I presume that with that level of precision, you guys have been have been chewing on glass for a long time to get that right. How far were the tolerances to begin with? How fast did they come down to that sub millimeter level?

• 23:56Speaker 00

  What we've seen is it's not even about like that, you know, it's not like we went from three to one millimeters. To give you a sense of like how complicated this turned out to be. So I'll give you two examples. One is we do this thing called 3D reconstruction, right? To map the three structures, you know, similar to what you just described. Had you asked me a year ago, I just said, like, we already got it to like sub millimeter precision. It works like literally like we were just like, it works. We felt good about it. And then we started going from like small piles to bigger size and we were doing like hundred feet kind of like walls. And then as we were doing that, we actually started regressing and then we got like warping. Like we actually still had like precision, but then suddenly like in the middle, if there was be like a big window frame or some feature like featureless plane, we started to get kind of like weird inaccuracies or like literally like straight lines would not be straight anymore to like millimeter level.

• 24:41Speaker 00

  We have actually at some point built a wall that was not straight as as we were building is like, what is going on there? And then we discovered it was not the robot. It was actually our 3D model of the world. Solving those things is so hard, actually even just like finding. And I actually think this is one of those things that is underrated. If you'd have this problem, like who who else does this, like people who work on augmented reality? But when they have this problem, they can just ignore it. Like you don't care about like a two millimeter issue. But if you're building a wall, a straight wall that's supposed to be there for a hundred years, you will care. So you need to get it right. And then the other example is just like, you know, I feel like temperature affects everything, right? Like camera calibration, but like that's been also like a continuous issue from like tech stack.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Does that mean that the robots don't work as well in extreme heat and extreme cold?

• 25:23Speaker 00

  I don't think that's the right way to think about it. It just means you need to like collect more data. And so like you can, you know, maybe you calibrated them at one data point and now you have to calibrate it like 10 data points, like at different temperatures. Or you need to make sure you're like, when you're snapshotting a picture at different temperatures, you're not comparing them like for like, right? Like it's more about that kind of nuance, which is all just like more code, more logic, more complexity. We just need to deal with it.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  So you guys are based in. As far as I can tell, kind of the city center of Amsterdam, you're right there in the middle of one of Europe's most beautiful urban centers. I bring that up because some people say that there's less capital available to companies in the European market. And I'm just curious, as you guys work on building out your robotic fleet, it sounds expensive. Do you guys have access to enough funds? What's the climate like over there?

• 26:06Speaker 00

  The first thing I'd say is I don't think of our company as a capital intensive company. I think one of the things kind of like I have to explain to like investors, the VCs is there's a default, you know, model of like, oh, you know, hardware, it must be capital intensive. Meanwhile, you look at like all these software businesses that literally raised billions to get to like IPO. And then you look at SpaceX, who I think for, you know, raised only one billion to get to the point of like from capital markets to get to the point that they got, right? It's like the cost of our robots is not insanely expensive. Their payback time is really good. I would start with saying it is not that capital intensive. Interestingly, I think just like salaries, just like another other start, just like paying high quality people, just like is, you know, that's your, your.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:43Speaker 00

  Our biggest word is just like team size, right? Just like as any company, right? It's not like, you know, the building the robots. Honestly, I think, you know, ultimately capital is global. You can raise from American funds, you know, if you ask me, can you raise money in the Netherlands as a Dutch company? Probably, I don't think you can access a lot of money. I don't think you're going to get the best kind of, you know, investors and board members. I don't think you need to do that, right? Like there's plenty of like great funds in London, in the rest of Europe, but also in the US. And some of these funds actively operate in Europe with like European offices, some don't. I don't think it's that hard to raise money, honestly.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  No, I'm really glad to hear that because I feel like you guys are really on to something. And the reason why I brought up just housing and people having kids and stuff in the beginning is I think that as we become an increasingly urban, urbanized species, we need to find some way to rapidly increase our ability to build housing. And so I'm hoping, I'm hopeful that Monumental isn't just a cool name for the company, that it's the impact, the scale of impact you guys can have on getting more homes built. Because God, it seems like every single nation where I look. No one can do this at scale and it just it boggles the mind that one of the most basic things humans do build shelter somehow in the modern era in our current economic environment in which working in major cities is critical for career advancement. We can't do it.

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I completely agree, Alex. And you just mentioned, you know, we're in this beautiful city center. You mentioned to me before the call that you spent time in Amsterdam. The thing I would add to you is like, you know, we need more housing. Like, it's just like one of the most urgent, urgent things we need to get tried in almost every Western country. But I would also add like, we also need just like beautiful housing, right? One of the things that's shocking to me is how much we've regressed in aesthetics, right? Like, how we just stopped caring. It's kind of makes sense, right? Like, if you don't have food, you're not gonna look for, you know, you're not gonna be kind of like picky about the food you need, right? Like, if you're hungry, if you don't have housing, you're not gonna be picky about the aesthetics of your house. But in a, to me, that's actually like a sign of poverty in a way, right? And so we need to break free of that. And I think one of the things that excites me about what we're doing is, we actually will not only, you know, lower the cost of housing, we'll be able to like

• 28:41Speaker 00

  actually build aesthetically pleasing, diverse types of houses without raising cost, right? And that is exciting to me.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  You stole my last question, kind of, because I was thinking about the robots and the bricklaying. And one thing that very, very good bricklayers can do is do interesting patterns, different sized bricks. You can make a wall almost artistic if you're good. And it seems like, you know, based on the the GIFs images that I've seen, you guys are doing kind of standard wall creation today. But it doesn't seem like it'd be impossible to down the road, be able to do some kind of more aesthetically pleasing, more artistic bricklaying?

• 29:14Speaker 00

  So we've actually done it. We're actually doing like really exciting stuff. And I think, interestingly, this is again, the stuff where a lot of messes actually like will go much slower, making it more expensive, much harder for them. But we've actually built our robot. For example, if you want to do brick patterns, if you want to combine two or three colors of bricks with a very intricate pattern, you can go as far as like actual pixel art with bricks. You know, the robot's not gonna be slower. It's not gonna get more expensive. You can do things like in-depth and out-dense really easily. And so like, we can do everything that a really skilled craftsman can do. But like, we can do a lot of like amazing things at the same speed at the same cost. And that is exciting.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  And so we're gonna coin the term not brick pixel art, but Brixel art. It has to be the new phrase, right?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I'm not sure if that's gonna work, Alex.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's brilliant.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  Let's try it. Let's try it.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  I want to have you back on in a couple of quarters to check on how progress is going. But this is, this is tremendous. Before I let you go, though, where can people find you on the internet? And also, is there a job that you're looking to fill that you want to shout out to the This Week in Startups community?

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you can find us at monumental.co.co. I think we literally have like 15 open roles. Thing I would want to say is like a lot of software engineers, we're always looking for great software engineers, think that, you know, we'd be looking for like embedded people or robotics people. We are a full stack software company. You just showed Atrium. It's a React app using Rust. It's like a proper software app. We're not some like industrial robotic. So if you're like an amazing software engineer, if you want to contribute to this and actually like help build robots that build houses, you should just like apply now, basically.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  I'm gonna do you a little favor here and show part of the site because this made me laugh when I read it. There's a note on the Monumental website entitled "A quick note on our tech stack", and it just lists all the different languages you're using and where you're using them in the hierarchy of the application. I don't think I've ever seen that level of detail about how software was built on a startup's page. It was pretty cool. I like that, Salar. Thank you for doing that.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  All right. Well, thank you so much. Monumental.co, part of the TWIST 500, one of the awesomest companies in the world. Shout out Holland, Salar. We'll see you soon. Thank you.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Alex.

• 31:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 32:24Speaker 01

  On the show, we love to talk about drones, usually in the sky, sometimes underneath the water, but there is a class of startups out there building drones that sit right on top of the ocean. One of them is called CSATS, short for sea satellites. And I'm going to learn lots today about dual-use technologies, reindustrializing America, and also, when can I buy one? Please welcome to the show, it's Mike Flanagan, co-founder and CEO of CSATS.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  It's really good to be on here. Thanks for having me. And excited to talk about the world of maritime drones.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  I have sailing merit badge, sir. So I'm a literal expert in all the, I kid. I want to actually go back in time, though, and not talk about the company to start, because if you rewind the clock, you and some buds were sitting in Tiverton, Rhode Island, very close to where I live, and you were working on a crazy science project that ended up leading to the company. So just for fun, tell us that story.

• 33:09Speaker 03

  This story, in many ways, CSATS has been a journey of technology disruption, technology innovation, going to directly solve customer problems or end user problems. But then really, like you have all these things are driven by like global collisions, like technology change, making new opportunity. This absolutely happened for us in this childhood story, you know, the Scout Transatlantic project, if anyone wants to go Google Scout Transatlantic autonomous boat.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  It's really cool. I recommend you, I did this earlier today. Fantastic. Do it.

• 33:35Speaker 03

  There are fun stories out there. It was like, you know, pre, I mean, to the end there, it's like, this was basically a garage project, a couple of kids doing something just on the side out of like passion and kind of like intellectual curiosity, pushing the limits of what's possible with like consumer hobby grade tech. And it really went viral.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Describe the, the challenge.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the challenge was to send an autonomous boat from Rhode Island all the way to Spain, like across the entire, yeah, exactly. Go Rhode Islanders, great maritime states, you know, grew up around the water. And, you know, we wanted to send this little autonomous boat across the whole ocean, just pulling in solar power, charging its batteries, spinning its propeller, sending back updates over satellite and across the whole ocean. I mean, this is something that had never been done. There's a transat, there's a many year running competition to do this. And I don't know how many years it went, like five or 10 years. Of teams trying every year and always failing. So this was, this was a huge project for us.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Talk to me about how you kind of went from there to founding the company.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  The Scout project actually propelled our trajectories, our career trajectories. So I was the youngest person on the team at the time. So I was still in school. That project spans two and a half years. So I was going through engineering classes and like all of this was really clicking. I was like, oh, this is why we do this. So I started changing my own career interests based on that project. And what I saw is like applied engineering. Several of other team members went off to work for various places like America's Cup teams. And Dylan, our now CTO at CSATS, went on to help start Ocean Arrow, another USB company. So it really kind of propelled us all into this space. Take that forward another, you know, five, 10 years. I guess that was 15 years ago now. We started CSATS five years ago. When we started CSATS, we really were like, hey, a lot of the companies in this space, the first gens kind of are doing incredible work.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Work that, you know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, et cetera, et cetera, technology development. But like the wave gliders, the sail drones, a lot of these companies were very first gen. They were kind of like these weird products that were hard to use. You had to know a ton about sailing or about like be a deep mariner to get any value out of it. And even then it was really complicated.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  We were like, hey, let's build CSATS. Let's make this easier, more scalable. Let's hammer in on like an iPhone style product. Like let's make drones easy to use in the ocean.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  That's where I want to start because you have two models kind of currently in market, the Lightfish and Quickfish, both of which I think have solar panels and bring in some power and such. But it's the autonomy element that I want to start with because you guys talked about how you can train people up in like three days to use these boats. In my experience with anything on the water, it's very tedious and difficult and not to be mean, but like it's tricky. So what did you guys build and what did you invent to make it possible to have these drone boats that are so easy for basically anybody to pick up and get ready to go with?

• 36:18Speaker 03

  Two days. That's our standard training. Two day course, start, start to finish. Industry standard is like two weeks to give, you know, audiences who don't know, like a frame of reference. So it's like, we're cutting that dramatically. And then take that even further. We've done stuff where it's like, hey, two days, if you need, you know, you're a boat owner, you're going to use all, all the different features. I've personally trained people who are doing like harbor security applications. In like three to four minutes where I'm like, okay, this guy has very little time. I'm going to teach him the basics of how to drive the car in a video game style thing through our remote interface and then I'm going to walk away because he's got a job to do.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Could you explain to me the human inputs required and then the autonomy element to this? Cause I'm trying to figure out exactly how autonomous these boats are, but clearly there's some training required. So if you could just tease that out.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  What is autonomous on these boats? They go out, they self-power manage, they self-propulsion steer, they self payload manage. Like they're basically managing like there's automation across the whole stack. Where the human operator comes in is really like mission desire. It's like, hey, are you trying to patrol a harbor? Are you trying to go to a target? Are you trying to go do a specific thing? So that's where like you still need like human level intent. You know, we're not at Skynet yet where it can just like, kind of think of what we might want possibly. It's like, yeah, a little more deterministic than that, but otherwise highly autonomous.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So essentially we're telling it roughly where to go and what to do. And then it handles it from there. I presume this opens up the possibility of having fleets of these things with relatively few humans in the loop setting directions.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely. If you wanted to deploy, let's say north of a hundred of these, your real time bottleneck is deployment. Because we focus on long endurance vehicles, so vehicles that are out more than like eight hours. Then your actual launch becomes kind of negligible in terms of like, hey, we're going to monitor a country's, you know, economic exclusion zone, their maritime border. You might put out a hundred vehicles, but like you and me could go to the ramp. If, you know, we got a couple of 18 wheelers to drop off all the boats to fit them all. Then, I mean, we just put them in one at a time and we hit go on the mission. We put in the next one, hit go and like, you can probably launch one every three minutes or something with two people. So.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we could just carry it off the truck together, throw it in. So the ability to be out for a long period of time is made possible by charging while it's out on the ocean is my understanding of this. My, my other thing that I know is that we don't put solar panels on the top of EVs because they just wouldn't really add enough juice to make it economically viable. Why is that different when we're on the ocean?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Excellent question. Yeah. So autonomous, yeah, autonomous vehicles like a Tesla, I think is driving around with like a hundred kilowatt hours of, of stored energy. Their motors are typically, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing it's like a 50 to 100 plus kilowatt motor.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  We're talking extremely efficient. Electronics, like we're talking like even though it's a big vehicle, it's like a 12 foot vehicle, it's able to go significant payloads, long ranges. It's all combining lots of optimized electronics. So we're talking about watts, watts, tens of watts, hundreds of watts to run usually like high-power payloads. We might be carrying like, you know, surveying, mapping sonars are are pretty high-power, a couple hundred watts. So we'll run, we have got solar and then also a hybrid generator system. So basically, if you've got bad weather, you can run the generator, or if you're running like a high-power operation, you can run the generator.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  What does the generator run on?

• 39:28Speaker 03

  It's a methanol fuel cell.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Very interesting technology.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Whenever I think about fuel cells, I think about projects from Honda that are Japan-only that end up fizzling. I presume that's an archaic perspective. How expensive are these fuel cells? And also, do they have any risks to them? Like, we know EVs, batteries can set on fire, for example.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Anytime you're dealing with a high-performance system, you're dealing with risk, right? Like jet fuel is very combustible. Like lithium-ion batteries are the highest energy density several times. Like our Navy customers are like, you know, can we go to lead acids? It's like, okay, here's the performance hit. And they're like, okay, with the, you know, if you want good things, they're going to be pointy. Like your Ferrari can go fast, it can also wreck hard. So the fuel cell is definitely not fizzled out. I won't say too much because it's a little bit of like, you know, it's out there in the world, people could go buy it, but it's a reliable product. It's a great system. We did a lot of engineering to work it into our products so that our customers, it really solves the range anxiety issue. Because like for solar, to get to get multi-month performance, you have to optimize a ton to get the power right. So we've done that.

• 40:28Speaker 03

  But then even so, like you might have two weeks of bad weather. A customer is using their boat, they get down to 50% payload or battery, they might be like, hey, send it home. It's like, oh no, if you can just recharge multiple times, you're just like, turn on the charge button. And even they don't even have to do that. It's automated. It's like the boat is like, hey, I'm going to turn on the charge button.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  When you have one of these fuel cells on, let's say the light fish, which is the smaller of your two boats, it's more like 12 feet versus 17 feet, I think for the quick fish.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Okay. So if I had no solar power whatsoever, and the batteries or the system needed juice, how many times could the power cell charge it back up?

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Depending on the configuration, like four to 10 times.

• 41:03Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, great. That answers all those questions.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of times like from zero. Imagine we ought to charge your Tesla battery. You're like, oh, I didn't quite make it to my spot, but you're like. Recharge, you know, it's not super fast, but you're like, I can recharge.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  I thought you were going to say point five times and then I was going to have a series of follow up questions, but four to 10, good, we'll move on.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Single use combustion stuff, the energy density is very high compared to batteries, even though battery technology has improved dramatically. Um, yeah, single use, still very high energy density.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I wasn't going to bring up, but one of the coolest things about this company is that it works with today's batteries. You move that, you move that marker 10 years into the future and you're going to have much more efficient storage and it's going to be fantastic.

• 41:37Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, and if you say, if you look at back in our garage project, we're using rudimentary satcoms. We're using rudimentary batteries. We're using rudimentary solar charging systems, rudimentary compute. Everything now, like over 15 years of working in this space is like, has gotten better. And then when you're working in the space of combining these into, no, also like into combining them into really clean, beautiful, usable products. Because like you were saying, like, just because you've got all this great stuff does not mean the interface, you can't train someone in three minutes because you've got great batteries. That requires product design and people who are aligned and being like, I hate using buggy technology. Like our CTO Dylan is fantastic because he's like, I'm so frustrated by banking software and this software is like, it's such, you know, it's crap how bad software is.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  And so it's like, bring that level of desire to have like smooth products to a user group that rarely has a good product experience.

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Government technology tends to be pretty, pretty rough. But you said Satcom earlier, satellite communications, and that brings up a point I wanted to get to, which is the customer. Because I think it's not hard to see the military possibilities for your ASDs, autonomous surface vehicles. Cool. But you guys also talk a lot about research and commercial operations. And so I presume that there is a panoply of different ways to use these, which might necessitate longer deployed times. And therefore communications, it becomes incredibly important. You don't want to only talk to your boats when they come back to port. So what's a standard-ish connectivity package and what do your customers do with that?

• 43:03Speaker 03

  I would say standard connectivity package, we're connecting across high bandwidth, uh, satellite connection or like satellite constellations to older constellations that are kind of mid bandwidth to the oldest constellations that are like bread crumb bandwidth. And then the boats are also able to connect to like local, like other boats, you can use them in fleets. We've done that.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  Can you coordinate their movement? Based on?

• 43:24Speaker 03

  We typically, we have like some rudimentary coordination, but we really focus on like extremely good vessel autonomy, because there's quite a few players focusing on like coordinated swarms. Like, I mean, you've got, yeah, like, like the government's working on it, Andrew's working on it, L3 Harris is working on it. Like, there's people, really smart people, working on like, how do I get good individual assets, planes, boats, submarines, ground vehicles, you know, manned assets, troops on the ground, to fuse together into a big complicated picture to like affect an outcome. We basically are like, hey, our best way to help that is to have extremely good individual units that like understand high level commands and can execute them really smoothly. Like, you can trust their data.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  That's fantastic. So, back to the customer point. Research labs, governments, people that are trying to track ocean currents, what's the non-military customer base like?

• 44:13Speaker 03

  People are trying to do, like, survey work is one of the most, I'd say, understandable ones. So, anytime we do construction work, right, you've got like a crew that comes in, kind of like, site surveys the land, like, where are we going to build the skyscraper? Then, like, you know, people build stuff, and then people are coming in and checking along the way, did we do it right? You take that underwater, it's so hard. It's invisible. So, like, you need to build a bridge piling, you need to like lay a pipeline or a cable, an internet cable. Well, we don't really know what's down there. We've got some old chart from, you know, the 1800s that some guy ledlined. So, it's like, okay, you need to know what it looks like today. Then you need to know, we like, you know, dig the trench, then we lay the thing. Then we need to say, like, did it, is it right? And then two years later after a storm, or like a month later after the storm, every hurricane season down south, you need to go check and say, like, is this infrastructure still okay?

• 44:57Speaker 03

  Or do we need to go do something to fix it? That requires actually going along with a sound sonar, so it's sending out sound pulses, getting that picture back, and then building a high-resolution 3D bottom map to say, hey, here's what's going on. So, in the commercial world, that's like a huge use that like robots are great for, because it's just extremely precise, repetitive work. And it's like, yeah, drones are fantastic for it.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  I was thinking oil and gas, and then subsea internet cables, but the two things that I, that I was thinking of as clear, clear use cases for this.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  There are like dozens more. There's like tracking whales, doing harmful algal blooms, preventing shellfish poisoning. I mean, it's like, it's a very interesting industry. There's like a gazillion things people are doing with drones.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  It's almost like the ocean is really big and really important.

• 45:34Speaker 03

  It sure is, as it turns out. Yeah, it's far away. Not many people think about it, because it's like, oh, out to sea. But it's like, actually, like, the whole world is is getting kind of fed by the ocean.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Those people live in Nebraska, like those of us who have lived near the ocean. I used to live in San Francisco and now I live in Providence. I'm close to this other ocean now. It's pretty important stuff. Let's talk about manufacturing. You guys are based down in San Diego, as we discussed before the show, close to the El Segundo area. But I'm just, I'm curious why that was the right place to build the company. And then also, how has it been working on products that I presume can't have an enormous footprint of Chinese-made supply?

• 46:10Speaker 03

  So I would say the two things there, San Diego is a great city for this work. It just has an amazing intersection of like leading scientific institutions, like the Scripps Oceanic Graphic Institution, a really big military presence in terms of like Navy Special Warfare's headquarters is here. I think one of the biggest like aircraft carrier, you know, hubs in the world. So huge military presence. Everyone kind of understands working with the military and what that brings to, you know, the city and the nation. And then also just, I would say, like, good tech hub. Like, you've got companies like Qualcomm and like biotech companies have been here for a long time. And then also very good, I would say, mission-driven people, like people who have like generally are looking to create an impact and also have like a stable, like, planted life. Got friends who are up in SF who are like, oh, yeah, you know, there's like a new sauna perk at this other company.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  So I jumped, you know, ship as soon as my stocks vested at the one year. I just quit and went to this other one because I could get free saunas. And it's like,

• 46:59Speaker 01

  I see we have the same friends.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Exactly, right? It's it's not super conducive to talent retention. And people aren't necessarily there for like a good reasons, like, hey, go gold mine over in SF. But it's like, if you want to build something impactful, like come to San Diego.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  You guys have discussed expanding your manufacturing footprint down in San Diego area. So I'm curious, what is your boat creation pace? I'm not quite sure the term of art there is, but that'll get to that.

• 47:21Speaker 03

  So and I didn't touch on your like Chinese component or supply chain question, which is like, you know, in government terms, like NDAA compliance, National Defense Authorization Act. Yes, we build a remarkable amount here in San Diego. In the early days, that was not very popular when we were raising our first round out of like tech stars. So many investors were like, hey, don't work on hardware, just be the software app for boats. We luckily had people who are experts across all these different things, like Max Kramer, who's, you know, one of our co-founders, isn't. Total expert in like naval architecture, mechanical engineering, boat design. He gets it and it's like, hey, we could compromise. Like we could outsource this, we could chuck it over the fence and hope someone else builds a good enough product. But if you want a good product from start to finish.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Like Apple, you know, needs to touch the hardware. They need to touch the software, the firmware. You have to kind of do the whole thing. There's also the yin and yang where you need to make it easy to play with. Cause in defense, there's a lot of partners in the ecosystem, so you can't be closed, which we do. Anyway, so we own a lot of our supply chain. Honestly, getting off of Chinese components, it's a challenge. Have to meet defense requirements and we might start with a prototype component. And it's like, hey, this component is a hundred dollars, eighty dollars. And it's mass manufactured for consumer users. Then we like go ahead and get the non-Chinese version. It's like eight hundred dollars. And you could have a literal eight to 10 to 15x cost increase.

• 48:41Speaker 03

  I look at this from like a high wall standpoint of like, this is tough, but it's something that we kind of have de-vested in for 20, 30 years. Um, I went to school at Notre Dame and you know, the Midwest and it's like, you see the rust belt. It's like, you see all the industry that's shut down.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So from just like not investing in having manufacturing in America. So now, yeah, we do need to pay a premium. It's going to be hard. We need to think about how to do it, but it certainly is helping, you know, bring manufacturing and tech back to the States.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Do we need to have some sort of like pooled domestic manufacturing capacity that like you guys, Andrew L, L3, like Regent and Vatten Systems and Serronic? Everyone just kind of like puts in 10 million each and then we just have better injection molding and better CNC machining. And like, it, it just feels like everyone tells me the same thing. And everyone's trying to solve it in a small way individually versus coming together to have a real industry-driven industrial policy.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  I agree. I mean, I think that like some, like definitely top-down policy can affect this in a big way. And I mean, like on the shelf behind you, it looks like you've got like an Xbox and a PlayStation three controller.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  You're the first person in the history of the show to notice that.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  I mean, but those are such good tangible examples. The circuit boards in there are almost definitely made in China.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%.

• 49:55Speaker 03

  Not that we can't build them here, but we do need to invest and incentivize companies to build up that flexible manufacturing capabilities that, you know, us, Andoril, Sironic, VAT, and everyone can source their components that are not that exquisite from a US company instead of going to China.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Do you think the government's doing enough right now to support this? Because I'm actually pretty bullish, not just on your company, but the entire, like, we might say, generation of of hard tech companies that I think you're a part of. And I'm just curious i- if in our currently volatile political system, Congress and the executive branch are able to actually do enough to support here? Or if there's lots of room for more activity from them?

• 50:32Speaker 03

  That is a good question. I don't think we should adopt kind of like authoritarian like styles like China has done. But I do just want to comment on the effectiveness of some of their policy. Like I used, when we were starting this company, I was learning about the regulations. I was like, oh, that's pretty, you know, controlling. Then I read about like, why does Chinese battery tech like rule the kind of whole place? And it's like, oh, they had a smog problem, like an air quality problem. So like, you know what? We're going to rule that you can only drive like I see, like internal combustion cars certain days of the week. If you have an EV, an electric vehicle, you can drive all the day. And then they're like, hey, and if you're going to build EVs in China, you have to have a certain percent domestic manufactured. And it was like really high. So like Tesla and all these companies went and just like, um, I forget the name of the company,

• 51:14Speaker 03

  but there's a battery cell company that went from like a nobody to today's biggest battery provider in the world in a couple of years.

• 51:22Speaker 01

  If anyone's curious why we don't just ape that here in the States, it's because it leads to perverse incentives and you end up with a manufacturing glut. That's why you get the term involution regarding Chinese cost cutting and you get industrial deflation.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Thank you for saying that, Alex, because I've I've referenced that once or twice. And no one has really articulated like that flip downside. It was clearly a downside, so I'm not saying we should do that. But it's a lesson for us that like, hey, top down regulation can work. It really can change things. You have to be careful about what happens. But it's like, if you want to drive change. If a government sets the policy, all the companies will react.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, we, we have this through cafe, like fuel economy standards and so forth. And we have industrial policy in the form of tax rebates for EVs or dead until recently. I just would like for you to say, you know what, Alex, actually it's so easy to get out Chinese parts because there's so many great options here in the States. I can build 10 times as many boats as I could last year because there's just, I'm drowning in, in machinery. You know, that's what I want because then there'll be more flexibility to innovate. So you won't be worried so much about getting the fricking parts you need.

• 52:20Speaker 03

  It's true. And you know, it is better like for the optimist or optimistic side of this. Like it's better today than years ago. It's like, things are getting better. There are people like all the time we're getting contacted by suppliers who are like, hey, we have this new clever way to do composites. We've got this new clever way to do batteries. We're trying to get into this game. And it's like, that's great. I mean, there's a lot of disruption happening. I think people see the need now, which is really good.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  How many boats can you guys build per month, per quarter, whatever the right time of reference there is?

• 52:46Speaker 03

  We've got the capacity to go into the hundreds. So, I mean, the, the nice thing here is per year, I would say. The difference here between, I've got a background working in like consumer goods and medical, and then automotive, uh, working for like a consulting automation company. So I had the privilege of going inside a lot of American factories, helping automate and increase throughput. Those are the scales of what's possible. Maritime right now is way below that. So I really enjoy it from CSAT's perspective. Like we're much closer to consumer goods or to automotive than we are to shipbuilding. The new like kind of like shipbuilding pushes I think are great. And like people going after the medium sized USVs is very interesting. Those are big bets. For small ASVs, the reason we like them is we can proliferate them very quickly, very capital efficiently. And we build a lot of them. And I mean, you get really good effects from.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  And just to be clear, we're, we're describing this basically up to 17 foot boats as small. So in the, in the USV world, these are the few 500s of the, of the USVs.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. These things are very small. I mean, the Navy is very used to, you know, ships are big ships, boats are submarines. And like our size of thing like hardly registers.

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. You guys are like a pimple or something like incredibly small.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  What is that fly on the water? However, it's changed. I mean, the power of small things has changed. Like Ukraine used small USVs, you know, 15 to 20 something feet to completely drive the Russian naval fleet out of the Black Sea without putting anyone on the water. They did it other places, but I mean asymmetric effect, small robots against big ships. The fight was a KO.

• 54:14Speaker 01

  But when I think about the future of warfare, I think about not just Ukraine, I think about, you know, future conflicts around Taiwan, and it's going to be a drone-based battle in a large way. And I do think that, and I'm not saying that you guys are selling them to Taiwan, but like, I could see equipment like the Quick Fish, I keep getting the mix up in my head, which has a built-in like payload area, it seems like according to the drawings, play an enormous impact. And they don't have to be big. They can be small, as long as they can carry what they need. In fact, size might be a net negative.

• 54:41Speaker 03

  Actually, I love that you said that. Our thoughts are the smallest platform you can make that does the mission capability is what you want. Because that's the best for stealth, it's the best for cost equation, it's the best for manufacturing logistics. Like, you get all these benefits by being small.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Make it just as big as you need for the specific mission.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Are we still behind? Because I think what, what the Ukrainian war, or the Russian war progression in Ukraine, whatever you want to call it, really showed us that we were behind on, on flying drones. That our domestic supply chains were crap, that we were just behind the curve on the future of warfare and so forth. But I keep talking to people like yourself who are building autonomous naval vehicles, either above or below the sea. But like, it feels pretty, pretty quick. And so are we doing good enough today? Or are we still playing catch-up?

• 55:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good question. You can look at this from two different standpoints. Like, you can look at this from warfare, or you can look at this from operational impact. And like, it's like, we're a dual-use company. We do scientific work, we do survey work, we do, like, and we work for, you know, militaries around the world. On that side, like, CSAT is one of the leaders. Like, even some of the companies that have raised huge sums of money, like, they don't have, you know, fleets of boats around doing like, real value-add, our positive ROI work, which is one of the problems with like, you know, these like humanoid robotic companies right now. It's people like, it can fold laundry, but it's like, the ROI is wildly negative. So it's like-

• 55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, 50K to fold laundry is something that, you know, the billionaires can afford. But currently, I'm still going to either do it myself, or pay someone 20 bucks an hour to do it.

• 56:04Speaker 03

  Exactly. And so you've got that problem in maritime, too. It's like, okay, you can build a multi-million dollar vehicle, that's very cool, but no company in the commercial space is going to pay for that, because it's just ridiculous. And so it's like, we build a more affordable vehicle, it does, you know, commercial sales, it does commercial positive ROI work for our customers. It also is very useful for defense and militaries. And they can scale it and use it in these very asymmetric ways. In terms of operational capability, you know, I would say that the US has incredible technologies. I think we're probably ahead, probably the leaders in many areas in maritime. Ukraine definitely has, you know, they have the pressing need of being in an all out war where it absolutely matters. And they're totally the leaders in terms of operationalizing USBS and warfare. I mean, no one's done what they've done.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  No, and that's why it's still a nation.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. To their credit.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  There's another company based out of Rhode Island that I talked to recently called Regent, and they're making essentially electric boat hover glide planes for regional transit. And they kind of blew my mind because they're like, we can get you to New York from Providence in like an hour and a half. It's gonna be quick and you don't have to go through TSA. And I was like, oh my God, this is fantastic. Prepping for our chat today, I was really curious, like, when can I go to the harbor here in Providence and put something into one of these boats that you make and just ship it down the seaboard? Because it strikes me as like, why would I need UPS? When I could just have my own or a shared local community Uber style rental of a light fish?

• 57:29Speaker 03

  So you're talking shipping of like packages and goods, right?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Sure. Why not? Or myself, or a baby, you know, or a bike. I don't know. It just, it just seems so cool that we have these boats that can go so far, so autonomously, and they're so small and easy to serve.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Nice. One of our customers sent, I think, like a bottle of bourbon or something across an entire ocean. It's not in the public yet, so maybe we'll hear about that. But uh, yeah, I would say, you know, it is true. Some of our products that we've looked at, right now, the shipping industry, because they're in a very safe commercial space, they're essentially protected by the US and many allies against piracy, against, you know, adversarial nations. Because of a total safety bubble, they've slowly expanded the ships from like, you know, the mega tankers to the super mega tankers, to the super mega Uber tankers, because it's basically like efficiency of economics, you just put it on. The downside is now to get anything across the world, like we do a lot of international shipping, to get one of our boats, it's only like a pretty small wooden crate, a couple hundred pounds, to get it to where we want it, it like guarantees

• 58:24Speaker 03

  by sea that it's gonna take like 60 to 90 days. I'm like, man, why is it taking so long? And it's because there's just, we put in air tax, and it like sits and waits at ports for the load and the unload. So actually, I do think there's an opportunity here for scaling more flexible, kind of like, hey, if you need to move that bottle of bourbon quickly. Like we can help you out. We can cut, you know, several weeks off of the shipping time.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  Especially if you're in and around like something like the Great Lakes where the seas don't get as rough as I understand it. And so you could probably get something from Chicago to something else in the Great Lakes pretty easily, pretty quickly. Who needs a train when you have solar powered drone boats? I'm just so excited about the future. Things like this, just they, it, it sounds like something that I could have read in my childhood in a book about the future. Like, you know, in the future, we'll have small boats that are autonomous. And I would be like, oh, that's so cool. And here, here we are.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  Here we are.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  We have them.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. Have you read, uh, the Ministry for Future Affairs?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  That is the, the book by the guy who did Red Mars. I did.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  It's about like future crediting, future societies. It's kind of like a climate change sci-fi futuristic. Cause it's only like 50 years in the future or something, or maybe it's like 20 or a hundred years. It's near future. And it gives the author this freedom to just kind of tweak things. And one thing I loved is like, oh, he actually plays out here. She, I forget who the author is, plays out.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  It's Kim Stanley Robinson, KSR.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Nice. With like amazing stuff on small drones, on maritime drones. There's like a bunch of stuff where it's.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Well, the weapon that you're describing is it's a missile that doesn't impact itself. Instead it breaks into like 10,000 little missiles. And then there's unstoppable, I think is the, I forget what they call them, but it's a swarm weapon of, of a type. The problem with that book, while we're doing this, is that the change agents end up being terrorists in a way that forces governments to change their, like that's, these swarm weapons is how they take down global air traffic.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  So pretty gnarly future.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Hopefully that's not where things go.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  But it's a good point that, I mean, what we're dealing with right now, there's a lot of people, you know, that I talked to who are in the counter UXs, counter anything autonomous, any drone. And they are freaking out. They're ringing red bells and 10 alarm fires. And I'm like, fair enough. We're not living in that dystopia today, but there are very few defense nets against people with $500 drones wreaking havoc. I mean, it's pretty, it is a scary kind of like, it's when you realize that your doors are unlocked and have been unlocked for a year. And that suddenly people know where you live. And it's like, ooh, I probably should lock my doors. Yeah.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  And is that why your company is going to have their next major product line be anti-surface? Seriously though, I mean, is that something that you guys are gonna?

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  Well, there is some stuff, I mean, so some of the QuickFish applications are to put a robot in between a potential threat and a friendly vessel. And if you look at some of the stuff, like there's this, you know, kind of wild and very bad attack in the Red Sea. Where it's like the Houthis were shooting, you know, aerial drones and low-cost missiles at ships. They were striking them, they were causing damage, they were causing some fatalities. Bad problem, not good. I think that maybe they sunk one ship in, you know, a span of of time.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  They sent a surface vessel that was, looked like a fishing boat, it had like a dummy, like a scarecrow in it. And so there's this incredible video on Twitter X of all the security guards standing on the bridge with their machine guns up in the air, trying to determine why is this fisherman coming towards us, kind of? And it's like, you see the kind of terror, this is a horror movie. But then they're like, oh crap, this is, that's a scarecrow and it's too close and it hits the ship. It it doesn't kill anyone, I believe, thankfully, but the ship sinks, I mean, it was an entire tank from one USV. That is a scenario where the QuickFish could have played, it's like, oh, of course you send a little high-speed robot first, because like you can play bumper cars safely.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  It's not going to cause damage to the boat in question and you don't care if you sink the USV, it's cheap.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're standing off of, you know, your multimillion-dollar asset with people aboard it with a little bit of a buffer.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Well, I think this is why your company is not only going to reinvent trade and warfare, but also billionaire yacht defense. A critical growth market for all. I get, Mike, this has been tremendous. Uh, where can people find your company on the internet? And also, is there a job you are hiring for that you want to shout out into the the audience?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  Csets.com is our website, I think there's a new one rolling out pretty shortly. Yeah, we've got multiple jobs open, there's a career page there, we're always trying to hire for great tech-driven people. Anyone who's, you know, willing to push maritime autonomy forward and has something to bring to the table.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  I appreciate it, the next time you're in Rhode Island, you hit me up and I'll take you out to dinner.

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  I'd love that, Alex, it's been great talking to you.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  A pleasure, thanks, Mike, bye.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:02:43Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we have some founder questions. Let's do it.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  There's a great one over from the startups subreddit, Jason. A man was applying to work at a company and he says, "I'm interviewing at a small startup. The CEO has been setting up a series of interviews over the past couple of weeks. All his emails have been sent late in the evening or on weekends. Is this a red flag? Most of what I know about the company so far is good, but should I be worried that the CEO is seemingly working all the time? Now, a lot of folks actually had a pretty positive takes on this, but before we get to those, what do you think?

• 1:03:12Jason Calacanis?

  Why are you going to this startup is the question? Do you want to make a lot of money from your options? Or do you want to have work-life balance? What he's signaling or she's signaling to you is this is not a place where work-life balance. When the CEO emails you, you're going to be judged whether you like it or not on your response time. Period, full stop. How do I know this? This CEO is me and every other successful CEO I know. I get a flurry of energy on a Saturday or Sunday, sometimes a Friday or Saturday night. And I judge people, sorry, it's just the way it is, by the people who respond quickly and thoughtfully and the people who I get responses from Monday morning at 9:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m. At a startup, you're going to be moving 996, 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week.

• 1:03:57Jason Calacanis?

  That's the expectation. If you don't want that, please, for the love of God, do not join a startup. You are reading the room correctly, dear subreddit member. This Reddit rapid response here. Listen to everybody in the audience. This CEO is going to maximize shareholder value by working himself or themselves and the team to the bone to beat their competitors. They're not going to give you work-life balance. If you want work-life balance, pick a different company. Pick a bigger company, pick a smaller role in a bigger company where your contribution is narrow and the expectation is lower. That's why people join big companies.

• 1:04:38Jason Calacanis?

  They look at the benefits that the big company gives you. That's why people like to join the government. Some people want to be teachers. God bless them. You get three months off as a teacher. They want that lifestyle. It's a free country. Pick and choose. If you choose this company and you're seeing it as a red flag already, that to me says, original poster OP does not want to work at this company. If you see it as a red flag, not a green flag.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. You tell us everything we need to know here. Don't join this company. If you saw this as a green flag, hey, I'm up. I'm thinking about the company. I'm obsessed with my stock options being worth something. By all means, then go work there. This is a red flag for you. Get out of Dodge.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  Best comment was, the red flag would be the CEO working a nine to five and not the weekends. L and A O. But there was a couple of other points that I just want to bounce off you while we have you in the CEO chair. People were saying, hey, look, you know, the CEO is going to be swamped all day. Sometimes they only get to email at the end of the day and they may not expect a response right away. Do you think that carries water, Jason?

• 1:05:33Jason Calacanis?

  There is some truth to the first part of that, but not the second. You do, like my email might come at the end of the day because I'm talking to my direct reports. I'm talking to founders. I'm doing podcasts. Yes, my, my, my day might be full. I might be traveling around the world to Saudi Arabia and then Japan and then home. Literally went around the world recently. So yeah, they might not get to it later, but they're still going to judge you on response time. Sorry. Just the way it is. Pick wisely. This original poster sees it as a red flag. It is a red flag for you.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Go work at Intuit, which is famously good work-life balance.

• 1:06:07Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great. And shout out to Intuit. Go there. Yeah. I mean, there are some companies that were espousing four day work weeks and offering four day work weeks. Thirty seven signals, hard company to get a job at, but I think they take Fridays off in the summer. So go work at thirty seven signals and you know, you're going to have to fight for that job. It's not easy to get in there because people don't leave because the benefits are so good. Different founders, and this is something you can decide for yourself as a founder. Some founders like to overpay team members. Sometimes they like to shower people with benefits. Why? Golden handcuffs. They want to make it impossible to leave and they prefer to have no turnover.

• 1:06:50Jason Calacanis?

  Other founders see turnover as energizing and a plus. Okay, we outgrew people. Netflix was famous for having everybody reapply for their jobs in January. This was shocking when people heard this. What? You're not loyal to your own people? No. Reed Hastings said it. We're not. We're not loyal to our people. We're loyal to the mission of the company. If you can't provide and explain how you're going to provide value in January, then, okay. You shouldn't be here. It's a sports team and a sports team, you know, analogy is going to be cutthroat and you're going to get cut. So do not join this company under any circumstances.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  Corollary to this is make sure you understand your equity package and don't 996 for a company where you have $4 in potential future equity, because that's not where you want to spend your

• 1:07:37Jason Calacanis?

  Another good point. You would want to know your strike price. You're going to want to know how many shares are outstanding and you have the ability to ask those questions. And if you do, people are going to say, okay, this person's thoughtful. So if they say, we're going to give you 10,000 shares, you say, okay, is that 10,000 of a million shares and it's 1% of the company? Or is it 10,000 of a billion shares? I would like to know. And, okay, I have, I understand I have common shares. Can you explain to me just broad strokes, the preference stack? This company's been around for five years. You've raised 300 million. That last 100 million that came in at a billion dollar valuation, do they have a 3X liquidation preference? What are the general terms? Now, they might say that's confidential. We can't explain it. Then what you could say is, okay,

• 1:08:19Jason Calacanis?

  if everything converted, here's the little secret. Let's say we IPO'd at a $10 billion valuation.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  We're currently worth a billion. We IPO at 10 billion and I have 100,000 shares. How many fully diluted shares would there be if everybody converted to common at 10 billion? Can you just run that scenario for me? And then you would actually know. Because what happens at an IPO is all the preferred shares, all the common shares, become one class of shares, essentially common. So the preferred converts into common. Everybody has the same style of shares for the IPO. And their preference goes away because there's a liquidation that's about to occur in the public market. So therefore, everybody gets the same shares. This is generally what happens. And so then you would know the total number of shares, because if they did have a liquidation preference, if they did get a multiple on their shares, if they did get interest

• 1:09:10Jason Calacanis?

  on their shares, that would be done in the calculation. They could say, yeah, you went from having 1% ownership to having point 5% ownership because of the liquidation preferences. And you would actually understand it. $10 billion company, I own 1%. You know, I have a hundred million. I own point 10%. I have 10 million. You could just literally do that.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  If a startup CEO or the hiring manager in question is really coy about that information, Jason, how much of a red flag is that to the potential employee?

• 1:09:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if you can't get the denominator at the very least, or the ballpark denominator, and there's not a discussion about this, that means there's probably other people who are flying blind in the company.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Oof.

• 1:09:49Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, and yeah, that would be a red flag.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:09:52Jason Calacanis?

  Generally speaking, people know what their percentage ownership is of the company, and they, they do this math all day long. So if you were going to Uber in the early days, you would understand like roughly what your percentage ownership was. And then when new dilution occurred, they would just say, yeah, just, hey, that new round we're doing is going to be about 15% dilution. So if you owned 1%, you know, you own 15.85.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  All right. Next question is about pink and red flags, Jason. This is a rubric that you introduced to me, that there are sometimes a red flag at a company, sometimes a pink flag in between. I came across a tweet from Ankar Nakball. He's the CEO of a startup, and he said this, which I thought was very interesting. Hot take, startup founders using company credit card points for personal travel is low level fraud.

• 1:10:40Jason Calacanis?

  Now, I, I had that same position for a long time. There's a long tradition in this space, points of companies like, you know, the visas of the world, marketing to employees to use their cards so that they can get personal travel. I have always had the position like, well, that is then a bribe to like run up the bills. And in fact, when I was at Sony Corporation, you know, a lifetime ago, people would pick more expensive flights on purpose.

• 1:11:20Jason Calacanis?

  So that they could earn more points and they would say, well, what's the limit for my cross-country flight? And they'd say, oh, the limit is $8,000 or in business class or in SVP. They'd say, okay, I need to book my ticket later because I'll get more points.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Just torching cash?

• 1:11:36Jason Calacanis?

  Torch ing the company's money. And then they would say, which hotel can I stay at? That would get me the most points because I do five trips a year. I get those points. And then that's how I pay for my family's vacation is I use those points to pay for my family vacation. So yes, it is the most modest of pink flags. I have always taken the approach. Now, if you own your company, you don't have investors, well, then the owner can do what they want with the points, right? Like so.

• 1:12:03Speaker 01

  If this is your company, oh yeah, this is for venture-backed founders.

• 1:12:06Jason Calacanis?

  For a venture-backed founder, you should be saying, hey, everybody use this card. So if you think the American Express Platinum, or you think the Robinhood card, you know, that gets money back, or the Platinum card that gets you, you know, upgrades, or I have the United cards from Chase, I also have the Platinum card. Those ones seem to, according to my peeps, get you the most rewards. By all means, you do that and then you use those to get free hotels for business travel, et cetera. It is just a tiny little pink flag. Yeah, it's a little integrity test.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  That's what I was curious about was the integrity element. Cause you talk a lot about how if you make a, a small mistake and someone catches it, then they're going to have less trust in your ability to make decisions.

• 1:12:54Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it fits into that. All right. Next up, we're going to talk about a company called Cursor. You may have heard of it. I think they just reached like 2.3 billion dollar round at a hot new valuation, but everyone's not talking about that. Instead, they're buzzing about how Cursor hires. We talk a lot in this podcast about how to retain the right people. Well, the way Cursor goes about it, it's a little bit different. There's a piece in Colossus, a well-known kind of technology magazine of sorts that discusses this. I'm going to pull it up and talk you through it.

• 1:13:19Jason Calacanis?

  What is Colossus? People have been telling me about Colossus. I think I've been pitched a couple of times on having the founder on podcasts and stuff like that. What is Colossus?

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  It is a print magazine. I think it's quarterly. Comes out and does, I would say friendly profiles of people in and around the technology industry. It became, I think, best known for its Jared Kushner thrive capital. I'm not going to say profile because that implies journalism and I don't think that's really the goal here. I think it's more like insider.

• 1:13:48Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:48Speaker 01

  Is my, is my guess?

• 1:13:50Jason Calacanis?

  They're pro tech and less hard hitting journalism.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like that, I'm not trying to like throw stones here. I'm just trying to like, put it into context. This is not like, we're going to call someone up and really put it to them. This is more like, what are our friends doing? And that's why I think this is an interesting point.

• 1:14:05Jason Calacanis?

  Kind of throw stones. Okay, you can own it.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  The article in question is written by Bree Wolfson, who according to her LinkedIn, works for Cursor. And it's about Cursor. So there you go. She writes that Cursor's recruiting machine is on another level. And what's interesting here, Jason, is that

• 1:14:22Jason Calacanis?

  And she's objective is what you're saying.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Oh, entirely objective, entirely. There's no bias whatsoever.

• 1:14:27Jason Calacanis?

  What does she do at Cursor? She the hiring manager?

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  She says, it says head of employee experience, Cursor, full time, September 12th, 25th to now. So Cursor's secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec. So mostly what you do, Jason, is you think about a job you need. You think about what the requirements are. You put a listing out there, people apply, you go through them, you pick one, you hire them, you're off to the races. Instead, she says, quote, at Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this. Post the name of someone really, really good in the hashtag hiring ideas channel in Slack. Swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews. And if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday. This is an inversion of the hiring process. I'm just curious how often you've seen ideas like this work at startups and if you recommend that founders take this approach.

• 1:15:15Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second. What they're saying is they take a person who doesn't work at Cursor, then they Have a group of people try to peer pressure them into joining Cursor, like a full court press.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, like a love bombing type of thing.

• 1:15:29Jason Calacanis?

  They love bomb. Okay, I like that term. Okay. So it's like a hardcore recruiting.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  But about the individual, not about like the specific corporate needs. So I would go to my friends and say, you know, I think this Jason guy is real sharp. He know he doesn't fit any of our current job openings, but I really think we should get him on the team. This to me is almost like how a venture capital firm might hire like a new partner versus like hiring for a traditional startup. But Cursor is high impact, 300 people or so, and they're doing, I think, a billion dollars in ARR. So clearly it works.

• 1:15:57Jason Calacanis?

  This exists in the NBA. So when Donovan Mitchell was going to be available, I think he was playing in Utah or something. And Donovan Mitchell, known as Spider, he's an NBA guard, right? And he's currently with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But when he was going to be available, because the Utah Jazz were going to trade him for whatever reason, a bunch of the Knicks started publicly courting him, liking his tweets, you know, meeting him at games, going to Mets games with him, going to Rucker Park. They just did a full court press to try to recruit him. They failed because the general manager of the Utah Jazz hates the Knicks

• 1:16:39Jason Calacanis?

  and like purposely like sent him to Utah where he's done very well. And, you know, the Knicks didn't get Spider. And it was kind of a bummer, but we're the best team in the East. So it is what it is. So I like the strategy, actually. I think it's a great strategy. Also, hiring extremely talented people is something where if you have extraordinary resources, you'll find something for it to do. So I like that as well. In the NBA, you pick in the draft the most talented person, not the person you need most. So let's say you have a great point guard on your team.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:17:14Jason Calacanis?

  And another great point guard comes up, or you have a great shooting guard, and then another shooting guard comes up, and you just take the best person. Why? Because the difference between the best person in the draft and the next best person could be the difference between like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant and somebody whose name you don't recognize when I say it.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Jason Calacanis?

  You always draft the most talented person. So I love this advice. I think it's great advice and I think showing people love with five or six different people, love bombing them or recruiting them or full court press, great idea. Works in sports, works in venture capital for partnerships. Why wouldn't you? At one point, there was a venture capital firm who watched this week in startups. They needed a new partner and they came at me hard. And that's actually happened twice in my career where people were like, hey, join us. We, you know, together, you know, you have this weekend startups, you plug it into our billion dollar franchise, boom. Even to this day, people are like, oh, Founder University, this week in startups. You've really conquered that like media thing.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Look at like Andreessen Horowitz started Speedrun, Pair VC has their summer program. Sequoia has the ARC program. People have looked at the things and Sequoia has a podcast, Crucible Moments, A16C hired Eric, who I guess was talking about this, Torin Berg, to lead their content. So those things have just naturally happened, right?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  This is actually happening to me now. People want me to come to leave Twist and go start something to talk about their portfolios. And it's interesting.

• 1:18:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, every venture firm wants a podcast plugged in. It is absolutely the right way to go. Yeah, I think it's great for the back to Colossus, the publication, having insiders write about their strategies is great service journalism, but it's not objective journalism. So you are correct.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  What if you're a founder of a company, Jason, that isn't growing at three XP a year? What if you're at our friend from Familify, right? And he is in the wilderness, right? This hiring approach probably wouldn't work that well is my guess. This strikes me as a you're growing like a rocket ship and you have lots of cash strategy.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, every company has something to offer. The company that doesn't have product market fit yet has a higher equity and more responsibility and the joy of going from zero to one. And that's what they're offering. So you're just offering something different. If you look at Cursor in year zero, hey, we know that somebody is going to crack making developers 10 times more efficient, and that should be us. We can offer you 5% and you could be a co-founder. Like, you could actually, in year zero, offer the co-founder title. Hey, we've got two co-founders. We're willing to add a third. If you join us, those two people go, and they recruit them, or her. That happens all the time, actually. You're just offering a different package. Great idea.

• 1:20:02Speaker 01

  All right, just one more thing before we let you go. Bilal Zuberry of Red Gloss Ventures, previously, I think he was over at Lux, has some advice for the early VCs in the world, and I wanted to get your take on this. So Bilal writes, "Dear young VCs, two cents from me. Stop going to so many conferences. You may not realize it, but you're likely meeting the same people again and again. And instead of having your own perspective, you're essentially repeating consensus views on the same few startups and business models that everyone already likes to discuss. This strikes me as very good advice, but I was curious if you agree with it, and where these young VCs should be spending their time, if not at conferences?

• 1:20:37Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, meeting founders is the number one thing you should be doing. Building a network of other VCs to get pocket listings for them to tell you about their investments, or to introduce your investments to is equally important. I would say probably equally important, if you're going to succeed, having a network of people you can send your deal flow to, to do the next round. Critically important. We have something called the Whisper Network. We build systems as opposed to having goals. So we have the goal of being able to help our founders meet new investors to do their next round of funding. But we have a system called the Whisper Network. It's a piece of software we made where our founders can go in, pick which folks they want to meet, and then whoever in our organization has the best relationship, then can forward that information on.

• 1:21:20Jason Calacanis?

  We might open it up to other founders at some point, let them join the Whisper Network, and be part of it, or let investors join the Whisper Network and, you know, receive information through it. Anyway, long story short, both of those things are important. He does make a really good point about group think. The reason why I think I did well is I made my own event where I invited founders I met. It was called Open Angel Forum back in the day, and I would let angel investors, now it's called the Syndicate, basically. And we do an online thing where every week or two, I have a deal committee, which now has 150 people on it, about 40 of them show up, and we show them two or three companies with the founders there. And then they pre-commit, or don't pre-commit.

• 1:22:00Jason Calacanis?

  And if they pre-commit and we get 10 people, 50K in pre-commits or more, we tend to share it with the rest of the syndicate because we have enough early indication that it would hit the 250K minimum that you need to run a syndicate because of the legal expense associated with the syndicate. So I like the idea of starting your own. So I'll take his advice one step further. Instead of going to those conferences and being one of 500 people there, one of 300 people there, or 1,000 people, instead of going to TechCrunch Disrupt, I would say, do what I did my whole career, which is I threw the party. So when I had the Open Angel Forum, there were 21 people in the room famously when Thumbtack and Uber and other data stacks companies like that presented there for their seed rounds or pre-seed rounds.

• 1:22:43Jason Calacanis?

  And people, three people invested in Uber, myself, Cyan Banister, and First Round Capital at that Open Angel Forum famously at a pier in San Francisco 15 years ago, something like that.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Shout out Cyan Banister.

• 1:22:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Cyan Banister. It was like a $4.5 million valuation back then. So anyway, that's the long and short of it. You should start your own event. So pick a category you really care about or go to niche events. So I went to the Wikipedia Conference, which was a very niche conference with 100 of the Wikipedia editors in Boston. Dave Weiner was there, myself, a couple of interesting people, Doc Cereals, really interesting people who were kind of in the tech business in the 70s and 80s and I was coming in in the 90s and the early 2000s. And I got to kind of be with those elders, the really wise Doc Cereals, the really wise Dave Weiner. They had two decades of experience. I mean, I got to sit there and just be a fly on the wall and listen to them talk about Wiki software and Larry Sanger and everything.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Jason Schuman, Primary, is a general partner over there, early stage investor. He thinks that what VCs should do is go to niche conferences, to your point, but he thinks they should be industry specific.

• 1:23:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. That's exactly what I'm talking about.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think he's dead on.

• 1:23:55Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out to Jason. He gets it. When you go to those, then you have an advantage over other competitors because if you're at this legal tech conference, you're getting to see those technology companies in the wild. You see them at their booth, how they're pitching folks, you see their presence. See the talk they gave, whether people in the room in the talk, did people in the room go up to the founder after? Did the founder give a good presentation, then their director of sales and co-founder give a good presentation, all that stuff? So yeah, the niche conferences is also a power play. I like the idea of starting your own. I've done that my whole career and man, has that paid off for me. If you throw the party, people remember you. People remember TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50, they, you know, Dropbox launched at that.

• 1:24:37Jason Calacanis?

  Gary Tan just tweeted me and Mike Arrington interviewing him and Tyler Crowley, my former like chief of staff, interviewing Gary Tan. Did you see that, Gary Tan? He found a video, he wrote me a very sweet note, it's gonna come on the pod. Gary just did a very public tweet where he's like, look at this, J Cal, and he sent me a very private note. He basically is like, wow, Jason Calacanis has done the same thing for 15 years consistently, which is support founders and interview them on his podcast and be enthusiastic. And he was just talking about how when he was young and he was just starting his career, I was kind to him, I guess. Look at where he is now, you know, great questions as always. All right, everybody, another amazing This Week in Startups is in the can. He's x.com/alex. Cautionsoptimism.news, throw him a hundy, subscribe and get Alex every day in his email newsletter.

• 1:25:22Jason Calacanis?

  I am, I think, calacanis.substack.com if you care about my newsletter, I'm starting to write a little bit more. And most importantly, write a review or put a comment, screenshot it and send it to the team at thisweekinstartups.com or DM it to us and we will shout you out at the end of the episode. Post a really great comment, if you post a really great review, we'll shout you and your company out. Give you a little promo for your company for free at the end of the show. If you write a review or post an intelligent comment on Spotify and YouTube and you can write reviews. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.