01:07:06 · Miles Arnone, Jordi Hays
[01:07:06] S7: That's true, but I have a little different perspective on robots which may not be that popular, which is that there's a lot of hype around them. And the problem with robots is that they're attacking a pretty small part of the total production cost. It's largely the elimination of direct labor. And actually most of the cost and most of the time involves everything around that, a lot of waste. So the reality is that bringing robots in might take a few percentage points off your total cost at a very high capital expense. You're much better off, excuse me, trying to implement something like Toyota's lean production system to eliminate all the steps along the way that are wasteful, that don't add value to the product. But in The US, we're very techno centric and we like big step change improvements. And so robots are fun, and so we want robots instead of grinding it out and every week just pulling a quarter percent or a half a percent of the cost basis out by getting a little more efficient, which the Japanese, frankly and other cultures are better at. So we need to adopt more of that kind of ongoing bit by bit approach versus, oh, I'm gonna put robots here, get rid of all my labor, and all of a sudden I've solved my problems. That won't happen. [01:08:14] S0: Yeah. Yeah. No. It's very American to be like, well, we have this one trick that's gonna solve all of our problems. [01:08:20] S7: Yeah. AI will fix everything. AI is gonna solve all problems. Right?
01:08:20 · Miles Arnone, John Coogan
[01:08:20] S7: Yeah. AI will fix everything. AI is gonna solve all problems. Right? [01:08:24] S1: I like the way that sounds. Yeah. Alright. Take me through the Slate Auto story, the partnership, how that how that fits together with the company, and is there a plan to do more of those type of projects? It's a fascinating product and company that's very exciting, but interesting to see how you interface with it. [01:08:44] S7: Yeah. So Slate started as part of Rebuild and then spun out and Okay. Independently funded since that time. And they're developing a sub $25,000 electric pickup truck. [01:08:54] S1: Yeah. [01:08:55] S7: An interesting contrast to the motorcycle example you were talking about, the real value of the product there is not that it's electric versus ice. It's that it's cost effective. [01:09:04] S1: Yep. [01:09:05] S7: And there are a lot of people today who can't afford a new vehicle or even a reasonably well performing used vehicle. [01:09:10] S1: The average new car in America just hit over $50,000. I I was reading that today. It's... People are stretching out the payment plans to ten, twelve years for a new car. There's so much opportunity for for the lower end right now for sure. And so [01:09:24] S7: that's really something really cool. Go to the the parking lots of factories or burrito shops or whatever it is around the country and look at what people that work in those places have to drive, it's amazing that it makes it back and forth to work. [01:09:35] S1: 100%.
01:09:35 · John Coogan, Miles Arnone, Jordi Hays
[01:09:35] S1: 100%. [01:09:36] S7: Yep. So anyway, this business was started to address that problem. And as I mentioned earlier in the context of drones, the real insight that SLAIT has leveraged is they've reduced the vehicle to its minimum sort of function and their plant has been designed to produce one product, one SKU over and over again, much lower capital cost, much more cost effective. And then the product's designed so that you can modify it downstream of production very easily. So for example, each vehicle comes in the same color, slate gray, but you can wrap the whole vehicle in any color almost for five hundred dollars Yeah. Which is much more cost effective than typically. [01:10:13] S1: And you can modify it, like turn it into an SUV and stuff. There's a whole bunch of [01:10:17] S7: an SUV.... [01:10:18] S1: Bunch of kits that are really... [01:10:19] S7: Lots of options. So Rebuild today is a supplier to Slate. We we produce components for part of the vehicle, but it's an independent business that was born of Rebuild and is off doing its thing. And to your point earlier, that's part of our model at Rebuild is to help companies like that, whether we instantiate them or someone else, to reach critical mass. [01:10:38] S0: Jordan? Very, very cool business.
01:10:38 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Miles Arnone
[01:10:38] S0: Jordan? Very, very cool business. [01:10:40] S1: Tell us about the fundraise. Tell us about the partnership with, JPMorgan. I was, listening to Jamie Dimon talk about, JPMorgan's $1,500,000,000,000 security and resiliency initiative. This feels adjacent to that, but I'd love to hear about the fundraise. I wanna smash the gong, and then I wanna hear about how JPMorgan interfaces with you. [01:11:01] S7: Great. Yes. I mean, this this fundraise, which was 2,100,000,000, Boom. It's a good time. I appreciate that. Was was led by both JPMorgan Chase and General Catalyst. [01:11:15] S1: That's right. [01:11:16] S7: These are two firms that have very long term perspective on their investment horizon. Right? And so Yeah. What we're trying to do, is rebuild industrial capacity here, is a long term play. And so they've been great partners, and their networks are fantastic, and their money is quite green. And so between those two things, we can, I think, build this business to be the multi billion dollar manufacturing company that will hopefully help set an example and encourage many others to participate in the space? [01:11:45] S0: Yeah. I was gonna say multi trillion. But Yeah. [01:11:49] S7: Yes. Many of our board members would go for that too. Just a little longer. [01:11:52] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little longer.
01:11:52 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Rahul Sengottuvelu
[01:11:52] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just a little longer. [01:11:54] S1: Yeah. No. No. I love it. Love it. It's a great it's a great partnership. Jack McAllister doing so much interesting stuff on the hospital side, getting into reindustrialization now, and they have been previously, and then JPMorgan doing so much more there as well. It's a great partnership. Yeah. [01:12:08] S0: And I appreciate you're... You you maybe should be more hype seeking just because you guys have pretty... You know, had tremendous results and made incredible progress in a very short period of time. But I appreciate how pragmatic you are and just focus on focus on the basics. And I think it's what we need. So great to meet you, Miles. Thank for coming on. [01:12:28] S1: Thank you very much. So much for coming on. [01:12:29] S0: Come back on soon. [01:12:30] S1: Always welcome. Goodbye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Up next, we have Rahul from Ramp, a CTO coming on to TPN. Welcome. [01:12:48] S0: There he is. [01:12:49] S1: Rahul, how are doing? I'm doing. Thank you so much for taking the time. [01:12:53] S0: What's happening? [01:12:54] S1: What's going on with this artificial intelligence thing? Anything anything there? [01:13:00] S5: What's going on with AI? [01:13:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, here are lot of... But you think it's the real deal?
01:13:01 · John Coogan, Rahul Sengottuvelu
[01:13:01] S1: Yeah. I mean, here are lot of... But you think it's the real deal? [01:13:06] S5: I I think it's totally real. I mean, we... There's there's not that many companies who interact with a lot a lot of American businesses and and and provide AI to them. So we see it. We see the hype. We see the other side too. [01:13:18] S1: And Okay. [01:13:19] S5: It's great to bring value as well. [01:13:20] S1: Yeah. I mean, I love I love the data that's coming out of the Ramp Economics Lab. I love the products that you're working on. What are customers asking for? And then I'm also interested in what are you seeing that customers aren't necessarily asking for, but you want to be able to deliver before they even know to ask for it? [01:13:40] S5: Yeah. I mean, so one of the focuses for us is to help businesses automate their finance Yeah. And manage their money, how to control their spend. And we've we've been going after the long tail. So we launched accounts receivable this year. We've been doing bill pay for a couple years. Yep. We we have a bank account now, so Mhmm. Ramp Treasury. Yep. We do travel. So we're really just going after all the spend. Our customers tell us because they... We we hear from them what what they're frustrated about and where where their pain points are. But today, I'm actually here to talk about inspect. We just launched our our coding tool, I'm super excited to talk about Yeah.