02:52:18 · Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan
[02:52:18] S2: They're private companies now. It sort of touches, touches everything, you know, these these services. I've, obviously, every con everybody alive is a consumer of these things. [02:52:28] S1: Yeah. [02:52:29] S2: You know? And as a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement, but, they tend to be owned privately in The US. So big utility companies, service providers, you know, pest control operators, like all different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, you know, the national interest and so on as well. [02:52:48] S1: Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or, like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?
02:52:48 · John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson, Micky Malka, Jordi Hays
[02:52:48] S1: Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or, like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain? [02:52:56] S2: It's, it's pretty severe everywhere. So, like, The US has got a you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a c minus or a d. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War two. And it's, like, course, like, typical American plan with a twenty year lifespan. We'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just you know, in a lot of places, it's, like, really held together with duct tape and and wire. And, so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure, and then you have a labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older, like, older technicians are aging out instead of it's a bigger economy now, I guess. You know? It's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signing up for the journey to be a, you know, twenty five year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's, crushing. I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure. Like, 30% of the water we clean up leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like, my town has wooden pipes, if you could believe that. What? It's crazy. [02:53:58] S8: I mean, it's pipe out [02:53:58] S1: of all. [02:53:59] S0: I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning but wood pipes That feels
02:53:59 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson
[02:53:59] S0: I know about I know about all the lead pipe that that our country depends upon to deliver water to to homes, which is concerning but wood pipes That feels [02:54:08] S1: like a good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm I'm down. Give me a wood punch. It's probably safer. I don't know. [02:54:15] S2: It's like I know. It's something a beaver. Don't know but it's it's bad. [02:54:18] S1: Like the [02:54:18] S2: fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in. [02:54:21] S0: Yeah. Yeah. So you're active in a bunch of different industries. Yeah. What is like, what is a go to market been? What is even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like, we're gonna help you leverage AI and it and it's looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model? Are you doing something different? [02:54:45] S2: Yeah. It's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first 100,000,000 in revenue. So it's like I was trying to figure out that that that path path through path to customer. [02:54:55] S0: We need a word for bootstrapping to a $100,000,000 run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it it it it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's Hawkinson's model, something like that.
02:54:55 · Jordi Hays, Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan, Micky Malka
[02:54:55] S0: We need a word for bootstrapping to a $100,000,000 run rate and then and then raising some capital later, but it it it it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's Hawkinson's model, something like that. [02:55:09] S2: There you go. Well, I've I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can, like, give warning at the other founders. But believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out. But I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. Mhmm. So it turns out that their, you know, private equity kind of sits and and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so and they're also very aligned with, like, five to seven year cycles where they wanna drive change, like, big EBITDA growth and change in these in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms instead of their their secret weapon for physical AI. [02:55:49] S1: Yeah. What yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side? [02:55:53] S2: Yeah. So we we just raised a $51,000,000 a. [02:55:58] S0: Let's go. Congratulations. [02:56:02] S2: Thank you. Yeah. Co led by Khosla Ventures Fantastic. And Inspired Capital. And we picked those guys because, you know, cost Khosla's super badass. They were, you know, the first and earliest check-in OpenAI. They'd lean forward into sort of the future of abundance. [02:56:18] S8: Yeah.
02:56:18 · Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:56:18] S8: Yeah. [02:56:18] S2: You're e you know, there and then Inspired is, a lot of people don't know about, but at New York based firm, deep they're in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So it's, it's good. [02:56:31] S0: Do you see do you think the company will always be a software, more of a software provider? Or is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market? [02:56:47] S2: It's a good question. You know, we provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines [02:56:51] S1: IoT devices. Yeah. [02:56:53] S2: Yeah. We have, like, sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers, and it ties all this, like, crazy distributed infrastructure into one big, like, physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And, we found some industries, like, are more efficient than others, but, like, the most efficient one we found like, give you an example is, like, 50% of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see. That's the most [02:57:18] S8: The most efficient one.
02:57:18 · Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan
[02:57:18] S8: The most efficient one. [02:57:20] S2: We found. A lot of them are, like, 90% of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to there's nothing to do. But you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see. Right now, we talk deeply with these operators. It's a great, great way to go fast. [02:57:48] S1: I was actually a customer of your previous company, SmartThings. What's the through line? What are the lessons that you learned from the first IoT company to new IoT devices? What what are the biggest lessons from that story? [02:58:02] S2: Man, you're you're welcome and and sorry, I guess. You know, that where it landed for you. But SmartThings was amazing. It was Yeah. You know, we grew it to today, it's, like, 500,000,000 households. It's, you know, more than 2,000,000,000 connected devices. Pretty big platform Yeah. All over the world. I guess what I learned so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IoT work. You know? It's it's matured a lot since then, and so, you know, those things are good. I think I I feel like I was solving the wrong problem, though. So my wife hated the not to say this in a bad way, but she, like, progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like Like wants regular light switches and stuff. Like she doesn't