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
02:58:02 · Alex Hawkinson, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[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 [02:58:41] S1: stop Yeah. Totally. Your [02:58:42] S0: always know. [02:58:43] S1: That was my that that was my experience. Like I there was like magical and then slowly like little like like hiccups creep in and those Yeah. Like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology are these that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot. [02:58:57] S0: Had I had a A 100% [02:58:58] S1: of the block. [02:58:59] S2: Market. Wrong market. You know, it's not a [02:59:01] S1: big enough. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I'd I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to, make the make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me ninety seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. Maybe I should but Well, I'll be
02:59:01 · John Coogan, Alex Hawkinson, Jordi Hays
[02:59:01] S1: big enough. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I'd I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. What do you think they need to do to, make the make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me ninety seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. Maybe I should but Well, I'll be [02:59:20] S2: negative on Sonos but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then Yep. Eventually. [02:59:26] S1: Same thing. [02:59:27] S2: Yeah. And, it's in the orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of, like, great gear. [02:59:32] S1: Okay. Yeah. [02:59:33] S2: It's the most they have, like, the best sound and all that stuff, but talk about, like, missing the software opportunity [02:59:39] S1: Yeah. [02:59:39] S2: Like, every stage in the company. [02:59:41] S1: Totally. [02:59:41] S2: And, you know, I just don't see you know, it's sort of Alexa sort of faded out in a way. Apple Home, it's not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really like, Sonos has this opportunity to, like, own they could be the thing that, like, unlocks things like ChatGPT. [02:59:57] S0: Well, yeah, John's [02:59:57] S1: idea John's [02:59:58] S2: idea is that they should buy [03:00:00] S1: My idea was was Sonos is trading at what, like, billion market cap or something? Yeah. My idea was OpenAI literally bought them. [03:00:07] S0: They shipped, like, 5,000,000 devices.