00:35:37 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:35:37] S2: Dashboards. [00:35:37] S0: Yeah. It's like... And then he starts Amazon, but, you know, and then like, Jstie, Steve Jobs being the canonical heart based founder or something, know, the bicycle for the mind, the hippie on acid, you know, all this kind of other way, and I think this era of heart attack fenders are way more oriented on the heart based or something like that. Yeah, there's this interesting spiritual way. I think there's potentially interesting reasons for that. I mean, a lot of us grew... We're very, I think, impacted by something like COVID. A lot of us are typically in our later 20s now, but we're in college or something like that one had, it made me feel a little bit cheaters now, or we were forced to be in the digital world, so we feel to cause impact in the physical world, perhaps. There's, you know, maybe some potentially interesting reasons there, or maybe we're just more of a product of the times that we're in where more people are going back to organized religion, or we grew up through maybe kind of crazy woke era stuff or something like that, we're very colored by that. Yeah. Know you want to [00:36:36] S2: ask more about the robots, but do you want to talk about faith for a second? Because that's something that, I mean, that was something you would never talk about twenty years ago in Silicon Valley. [00:36:46] S1: But I'm [00:36:46] S2: curious about that. That has been a real sea change. How does that... Do you think it matters? Where does that come from?
00:36:46 · Chris Sacca, Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:36:46] S2: curious about that. That has been a real sea change. How does that... Do you think it matters? Where does that come from? [00:36:54] S0: I think it speaks to an underlying change in the world, I think. I think there's a... I mean, it's very important to me. It's how I've met, like, a lot of my closer... Like, closest friends here in San Francisco. I've been through, like, church. I live with three other guys. All of them are Christian. All of them run tech companies. And so, yeah, this has been how I've kind of found my community here. And yeah, it's definitely noticeable. And yeah, all of my friends who are typically Christian are also building companies in the real world or in some capacity. So using my small sample, I might have to use a student's t test to see the reliability of this, but there is definitely a correlation here with guys who believe in God and believe in heaven and believe in, like, I need to live a good life or else I don't go to heaven. And then they build these companies that make it rain, that do autonomous cargo, that do ocean robots, that, like, there's definitely [00:37:49] S1: Making it rain in particular is, you [00:37:50] S2: know That is literally biblical. [00:37:52] S1: Still, I have more questions on the robots. Sorry. [00:37:54] S0: Keep you [00:37:54] S1: bringing us back to the robots. [00:37:55] S2: Let's go.
00:37:55 · Chris Sacca, John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:37:55] S2: Let's go. [00:37:56] S1: If I have a bunch of offshore wind turbines... I don't, but if I did, and I wanted them to be flotsam and jetsam free, what are my options right now? Do I pay someone with a boast to go inspect them? So is this like a... You just sell cheaper inspections or... Broad shape. How are you selling to the... Like, what's the pitch meeting look like?: [00:38:17] S0: The broad shape... And again, the beauty of our business is that, like, the same way that business is done or operations, maritime operations are done for the Navy, for the ocean conservation, for the energy folks is all pretty much the same. Big, expensive surface shipping, as you know, we're not building ships fast enough these days, so it's like there's a backlog to even get the ship. Once you even get the ship, you're chartering it at, you know, an order of maybe a few $100,000 a day on that ship. [00:38:46] S2: What do they cost to make, by the way? We haven't really talked about the core economics of what you're making versus So, what they're yeah, on the underwater vehicle, we [00:38:55] S0: can sell them... So we primarily only sell them when we're working with navies. With the offshore industry folks that want to buy services office or running this, like, services business, but if you're working with a navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000 For contrast, the most common, like, autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is, like, somewhere on the order of maybe $5,000,000 so yeah.
00:38:55 · Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:38:55] S0: can sell them... So we primarily only sell them when we're working with navies. With the offshore industry folks that want to buy services office or running this, like, services business, but if you're working with a navy, we can sell them for as cheap as $50,000 For contrast, the most common, like, autonomous underwater vehicle that the US Navy is buying today is, like, somewhere on the order of maybe $5,000,000 so yeah. [00:39:18] S1: So you're targeting at two orders of magnitude costs improvement. [00:39:21] S0: Now, that's for the base vehicle, once you add the leather seats and the other nice things, you know. [00:39:25] S1: Premium subscription, yeah. [00:39:26] S0: Exactly, but no, and frankly, when you add advanced sensing, advanced navigation, but even still, it's like, then you get to one order [00:39:34] S1: of You [00:39:34] S0: have a [00:39:34] S1: low cost platform that then you can add sensors [00:39:35] S0: over So that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is like, you know, that is like less than a million dollars, more than maybe 500,000, but it depends.
00:39:35 · Will O'Brien, John Collison
[00:39:35] S0: over So that's the underwater vehicle. And the surface vehicle is like, you know, that is like less than a million dollars, more than maybe 500,000, but it depends. [00:39:46] S1: So Chris was flagging earlier, bad buyers kill companies, and I think this is true, where if you're selling to governments or multi year procurement cycles or something like that, just like fairly frequently, the company can run out of money before the buyer has a chance to finish the procurement process. It strikes me that you kind of have bad buyers where, I mean, you have some private companies buying from you and everything like this, but it's long procurement cycles and some selling to governments. And so how you deal with this fire? Or you can push back the premise, but the fact that ultimately your time to revenue is longer than for other companies.
00:40:27 · Will O'Brien
[00:40:27] S0: You know, so right now, the two main groups we're selling to are, yes, Navy and offshore energy, and yes, both of them have, you have to go through, and on the energy side, you have to do all these health and safety things. You have to get onto a master services agreement. You have to ladder your way up to that. Government, kind of the same. You have to get on, put on a contract vehicle, get the clearances, all this stuff. I think they're actually the shape of business that venture companies are actually very well suited to go after. We can afford to invest the money in the R and D and wait because once you win those contracts, you're very sticky, actually. You're very sticky, and you're kind of hard to pull out, and they're like, they don't want to wait two years to put someone else in against you. I have always been attracted to... I mean, my first startup was kind of the first scooter sharing startup in The UK and Ireland, and that's where I learned to kind of sell to government, and I loved it. I loved it for two reasons. I mean, once you won a contract, it was very difficult to lose them because they're just very sticky customers, but also you're seeing your technology go into the hands of people that really need it. My underlying thesis around my own entrepreneurial path has been, first startup was going into transport and trying to change that. This is now going into the public domain, public good, working with defense, or going into the ocean in general, is a public good, and trying to deploy technology into it. But sixty years ago, the people working are thinking about these problems, most commonly, like transport and thing, not guys who were here in San Francisco. They were in some government job or something like that, and my underlying premise around technology has just always been, I think, public services or public domain technologies are maybe the most interesting because if you think that the smartest person in 1960 was probably going working in government, now they were going working in San Francisco, ergo, increasing share of the things that were previously the reserve of government are now going to be the reserve of private companies. It's like there is a future where Ulysses is the largest navy in the world. You know, we're the largest steward of the ocean.