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.
00:42:40 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:42:40] S1: The US Navy's pretty big. [00:42:42] S0: Yes. I bet he has more [00:42:43] S2: craft soon. But I'll tell you, as an investor, once these companies actually get to the contracting phase, they're very reliable [00:42:51] S0: and very [00:42:52] S2: and very bankable. So it may take some time, but that's what our business is, is to bridge that to where it comes through. And strangely, whether it's as a hard tech investor or even in some of the decarbonization work we do, one of the most sober and consistent customers for the work we do is the Department of Defense. [00:43:10] S1: But they're actually a good buyer. [00:43:11] S2: When you get to the people who actually get shit done at these organizations, they're incredibly well informed, and the decisions are apolitical and sober. And so when somebody comes inbound to him, that's the other thing. Like, when you see the Department of Defense or the Navy coming inbound to a startup, that's a new muscle that they didn't used to have. So they're paying attention. And when they come in and say, look, you solve a problem for us at one hundredth of the cost we pay today. [00:43:37] S1: Yes. [00:43:38] S2: So once we get to that contracting process, it may take a while to fill out your master service agreement, your SLAs and shit, but the reality is that's very bankable. [00:43:47] S1: And they're using you for mine clearing stuff, maybe? [00:43:49] S0: Yeah. So I might actually just go back to one of your original questions, how is work done on the ocean today and how are [00:43:55] S1: you different?
00:43:55 · John Collison, Will O'Brien
[00:43:55] S1: you different? [00:43:55] S0: Because it kinda makes the rest of the things clear and, again, draws a consistent throughline. So, again, most important work today is a few $100,000 for a ship per day to go out and do something On that ship, you're going, and then you're, like, typically have, like, a bunch of guys onboard. If you want to do something underwater, you put, like, this tethered vehicle, you're remote operating, and you look at the screens, and you take shifts, and you go and do the thing underwater. You find the mine. You repair the pipeline, whatever, you know, whatever it may be. So, again, they all have this shape. Plant seagrass. But then the problem is then it's like, okay, well, because due to, like, union laws and labor laws, it's like, okay, well, people can only max work, like, maybe eight hours a day, and you wanna work twenty four hours because you're going out there anyway, so you need three people then. And then it's like, okay, each of those people, like, has a manager, and, like, and then you have, like, the ship captain, and then you have the the second mate, and then you have, like, the guy who needs to cook the spaghetti, and then you have the doctor because you've gone over the eight people, and you left from The US port. It's like, so you end up with this massive crew, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day, and that's a broad shape of all the tasks underwater, so then the idea is if you can, yeah, do that autonomously, don't have any of the labor cost, you can control over Starlink, any nice, know...
00:45:03 · John Collison, Will O'Brien, Chris Sacca
[00:45:03] S1: Can you work in worse sea conditions than... [00:45:05] S0: Yeah, exactly. That's another thing, and you go [00:45:07] S2: fast as well. You can [00:45:08] S0: go fast with the water. Like, when people are board, you can't... You get seasick. [00:45:11] S1: Do you compete with the Neoprines for some of these, ceramic or those kind of folks? [00:45:18] S0: The ceramic don't have an underwater They're building ships, they're just gonna become a new shipyard. Got it. And I think where we're different maybe from an underworld or otherwise is the thing we're thinking about is like, again, robots will do an increasing share of the work in the future. Who builds the underwater ones? A lot of the folks in the defense sector are thinking, how do we make things go boom? Frankly, that's not an interesting technical problem for us. Any gnomnets can put C4 on a vehicle and make it go boom. The very difficult, interesting technical question is like, do you build a general purpose underwater robotic platform? And that's the thing that we think unlocks the ocean at scale. That's the thing that turns it from a $3,000,000,000,000 economy into a $10,000,000,000,000 plus place for commerce. [00:46:00] S1: The undersea cables, how worried should we be about that? [00:46:03] S0: Absolutely. Totally asymmetric. Like, Jesus. I think this is like, yeah, this is like one of the only movies. [00:46:11] S1: Do you guys have any undersea cable angle? Yeah,