#35 - Elliot F. Poirier, Co-Founder of Watoga

0:00If you blast and you fuck up, you're just stuck with a pile of rock that absolutely sucks. This isn't like a small pile of rock. How often are the initial blasts fucking up right now? Today, I'm super excited to interview Elliot, the co-founder and CEO of Watoga. Watoga is building the AI operating system for the mining industry here in Quebec. Yes, very correct. Yes. All right. Let's start this off with, you said last year you were in Vegas for a mining conference and you almost got stabbed. What's the story behind that? Well, so basically like when we started the company, I was just like not having a job.

0:40And we wanted to like maximize going out to conferences, meeting people in the industry and so on. So when I went to like Mine Expo, which was the conference in Vegas, happens every four years. Absolutely amazing conference. Like Caterpillar spent$12 million on their booth. They had like trucks where the wheels are three times my height. Fantastic. um but so when i was booking my hotel there i couldn't get something expensive so i literally filtered by cheapest and i got this hostel that was literally eight dollars canadian a night that's like six yeah exactly and so i didn't really look at anything about the area or whatever so i get there i'm on the flight then i start talking to the lady next to me she's she goes like oh what neighborhood are you staying in?

1:27And I tell her the neighborhood, her face drops. And I'm like, doesn't seem ideal. So I look it up and it was like an F tier, like crime neighborhood, like 4X the murder rate and so on. I think like the first night I spent there, I took a shower and I felt dirtier after the shower. And like, I was like going to bed and I was just, I don't know I just felt like I needed to succeed because I could like this was just like it was that much of a realization in that moment um so the story with getting stabbed is that one night I went out with some people from from like industry and so on went for drinks and we go out to like 1 a.m or something like that and it was basically like a 50 minute walk from the strip to the um to the the hostel and while I'm walking back I'm like I'm listening to a like an audiobook or something and this guy just like from from a random corner kind of calls out and he goes like hey bro come over here and I'm like he starts getting closer so I just like as soon as he started getting closer to me I just like bolted it and that's kind of the story like he didn't But it was just so sketchy.

2:48And in the morning when I would walk to the strip, there would just be people injecting next to me on the street. One time I was going back to the hostel and there was this lady from a strip club nearby, fully naked in the parking lot, just drinking vodka. And I was like, what the hell is going on? There were signs that maybe a little bit sketchy. Yeah, but I mean, tough times have passed. So like I could get a$16 hostel. You're not quite playing poverty sim anymore. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Do you want to just talk about like how you got into the mining industry in the first place? Yeah. I mean, if you want to go way back, Minecraft.

3:32But that was just like when I was a kid, I just really liked automating a lot of systems in like the in the like modern Minecraft where you make like your nuclear reactor. You automate all the pipelines. There was also like quarrying in this one specific mod pack I would play called Tech It and like I would make these quarries where every mineral was like sent to its respective processing unit and I always really enjoyed that but then like When I when I was in high school I considered doing like physics, but I also considered doing politics because I was very into like economics like history geopolitics and so on and and I ended up going more the politics route just because my older brother is like a pretty successful entrepreneur so my take was that he would kind of do business I would do politics and then we would end up like ruling over Canada so I went down the like politics track and kind of hid my like passions for like math more like engineering automation these types of things for a while actually I campaigned for the liberal government of Canada do you want to talk about that?

4:35I don't know. It's one of my biggest regrets. That's all I'll say. How did you get into it and like what made you decide to kind of leave? So what's funny is that when I was in high school and seizure, since I was surrounded by a lot of French speakers, I was a very devout federalist. So I was like, okay, Canada needs to stay a whole. These independentists are ridiculous. economically it makes much more sense for Quebec to stay in Canada. And then when I went to uni, I was just at McGill, and everyone spoke English, and no one spoke French. I was like, okay, we are actually doomed if we don't secede.

5:15So that just turned me into an independentist. And so when I was in high school, obviously, as I said, much more of a federalist, and I really liked the Liberal Party at the time. It's kind of more left-leaning back then. It's patriotic, but more left-leaning. And so I ended up like campaigning for Justin Trudeau. And like, yeah. Do you want to talk about like going from the transition? You know, you said that you were kind of like a communist at the beginning when you were a kid. And then over time, you shifted towards being so much more capitalist. I was more left-leaning in like high school and C-GEP.

5:51CGEP is like the in-between step between like high school and university. And then when I got to uni, ironically, I was studying finance, but I like just became a communist, like straight up. I was like going to the marches. I was part of like Socialist Strike Back, which is like an association and so on. And I think like it was a two-step process going away from this. firstly like after two semesters in finance I was just like this is not a real degree and I just switched to honors math and like I got like super into theory so I was not thinking about politics that much anymore I was just like okay this graph is very cool and has nice properties instead and so that was like the first step that kind of like led me to believing in divinity to some extent like if you study enough math you kind of just like start seeing a bunch of patterns and I was like dance cool and like that just made me believe there was something greater um because it's like beautiful or what it's just bro like you know you can bound how close you can get to irrational numbers that's like one of my favorite theorems it's like uh diophantine approximations it's you can you can bound how close you can get to irrational numbers and what's insane about that is irrational numbers are like kind of akin to like reality right you're gonna have a measurement of 10 meters but it's not actually 10 meters it's this abstract measure that you can't have you can actually bound that like mathematically which is insane and like so just seeing all these patterns as well like sometimes you you solve a math problem and like the main tricky part is the proof not the actual solution because like the solution will come intuitively because it makes sense as like a as just like a continuation of things and just that intuition aspect to how these patterns form is very like uh inspiration i don't know it just like breeds kind of this beauty and it's like yeah coherent order lights you up a little bit yeah yeah yeah um but yeah so that was like the first step and then like um i started going more and more on trips with my brother and at some and at some point he brought me to New York to an event with like a bunch of his founder friends and so on and I was just like talking to them kind of like just being a rambling communist like very just annoying it's like no but this is how we need to do things the government needs to like do all these things and they were just like yeah I'm just like building a company that does that and I was like oh you just you just do things instead so that that was like the big unclick and And then I like started reading more into that space.

8:35What do you think? What kind of like impact, you know, other than just kind of converting a little bit? Did that like trip? I think it was the David Sinra, you know, Patrick. It was actually before that. It was like I think it was a year before that we it was just like kind of a house party. There's just a bunch of founders. I like played chess with a bunch of people. And also the other thing I found when I like met with these people is like it was a group of people who I felt the most kind of like understood. and like akin to that ever been around like I think every every step in education I got like closer to that type of group but like when I was over there it was just like everyone was very passionate about history but also like interested in kind of like math sciences and like it was very like renaissance men in a way and that was very appealing I feel I find just kind of like being surrounded by builders yes but it's just like all the interests were so aligned and like I don't know the same type of jokes the same type of like interests and everything like so it just like fit really well uh and I was like okay this is kind of like this is what I'm meant to like do um and in terms of more so getting into like the mining space honestly that so I did a year in math I did my degree in math right uh which was very theoretical very like like proving these abstract theories without like any application which is like academic yeah yeah and for the first year I was like actually uh like my my take was that I would become an academic I would like become a prof in like something like in probability theory which is one of my favorite fields um and so uh during that first year i was like just very academic after a year i feel like what what what tends to happen is if i was uh immortal i would do like a billion math bhds because they're just really fun like it's a puzzle it's very nice to like it's very it's a very good way to see structure in the world where there isn't um but when you're doing it and you have a finite lifespan It feels like you're running in sand or gravel like you're kind of like stuck It's you're not actually doing not getting anywhere.

10:51You're doing a lot of legwork for very little That's what I would say so after a year I was like I don't think I can spend my whole life proving that like This graph is bipartite or like these types of very abstract problems like I had a friend who was just finishing his masters and He did this like weird problem where it was like just proving that like Like, oh, no, this wasn't a friend. It's just like this guy that one of my friends met, like he was doing 6N minus 1 is always prime or semi prime. And like he spent three years on that. Just on one problem? Yeah, bro. That's so like it's cool.

11:33It's like a cool problem. I'm sure the proof is beautiful. But like spending three years, like your peak, like I don't know. that's that's horsepower and all the energy that you're ever going to have yeah yeah so because of that i i was looking at like i was just starting to look at more applied fields maybe getting into like a company building and so on and around the same time like around three three and a half four years ago i went to dinner with my brother and a bunch of his friends and then one of his friends had his own consulting firm and a lot of clients in the mining sector and so i was kind of still a bit of a like a left-leaning back then so I spent the we spent the whole dinner him trying to convince me to vote for the Conservative Party but as a side side note he was also just telling me that like my whole generation was dumb because we weren't going into critical industries notably mining it was like everyone's like very old they're all gonna retire like I'm sure Ted said this during his podcast but like in the US by 2020 by 2030 50 % of mining engineers are retiring.

12:40Yeah. Like that's like hundreds of thousands of people, right? Yeah. That's, that's like ridiculous. Uh, so that kind of caught my attention. I started looking at, at it from more of like a supply chain angle, like where we're dependent, where we're getting our minerals. And like the, if you look at the processing numbers specifically, it's just, it's just doomed. Like it's so brutal. Like so much of critical minerals are like fully like majority processed in China, like copper, nickel, like a lot of these elements are just majority process in China. And since they own all the demand, they can just fluctuate market prices and then snap up assets in the US sphere of influence, which ends up damaging our supply chains.

13:25Because you can build all the defense manufacturers you want. If China's like, OK, you don't get any more lithium or rare earths, you're kind of fucked. um and so from from like that i started talking to a lot of professors at mcgill um because we have like uh third best mining engineering program in the world uh so like a lot of really good research is coming out of there and or do most of the like mining founders that are operating in canada or quebec kind of come out of that university or are there even very many mining startups i would say there's more here because the government There's basically zero in the U.S.

14:03It's like almost none. There's like none. But you guys like forgot mining existed for like 40 years. No need to throw shade.

14:16Aside, you do have the best mining engineering school in the world. Colorado School of Mines is actually number one. But you have like three schools. Yeah. You all like concentrated effort on Colorado School of Mines. There are like, I would say what's interesting is in, specifically in operations, a lot of the software in the mining sector were built by like McGill grads, actually. It's very interesting. Like you go to these conferences and you like find out who designed this McGill grad. It's like, it's a, the ubiquitous McGill grad is very common in like software and mining.

14:57but yeah so like just started talking to a lot of profs started reading a lot of papers started auditing classes I still remember this one class like stochastic or body modeling which was like a grad level class and the prof at the beginning goes like who who like which which faculty are you from and then like most people mining engineers and then like and and then like he's like who's the rest and like the rest like geology right and then there's just me and then he's like what are you in and I'm like math everyone's like what um so started doing that I kind of like fell in love with the industry by doing that just because it like it re-tapped into this kind of like automation and like really love for like industrial things that I had as a kid and like just an operating mind is like very heavily reliant on like statistics and optimization uh like the three aspects are really statistics optimization and people and like statistics optimization are my favorite fields in math it's genuinely how it's just like applying the stuff that you'd actually be doing exactly you know a theorem for three or four years you're just applying all of it and building a company yeah what's what's really interesting about that is like i would read these papers go see the prof afterwards and it's like it's so cool that i can like see the math i learned being applied then the profs would be like you know this is like super academic and I'm like what like I'm used to like proving like a 27th dimensional cube like something like that and so I think that aspect really like I really like that but also just the fact that it's like it's the coolest form of a factory in the sense that like you have this added problem which is like you have an information theory problem right because you have a factory where you don't know what's going into it and it's just I don't know it's like a semi divine process in the sense that you're just taking rocks and converting into like useful metal that all basically through that I really fell in love with the space ended up doing research at McGill in mind planning optimization with with the professor professor Alessandro Navarra which is one of our advisors for the company he was honestly like like uh very helpful in my journey of like getting into mining because he did one uh he did a master's in applied math actually so he had a lot of appreciation for like uh mathematics applied to uh to mining and um and so i did research and i tried to start another company before this one actually what was that so that one was uh also it had a terrible name it's called it was called the first name was just like a gimmick we called it palantir for mining uh but like this so i still own the repo uh funnily enough like this company is more akin to that but um the the name we gave it was behelit which is a berserk reference which is just the stone in berserk that represents like uh divine like ambition and like just the fact that your destiny is like foretold.

18:10Do you want to talk about like where the name Watoga comes from? Yeah, sure. So I played a lot of Fallout. There's actually a lot of Fallout decorations like sparsed around here when I was a kid. And I really like the lore and I kind of like the world in Fallout. And so Watoga is this like fully autonomous city in Fallout built by both Robco, which is like a gigantic robotics company, and then AMS, which is Atomic Mining Services, which is a company that builds fully autonomous mines. And our first product is named Rockhound, which is one of the locations in Fallout 76, which is a massive mine that was fully automated.

18:59And actually, what's what's really interesting is uh like uh my co-founder sam who's who's a mining engineer he got uh he got me like a a rock hound magic card from the collaboration and the only place where that card was available in like the shiny format was montreal which is i don't know that's just really cool like it was the only place in north america that had that card crazy why did you guys decide to like base the company here yeah so that was that was very challenging for us like we we really tried to figure out a way that it would make sense to stay in else in el segundo because like we really like the the culture there the the work ethic and and so on it just made so much more sense for us to come back to is it like closer to your customers and literally the fifth floor in this building is someone who runs a nickel mine.

19:54So LA has no mining people. Like, that's a big problem. Like, if we were to walk outside right now, we're like five minutes away from several very big mining companies as headquarters. And so we're much closer to our customers. Honestly, the talent we need for this company is we have much better talent in Montreal, all because we have a great uh ml research center and we also have um like very good mining engineering universities so what ends up happening is some of the research from this machine learning institute is people working on on like ml products just way easier to hire people here exactly it's it's much more logical from that point of view also i mean the government is much more helpful to startups in terms of like grants and so on here um the like the main the main honestly the main factor that's like a disadvantage being here is that um for all my love of Quebec the Quebec work ethic is very lax and uh and so that's kind of why we like at the beginning we like has we considered very briefly getting just a WeWork space so this would be like super easy to do.

21:07And then like we had worked out of my brother's WeWork for a while before we did the syphilis. And like, it's just, it's a toxic environment if you're trying to build a great company, because you go get coffee and you hear like the French dev next to you saying like, oh, I'm going to clock out at four to go like rock climbing. I just need to like, I'm just doing tickets for the day, which just like, if you have that all surrounding you, it's very negative. so at least we have our own space and uh me and sam the mining engineering co-founder we we live here so like uh we we don't get contaminated yeah but at the same time it's kind of nice to like we're like literally 30 seconds away from the most beautiful church in quebec and just being surrounded by like such beautiful architecture just like very nice a little bit inspiring exactly exactly yeah so do you want to talk about like the right at the like the very beginning of of Watoga and what the initial idea was that you guys kind of came in with?

22:07Yeah. How do you came up with it? So as I mentioned earlier, I tried to start another company before this one, something called stochastic or body modeling, which was like kind of inspired by reading a lot of papers. And so what that is, is basically like when you're doing your feasibility study for the mind. So that's like still in the exploration phase. You're not building yet. You're going to build something called a block model. And so you're going to block out chunks of the mineralized region. And so how you're going to assign grades, like the most popular method right now is multi-indicator kriging, which is a fancy word for weighted average factor in like anisotropy and like the skew of the deposit.

22:47So you basically take all your assays and then for every block, you're going to average out, like do a weighted average factoring in the skew. And that's going to give you your grade. The big problem with that is it gives you one estimate and you have no quantification of how uncertain it is. And so stochastic or body modeling, what it does instead is you take all of your assay points. So these are like the drill holes that Teddy gets. And you basically turn that into a random field over that region. And then you sample your blocks several times. So you get several equally probable deposits. And that gives you an idea of what...

23:26really like helps you understand the area you're thinking about basically gives you a distribution on the amount of ore in the ground so you can understand like the risk better and you can do mine planning under uncertainty with that which basically means you're you're optimizing on highest expected value instead of optimizing on one deposit estimation which is most likely wrong so is up until today have most mines operated on this like you basically like single shot it look at your data once and then just go for it? Just start mining? I mean, there's multiple stages to this, right? So like, uh, you're, you're gonna get like inferred versus like, uh, I forget the other term.

24:04Uh, there, there's like several classifications for, for resource and it's based on the amount of data available. So when you do drilling campaigns, you're gonna like, um, get a tighter and tighter grid to define the resource better and better. And then when you get to a point where the grid is tight enough, these, by the way, there's like legal regulation on this, on the tightness of this grid. And so when you get to a point where it's tight enough, you're like legally allowed to like output of NI-43-101, which is the Canadian like technical report standard. And then you can build a mine if it's like seems it's deemed profitable based on that with like some margin, obviously, because there's always like, like per the mining engineering handbook, when you start a mine, like when it's constructed and you start operating, you typically still have 30 % uncertainty.

24:49Really? It's so it's, it's pretty sizable. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So you're basically trying to help like mines way better understand what they are, or, you know, mining companies way better understand what they have. Um, it's, it's, it's, yeah. So to some extent it is like better resolution. Um, I mean, I'll, I'll just close out on the first company cause I just want to close that thread. So like The reason that that didn't work out is basically I just read a lot of papers and then started going to conferences after. And when I started going to conferences, I basically realized that prospectors do not really want to have this risk profile or better understanding because they have to pitch to their investors.

25:35So if they have one estimate, they can kind of sell the story around that. But if they have a risk profile, the investor is going to ask, why is this not profitable 50 % of the time? And so that ends up like being a downside for them. So I wound that down and like I was actually initially like going to go for a master's in mining edge. And then I met one of my co-founders, which is Sam, who's a mining engineer from McGill as well. And we just met like late night at the library, just like he was kind of surprised to see like someone in math interested in mining. and so we start like he did most of his internships in drill and blast he actually got second in um the biggest uh drill blast competition in north america and what is a drill blast competition they give you um they give you like uh it depends right it depends on the competition but like you're probably gonna have to do a blast plan for a specific thing i think in his specific case it was they were doing like a stope design for like a mine in BC and he had to like design the drill holes and like do the analysis like a void ratio and a bunch of these like technical characterization for the the specific blast and so from like all a lot of his experience he started showing me a lot of the software in the space and there was like it was very outdated like legacy software that is like there's poor integration across like all parts well but like the airline industry where there's just like no software updates since like the 1980s it kind of exactly yeah and so the big problem is like it's super fragmented like we've we've been on calls with mining engineers where their workflow has 10 different softwares we're just like what and that's like excluding the Microsoft suite so like admittedly most cases are not as bad as that but still and so there's poor integration between all parts if you want to be able to do the like competent analysis you typically have to do a lot of manual data entry and they typically don't have time because like mines are very time constrained you're trying to send rocks to to your mill like and that's the number one priority so if you have to get that plan out in six hours or like a day it's going to get out in a day no matter what the analysis is needed is and so like a lot of manual data entry and the the models they use to like predict like fragmentation or like movement of the rock a lot of them are very outdated like empirical models that you would need to calibrate a lot for it to get like near useful exactly so because of all these reasons like okay we should definitely like explore this at first what we were thinking is like really focusing just on material movement so like when you blast how does the the rock move because that is a big problem and like that causes dilution you want to explain what blasting is um so basically you have a polygon of rock which you have to design as well and then you're going to place drill holes in it and you're going to place them in a specific pattern based on like the desired outcome.

28:53So based on the direction, based on the rock properties of that bench, like how do you want it to move. So you're going to place those drill holes and then you're going to fill them with explosives, then put like tiny rocks on top so it doesn't like blow upwards, and then you're going to sequence it in a specific way, and then that's going to blow up the rock. The main reason like this is the way it's done is just in terms of energy efficiency, efficiency like chemical explosives are like basically unmatched like in terms of like a price right typically like um the the size reduction of rock is a cycle called like comminution so that's like reducing the size and typically whenever you go up a medium it goes up 10x in price so blasting would be like let's say blasting is one dollar then crushing would be 10 and then um um milling which is like uh like a ball mill or a sag mill or something like that uh would be a hundred and so it's just way more efficient to use dynamite or so you want to you want to use as much explosives to reduce the size you still have to use crushing and and uh and milling right like you still have to do it because you want to break up the rock as much as possible on a super cost efficient explosives yeah and then you go up the cost curve exactly yeah because you still have to do that right it has to be in powder form for the for the actual like uh processing steps but you want it to get as close to that as possible before going into those steps because because then you're going to save a lot of money and there's technicalities here where like you want optimal fragmentation you don't want minimal fragmentation in all cases where like for example lithium if you have if your fragmentation is too small like if you have too much of something called fines like too much powder it's actually negative and why is that um the reason why lithium is uh like fines are more expensive is because uh you're going to lose some recovery when you get to the mill so you want it actually perfect size you don't want minimum size and like every every like mineral metal and like specific mill design is going to have like an optimal size fragmentation but typically mining operations are more so on the large side of things where like you're not blasting small enough typically if you're like a drill and blast like consultant where you go to sites to like help them optimize this this type of problem if the mill calls you and the particle size is too small that's typically a compliment it's a bad thing no that's a compliment because if you can get it to that point that's usually a good thing it's just like it's not ideal okay all right so when you're thinking through the like first is it basically like you're making mines more efficient and especially the process of just starting a mine?

31:38We are making them more efficient in a lot of ways. Like our goal is to make really this like AI powered kind of OS for the mining operation where we will be building some hardware later on, like for sensors and for specific use cases, but most of it will be software. And so the goal is really like, as soon as you collect operational data, that goes into kind of our digital twin of the mine, which is like a collection of machine learning models that are going to end like geostats models basically whatever works best we're not like ml focused you know but so it goes into all these models dynamically updates the way it's so like you always have the best predictions and then updates your your schedule and your like predictions on like what the next actions to take are so the first product we're really focusing on is drill and blast and grade control um and why is that so important like why is that a great first product so two reasons i mean first of all sam is a drill and blast engineer so like it made a lot of sense to start here but also it's a very like fragmented space it's also one of the most like discrete time step actions in terms of like if you have if you have to like um if you have to view a mine through time you would probably view it through blasts in the sense like it's chunks taken out of the pit um or like stopes if you're underground um and so there's there's that aspect for sure but the other aspect is like it's an undoable act uh it's not an undoable act sorry uh where if you blast and you fuck up you're just stuck with a pile of rock that absolutely sucks and that's going to cost you a lot of money to move because it's like also like for context right this isn't like a small pile of rock like a typical bench like a blast benches are going to be like 10 to 15 meters high maybe like 40 to 100 meters deep and then like 60 to 100 meters long so it's a massive massive area yeah huge amount of rock so that's like a whole you have that pile of rock afterwards you have to move that yeah so like it is it is a huge pile of rock so if you fuck up that you're like that's going to cost you a lot of money how often are you know the initial blasts like fucking up right now it depends what you define as fucking up but like um done inefficiently like done the wrong way i would say it mainly depends on the mine where you have some mines that are like absolute like works of art like malarctic mine in uh in quebec is like an absolute work of art like it's extremely well run um it was like the one of the first internships for sam and i think it was his first which mineral are they taking out gold gold okay they make around like two to three billion in profit a year two three billion in profit that's like one mine okay yeah yeah that's not a bad business but like they they just like it's run so efficiently it's like it's a beautiful asset and do they have like a massive deposit i imagine they do they they have a really good deposit but also it's like uh it's low tonnage uh sorry it's a low grade high tonnage which is a specific type of mine where like the most the more optimized you get the better like the performance more so than like narrow veins where you have like some mines that will just have like, um, like in, in Malartic's case is just like, they have a bunch of gold everywhere.

35:12It's low grade in a lot of mines. You're just going to have like, you have these very narrow veins and in those veins, you have like insane amounts of gold, but like, there's nothing around it. So, um, in their case, they really had to optimize a lot in terms of that. Um, in terms of like fuck ups, as I said, it depends on the mind, but some minds will have like, like fairly frequently per year and then there's also like the other issue which is like you might you might not consider this blast like like you didn't fuck it up but like it could have been like way better mentally better or like way better if you had like better pattern if you in a lot of cases where like um the departments and mining will be siloed so drill and blast is optimizing for its bottom line uh and then like the grade control which is the geology is optimizing for its bottom line and then all of operations is a separate entity than the mill but the thing is like you should connect your drill and blast with the mill because typically if you increase like uh the the the costs of your drill and blast department you're going to get lower costs in the mill by like 10x as i as i mentioned earlier so like improvement in the in the on the blasting side will leave to ma uh to massive you can make some like uneconomical mine done poorly become actually extremely profitable exactly yeah exactly so the the this like siloing of departments is a big problem and yeah is is the goal like to is the long-term goal basically it becomes so good at understanding minds that you just want to do the mining side yourself like buying mines or buying plots of land like how does that happen yeah so that's kind of that's kind of our long-term goal um like i think in a lot of like in mining for the most part if you want to be able to build like a massive company and like actually capture most of the value you're generating you have to go for like a services model at the very least if not asset ownership um and that's kind of what you're seeing with a lot of these startups and mining that end up going for one of these two approaches because like just doing sass alone typically does not like get the result that you want yeah exactly um so yeah our goal is like right now we're just focusing on developing the tech and like case studying it making sure like we prove out that it works as intended.

37:34But like, as soon as like next year, we'll be looking at working into services where we like, we would do all the drill and blast for a site or for a query, might be looking at getting into like surveying, mind planning. So right now you're building the software and eventually you're going to like build a company that's really, really good at actually executing on the information that you gather or like the insights that you have. Exactly. Yeah. Because you still like our software is not fully autonomous, right like it could be to some extent but you don't really want it to be you um i mean first of all uh for us it's it's like uh if you if you let an ai model output blast that get like put into the field that's a huge liability but the other reason is like um there might be some like insight the guy sees that is not necessary like you you always want to guide this especially with something as critical as blasting because like there's a lot of safety concerns here obviously yeah and so our model basically like our software basically does 90 of the work and it automates a lot of the data analysis and the trying out different scenarios that you would just not have time to do in a normal mining operation so an engineer still has to review it and stamp it but we've already like basically you get to the design meeting which would typically be a kickoff where you talk about what you should think about on this bench.

38:59And instead, when you get to this meeting with our software, you just have all the most likely scenarios for this bench and several blast plans for each of them with the forecasted performance. So it automates a lot of these steps and a lot of the work. And so going back to the services thing, our goal would basically be we use our own software. We just provide you with the blasts. and it's like way faster but also improves your performance is the like information collection going to be a big uh hurdle or is this something where you're just like getting information from you know it's it's already like useful information to get from a mine yeah and you're just creating like a digital twin and so people understand right now we're using like anything the mine already has as like sensors and instrumentalization and so on uh the pipelining is a bit tricky so like right now we're like implementing it custom per site but uh it will just like we'll be able to just stack these tools and at the end of the day there's like four oems that matter so like we just make integrations with them we've already been in talks with them and they they already were like willing to just like give us like a direct talk about like building those relationships and how you did it uh or how you're not gonna lie like with the oems it was just cold outreach it's like honestly we've been brutal at the cold outreach game like one of our one of our uh one of our advisors uh which is just absolute goat in mining uh man like jonathan peck um he basically he invented like gps tracking on uh like equipment and mining and then he invented measurements while drilling on like production drills and so uh he sold both of his companies to caterpillar and just absolute he's just like build companies and then sell them but he's just like when you talk to him he's just like an absolute legend um niche figure in mind his linkedin doesn't even have a profile pic like he's just like a hidden man that's how you know he's good he's also so he's also based in montreal so that might be another reason we're here because jonathan peck is here yeah there's just like way there's there's a whole bunch of people and like talent stuff you can't find elsewhere exactly yeah um but yeah so like literally him the way we got contact to him is i basically emailed every single person in his department until he like how many people were in the department it was like five or ten people like 10 to 15 i think like that and they just like kept all referring to him and they're like these guys are so annoying like and at some point we were like we were reaching out to a lot of like mining people for doing like customer discovery and so on.

41:33This one company, Alamos Gold, we reached out to them so much. Because we were using our McGill emails because they have better optimization and so on. When you use a school email, it has more chance to get through the firewall. Oh, it doesn't bounce? Yeah. Crazy. Okay. And so we emailed them so much. They emailed McGill to get us to stop emailing them. What did they respond with? I assume they emailed something like, please some of them were like i got like two please stops yeah that was that was pretty bad um but uh but yeah we just did a lot of cold outreach that way um that like worked to some extent for the oems what we've started to realize with like mining people is it's much better to just like get an intro from someone we know or like uh go to a conference is it becoming easier now that you're a little bit more established and you have a little bit more time relationships chips it's it's getting better from that standpoint i would say um like the product is more fleshed out like our earlier demos were like yeah um but uh but yeah it's it's getting better from that standpoint also like i think a lot like it's a very risk averse industry so now that we've like raised money uh they can be like okay these guys are not going to disappear in two months and i'm going to be left with this like thing he's provided a lot of credibility yes Yes, exactly.

42:57And yeah, so I would say that that's definitely helped. But the the like, the best way to meet people in mining is you go to a mining conference, and you get piss drunk with them. That's like, that is the peak way. Do you have any good stories of doing that? And just like relationships? I didn't drink before. So I've only started doing it recently. And I have not been like very drunk in like two to three years so uh unfortunately i have not i have no stories about uh getting drunk at a mining conference so you started this i think probably roughly a year ago now i believe um and then you got into disipolis the second cohort uh what was how'd you find out about that and then what was your thinking behind you know so i actually found out about disipolis uh like i just saw them on twitter very briefly and i was like okay this is cool.

43:51And then what actually convinced me to join is, um, I started talking to Ted, uh, from Durin on Twitter. And then we met up at a mining conference and then he like, he strongly like recommended Jacob. And I was like, that's enough of a sell. Cause Ted was amazing. Then I talked to Jacob. It's just, it's, it's rare to find this type of like, um, obviously the goal of a VC or like a an accelerator residency at the end of the day is like to have returns on capital right but it's rare you find one that's so like aligned and especially with like mission aligned yeah mission aligned everyone on the team really like uh felt in tune with the values of the simplest and so like we actually had a yc interview and we like just went with this simplest instead because it was just like so much more logical for us.

44:50And just the crowd in El Segundo seemed like the right place to be. So that's kind of why we went into it and how we found out about it. What was your experience like actually doing that? The experience was insane. And like I think it's telling of like Jacob's ability but also just like um the the people he selected were so like very like mission aligned and just like compatible everyone in the badge like we would meet them up tomorrow we'd go for a beer like everything would be great like these were like like really like cracked people first of all but also like very compatible between each other um like i i just i just went to re-industrialize met up with like Denver from framework.

45:41And like every time I meet up with Denver, it's just like so nice. Cause it's just like, and like every single one of those guys, like I miss them obviously, but it's just like, we got along extremely well. Then also like the fact that if you would have seen our pitches at the beginning of the week versus at the end, it was like night and day. And that was like super helpful navigating through fundraising. um jacob helped so much and just like setting up the round for success where we had like tons of inbound uh instead of just having to do a lot of cold outreach and so on and that helped like tons do you try to raise money before discipulous and i mean we tried to do a small friends and family and we got like a bit but it was not like um i think we were raising um a hundred k at two mil and we got 20k out of it or something like that it was not it was not much and like mom or dad took pity and gave you ten thousand dollars i actually i actually didn't take any money from my parents uh and like my my brother and so on even though they kind of offered the main reason was just like I did not feel comfortable doing that like um yeah no so like just setting up the fundraise was super helpful and while we were like in talks with vcs and so on is very helpful and just like navigating that understanding like how to negotiate and uh and also just the speakers especially honestly especially like um we had tons of great speakers the first one which was Isaiah was like the one that stuck the most where he was like, I remember, remember this one line, he was like, it's just us up here.

47:29That was like one of the first lines of the presentation. And it just stuck with me where I was like, yeah, it kind of is where like low key, I think there's maybe 50 to 100 people in like, um, in the, the West or like the Imperium, if you will, that need to execute on modernizing mining and automating a lot of this and developing new technologies so we can like stay resilient from supply chain point of view and keep like western hegemony um and so that really sank in when i like heard that where it's like we're part of these people and like if we if we like we need to execute on this like otherwise we're doomed And so the speakers were really good in the sense of like kind of projecting forward and seeing like, oh, this is what it's going to look like in two years.

48:25And trying to like set the kind of a picture for you in your head so that you can execute towards that vision. Exactly. Yeah. So right now you're just like you're just building the first, you know, version of the software and stuff. How do you think about like getting the first customer? I mean, we already have design partners. which will likely translate to like being pilots and so on. We are reaching out to more because we need like better data quality than the current design partners we have. But yeah, a big part of it is like initially we were doing a lot of cold outreach, kind of realized that doesn't work as well.

49:05So now I'm just like sending very tailored like emails or like just DMs. and Sam also has like a pretty big mining network from having worked at like several mine sites reaching out through our contacts through our advisors to get like more clients so that's kind of how we're thinking about it we're also in like this project with Vale to like because they have this problem where like they have a problem in it with some of their assets in Brazil and are looking for like better software to help solve it. Um, and so just honestly trying every avenue. When you started like reaching out to people though, is this one of those things where they kind of immediately know, yes, this is a problem that we're experiencing and this would be something useful or how has that been like?

49:57I would say, I mean, yeah, everyone has the problem of fragmentation and dilution. This is like, this is omnipresent. Uh, it's, it's not like a problem you resolve it's a problem you optimize to have minimal quantities of but you always have that problem um some minds will have it more so than others the main the main like critical thing for us is everyone understands it's a problem most people will agree that like we're we're getting at it with the nice with like the right method and it will like improve the industry the main thing is most minds have a deliberate practice of wanting to be the first to go second so getting that first case study out is like the crux of the matter here.