How Shinkei Is Reshoring America's Seafood Supply Chain | Saif Khawaja

0:28There was this essay in this newspaper, This is Seif Khawaja. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he is the co-founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems. And they're basically like radically improving how fish processing works. And I'm from Alaska. And so that's like meaningful. Yeah. Do you want to just explain like how fish processing has been traditionally done? Yeah, you know, so there's harvesting and processing. So harvesting is what we talk about going on the boat. Processing, you know, is on land. The way that I'd kind of describe it is, you know, if you take the analogy of mining, It's the kind of extracting versus refining process.

1:01So, you know, generating raw material out from the land and then breaking that down into something ready for human consumption. So the key product Poseidon goes on the deck of a boat. So even though it's a processing step in a way, it's technically under harvesting. So when you walk into like most mass market, you know, nationwide retailers or any restaurant, the fish that you buy, they're basically brought on to a deck of a boat. and they're left to suffocate you know so they're flopping around releasing stress hormones lactic acid all this stuff that takes like 25 minutes typically it could be five it could be over an hour it'll just depend on you know the species the handling you know like some of them are crushed it's you know it can vary it's gruesome it is and so um you know so that process basically decays on me quality and shelf life so what we do is we rather than letting the fish flop around we have this small robot two and a half by three feet that goes on the deck and basically fishermen put the fish in head first one by one And we spike the fish in the brain.

2:05So you euthanize it stops experience of stress stops the production of stress hormones And then we cut the gills and so kind of like kosher slaughter for cows We like basically open up the major artery the heart which is still active after brain death will pump the blood out And so you have a less acidic carcass because there's less stress hormone production and then there's less nutrition you know suspended in the blood and so the bacteria basically get somewhat starved out and so you know we do this what this process the fish lasts up to three times as long they taste significantly better they actually retain more of their weight as well so you know generate more say you know yield per pound of fish and obviously you know nice fun ones that are handled humanely yeah do you know why no one has kind of done this before because I think we I don't know how many billions of pounds of fish we harvest every year but it's a lot i think it's something around like one and a half billion a day yeah so you know one and a half billion a day yeah billion pounds yeah it's obviously the whole fish so like you know it's broken down into fillet so it's not that's not 100 one but one half billion pounds of fillet meat ever generated every day but um you know probably still like a few hundred million um anyway so uh the value what we do kind of accrues further down the supply chain you go right so you know we have longer shelf life better flavor more weight retention right But retailers will care more about weight retention and shelf life than a fisherman will, right?

3:28Shests will care more about flavor than a fisherman will. And so the premise of, you know, this technique is that really the value doesn't accrue to the producer, to the resource extractor. It accrues down to the actual, you know, basically right before the consumer. And so in that way, there's kind of been this like asymmetric information. There's not really been a feasible way to do this process at scale. and also just the way that Americans consider fish, they're actually only great on size and on quality or shelf life. When you go to any nationwide retailer, generally when you buy fish, it's very rare you'll actually get a landing date or projected shelf life, the same way you would have milk with expiry date.

4:09Instead you just have a pack out date, which doesn't really tell you much. So it's kind of like the stacking of, you know, opacity basically leads to, you know, a lack of incentive for people to want to handle the fish appropriately. And, you know, then there's like all the waste, you know, North America, you know, including Canada also has, you know, I think something like the Guardian said is like 61 % of all fish that are landed don't make it to a plate. You know, a lot of that waste happens, you know, at the latter portion supply chain. And so, you know, our premise is like, you know, yes, you know, obviously the fish are handling humanely, but fundamentally the fish are more economic efficient to trade.

4:48It's kind of interesting to touch on. You guys are trying to make it so you can basically know exactly where the fish that you're eating was harvested, at what time, all this stuff, you know, changing the way that it's basically sold in stores. You want to go into that a little bit? Yeah, happy to. So right now, if you were trying to differentiate the fish you have, all you have the species, just kind of generic, and you have the location is caught. Not even the location, but just like as a wild or it's a farmed. Yeah. You know. Maybe, maybe like Alaska caught. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Maybe, yeah.

5:19In a rare case. If it's a nice retailer. Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, and that's great, but that's kind of the only resolution of data stream that we have in the industry. And so if you compare that to like, you know, cattle or poultry, you know, and just like the sophistication that happens in those industries, there's, you know, a lot of infrastructure around like, you know, shelf life projected, you know, um, Which farm it was coming from. Exactly. You know, all those things. Like sometimes even have like little photo of the people who, you know, who like harvested your eggs, you know, on a little egg carton.

5:53Very cute. That doesn't really exist in that. So, you know, but you know, there's consumers are educated about the levels of quality in those meats, right? So we have USDA prime grass fed beef. We have past raised chicken, you know, like there's not really an analog in terms of the process rather than the geography for fish. And so we a little not just, you know, my pen over here. We sell our fish under, you know, a label that, you know, we have called ceremony grade. And so the premise of Ceremony Grade is, you know, this is kind of new standard and philosophy for the very best fish, where we're basically taking these artisanal techniques across the supply chain, not just a flagship product, but like how the fish are caught, how they're handled, how they're packaged, you know, temperature monitoring, traceability, and then basically turning it into this like separate industry vertical that we, you know, have a monopoly of, you know, today based on the technology.

6:49Did you take anything from the like Michelin guide? A little bit. happened a little bit yeah I mean like we joke you know Michelin grade for all is like one of the phrases we use for talking about the product the you know at this point we're serving almost every single Michelin restaurant in the country that serves fish or have at some point you know through the distribution network we have access to over 50 stars you know a lot of them don't necessarily know that it's our product but they're just like oh all of a sudden there's fishes a lot better you know and we're at the point now we're not just the best restaurants in the country but in the world are actually reaching out to us by name.

7:24So you know, best restaurants in Europe, you know, our fish is being auctioned off in Tokyo. And it's really been magical to kind of take this, you know, traditional commodity fish, you know, like black cod, which is our main skew, actually turn it to something that's like prized by, you know, the best in the entire industry. Best chefs. Yeah, yeah. And so the way that I kind of think about it, again, it's kind of like commodities trading analogies we're basically taking these like you know um low differentiation commodities and applying our our like unique refining or processing stack to them to be able to generate you know a new type of commodity that we have a monopoly of that is um uh significantly more economic efficient to trade yeah did you ever go to japan and like tour any fish markets and uh more so now i went to japan as a kid you know my dad did a lot of business in japan and so um you know it's fun to be able to go and check it out.

8:18But, you know, that was kind of all peripheral background. And then, you know, since starting the company, you know, I go to Japan probably like twice a year. We're exporting to six countries now. So, you know, slowly doing the tours for them and meeting the chefs as well. I wonder if there's like a network of people. So once one person starts using your fish, they basically just tell their friends. Yeah. Is that kind of thing? That does actually. So our this is kind of fun that we're both robotics company and industrial business and a consumer brand. And so you can go on Instagram at ceremony fish and you can see we cross post a lot of chefs and that's actually a really great way for us to be able to get distribution very quickly because chefs unfollowed distributors or wholesalers.

8:56They follow other chefs. And so slowly there's been this network effect that's kind of helped push the name and brand because there's some floor of like quality that basically no other company is able to achieve that is associated with our brand and our name. So how did the company like start in the first place? What were kind of the first few like months like? Yeah, yeah. So the origin story really starts with my origin story. So I was born in Canada, raised in the Middle East, first in kind of like a little bit, you know, arguably rural Saudi Arabia. And then like Dubai, right? So Jeddah actually.

9:32Yeah. So we didn't have our first cinema until I was like 10. And then then moved to Dubai and I was there until I was 18 and I came to the US by myself. than a family here at the time for college. Went to, finished college, went to grad school, was attending my PhD, and you know, one of my early mornings there, there was this essay in this newspaper that was by this ironically vegan activist called If Fish Could Scream. And it was all about how, because fish don't have vocal cords, we give them less empathy than we do to terrestrial animals. So like cows, chickens, things like that, right? So the premise was talking about how most fish basically are suffocated today they're brought on to land flopping around whatever have you and so you know and i thought i was like oh this is kind of like putting a cow's head underwater it's not very too many and so um uh the the you know i just started thinking about the problem and i actually first wanted to work on a project on how might fish express paint so could you put sensors on the skin you know generate electrical signals um you know and then actually use that to like you know convert that it's generate the electrical signals convert that to you know PWM or something or even like a human scream you know and to be kind of a giving fish a voice and then you know in doing that I basically found the techniques that we're now working on today and so you know I thought why not just solve the problem directly um so that's kind of the genesis for everything I took it the company this whole time when I was 22 um in like mid 2020 2022 and And then have been working on it.

11:10We're heads down. It was very tough upfront. I'm sure you can imagine. First of all, hardware wasn't hot at the time. We were basically in a down market. So it was very tough to raise money. I imagine that for this sort of thing, not many venture investors are thinking about how fish harvesting or processing works. It's funny. Yeah. This is one of those markets that's not really traditional, but ends up being exceptionally large. 3 billion people rely on fish as a primary source of protein. In the US, if you look at the most recent executive order, over 90 % of American fish are actually imported.

11:44And half are actually something around half are like domestic origin, where they're basically landed here by American fishermen, you know, taken on by American distributors. They're shipped to other countries, could be broken down. So like Ecuador or Peru or Guatemala or China. And then they're broken down, gutted, scaled, filleted, packaged, frozen, thawed, and then frozen again, and then brought back. That just destroys meat quality. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, the reason that we can do is because it's, you know, if you don't have to pay labor costs because, you know, these people are generally indentured servants, you know, it's 20 cents on the dollar, you know, to process the fish.

12:23You know, here in the U.S., you know, foreign workers, you know, basically make up the majority of meat processing workforce, particularly in seafood. There's been automation other parts of other meets and I think it's something like 65 % of them are foreign domicile So they'll come in on like a j1 visa Be handling our free supply and then leave and they're paid, you know Basically like below, you know the significant below minimum wage. What were the first like few iterations for Poseidon? so The very first version was a 3d printer with a nail spike on the end of it and a plastic fish. Did it just like stab?

13:00It was literally just like, you know, I had off the shelf computer vision from OpenCV with a little camera over a 3D printer in my dorm room. And I would basically generate G-code for the 3D printer to move to a certain spot. And then, you know, it would literally just have the nail pluck the top. And that's basically what it was. And then, you know, we first thought, okay, you know, I always knew that I wanted to work on wild fisheries, although we did go to farm briefly, you know, in the interim for testing. And the very first commercially deployed systems were basically this, like, giant version of that, but instead of having a kind of nail, it was a high-pressure water jet.

13:40And, you know, lo and behold, me, you know, as, like, a 22-year-old, I was like, you know what, like, there's a lot of water in the ocean, why don't we use that to cut fish? It turns out it's very hard to find water jets that can handle the saltwater corrosion. So if you're listening, this is a great startup idea somewhere. We found a few, but they weren't getting the PSI we wanted. So the... Your ideal situation was just like shooting a very high pressure steam of water. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Really fast. Yeah, because I mean, it would cut straight through. You know, you can use... If you can modulate the pressure too, then, you know, you can use it for different types of cuts, you know, potentially clean the fish out.

14:18So that was kind of like the first pass. We fundamentally thought that that was throughput limited. So there's a certain floor of cycle time and the way that the system architecture set up that we couldn't generate the industrial speeds that we wanted, right? Fundamentally, we have to hit a two millimeter point. My co-founder says it's like half your pinky fingernail at surgical accuracy to industrial speeds. And so when you're moving that fast, if you can only hit the faster time of 30 seconds per fish, there's just no way you're going to be able to then put on a factory trawler, right so the um even if you'd want to do that in the first place so um so around the time it was like you know middle fall like start of fall of 2023 you know moved here to the gundo um you know i kind of had like a refounding the company um you know we raised our seed round you know my co-founder and a bunch of our early team joined around that same time and then uh you know just kind of been heads down you know we were in the we work you know like a few blocks away from here You know a lot of the best ones were yeah.

15:25Yeah. I remember just like there's like four of like the key like gundo founders and we were just like you know in the same room there. And then yeah you know have been we're very much a culture of keeping heads down like staying quiet. This is like probably my second or third podcast I'm doing. You know just so we can get you know the core fundamentals of business right. I think we're at the point now where you know we were talking about earlier we're copy pasting robots. You know, we can make a new version of Poseidon every two weeks with just one person, you know, with three technicians. You can pound out, you know, six robots, you know, every month.

16:00We're active in, you know, basically every major region in the US now. So Alaska, Washington, California, Texas, Louisiana, New England, much more to come. And yeah, multiple species. So over the next few years or next few months, we're gearing up for launching in a few nationwide retailers and the hope would be you know now you can walk into I don't want to call any specific one out but you can walk into a class retailer you can walk into some high-class retailer you know but even one that you know is buying like a really large volumes and you're basically you know you can pay you know to start maybe 10 % more eventually price parity for your fish and it's gonna last long and taste better and the same way that you have a grass-fed beef aisle you have a past-race chicken aisle you also have a ceremony great fish on there's this Steve Jobs like talk or speech where he's basically saying like what is Nike what does it celebrate and it's like it's not technically it's a shoe company but really what it does is celebrate like great great athletes and great athletics and I kind of like the way that you guys are trying to like celebrate the people that you're working with the the fishermen how did you kind of come to that philosophy yeah you know I think our our premise here is like first of all I worried to the deckhand after starting the company for a few weeks like a month and a half or so it was on a small boat in you know New England and the experience of getting caught in a tropical storm I think really kind of woke me up to just how tough the job is I think fishing is like if not number one is in the top three most dangerous jobs you know but here in the US in terms of fatalities I think especially like commercial fishing is incredibly dangerous yeah yeah yeah I mean you're I mean if if your comms go out if engine blows out like you're done you know there's no way you're getting back like you know if you're you know i just went fishing on saturday to one of our commercial vessels just to check it out and we were like four or five hours out west of the shore like if the engine blew out and the comms blew out there's you know no one's coming to save you i'm not swimming back i can barely swim a few hundred meters let alone you know so um so i think like having the empathy for just how hard they're working and how different a job this is where it's like, you know, people in their mind conceptualized fishing as agriculture.

18:19It's not, it's actually much more like natural resource extraction. So when you think of like hunting, it's like hunting or like mining where, you know, you don't necessarily know, you know, I think maybe today mining is a bit different, but you know, way back when you wouldn't really know like where your resource was, how effective it would be to kind of catch it. And, you know, there's no like fixed real estate and constant production of the resource, You know, it is nice that fishing does have some certain cycle time, you know, like Mother Nature, you know, will replenish some wars, you know, over maybe millennia.

18:50But like here in and fish is like a couple of months. Right. So that is a nice benefit for us. But at the same time, you know, the jobs are much more dangerous than they are like traditional agriculture, like farming fruit or farming cows. Yeah, no one's dying picking apples. Exactly. So I'd say we have that as like a core philosophy is like celebrating the fishermen, the people who are actually. putting our products to work because they're generally not celebrated. It's generally very opaque. You don't even know who's catching fish. The other side of the philosophy, the way that I describe our mission is we basically harness technology to democratize artisanal food.

19:24So the premise is here in the US, you know, like I grew up in the Middle East, you know, for us to even have beef there, it has to be halal before it's important. Right. And so you end up having like, depending on who you ask, you end up having much higher quality meat. The farmers are generally more into artisanal. Your dairy, your fruit, all that stuff is much more vetted because the population is much smaller. If you compare that to the food system here, when I moved here, I couldn't quite figure it out, but it was like everything just kind of tasted like straw. And so I haven't quite you know figured out exactly why but I think one of the things that like I noticed in You know it was just like this kind of like chronic brain fog and being tired all the time and stuff like that And like you know it got to the point where I was like you know in my sophomore junior year of college Ordering unpasteurized milk from my local farmer, you know It's like all my friends thought it's crazy But you know I started feeling great and then I kind of realized like if we don't step in to do this then no one else will yeah it's almost like the kind of the opposite of traditional livestock production where you or harvesting where you almost don't want to know where your chicken comes from you know chicken sandwich from McDonald's yeah because it kind of loses your appetite like if you do it right you actually are like oh wow this is really cool I know exactly where it was caught yeah how it was processed all this stuff it requires a lot of integrity now to be able to do that and you also take a lot on the line right to like have pride in what you're doing versus just like hiding it yeah exactly yeah i think you know that's been why we're able to build such a strong team is i think there's a lot of pride of craft and i think that there's a little you know eating such an emotional experience you know you're sit down with your family you share a meal you know it's one of the only things that's been passed down for millennia it's like you know a form of generating culture right and you know generally when engineers are working on you know very complex hardware is stuff that their family's never going to see or never experience and so to kind of take it from this kind of like you know four wall facility where no one basically gets to see what you're doing to like you know hey let's just go out for a meal and try our stuff today um it creates almost intimacy with the product where like an emotional bond it's an emotional bond to it and i think like you know you spend like you know for example two years working on you know some new component in a rocket you know before you really get to test it out you know over here you can you can upload new software to one of the robots and you can see the quality of fish improve it in your local grocery store the next week for the first few like getting them onto actual boats once you had uh the first poseidon that you wanted to go put on a boat what was that like engaging some fishermen to have that happen so the argument that we give to fishermen is very simple, which is basically that if they work with us, they get paid more.

22:17And it's not like a small component. It can be anywhere from 25 to 100 % improvement on a net income basis. And how does that work? Can you break that out? So we basically give machines, which are fairly low cost but very complex to build, to fishermen for free, structured as a zero-cost lease. And then we basically get exclusivity on any product that goes through it. We generally pre-order, and then we basically pay them a small floating premium above the commodity price to do that. And then we take ownership of the fish. we take the risk and then we sell the product. So we're kind of acting as like their first layer buyer.

22:48And in doing that, basically, you know, if you think of the way that fishermen make money, it's kind of like very stochastic. You know, they have this natural resource, they kind of just have to go and hunt and hope that they can close. And we take it from that stochastic system into a cash flow predictive system. And then, you know, the robots themselves, the economics are great. They pay themselves back in four weeks. We have very strong margins because of all the differentiation and the product quality and the shelf life. And so it's why we've taken the approach of being so vertically integrated.

23:18How are you planning to scale this up so that you're on kind of almost every boat that's out there? I think we want to be on every boat that we believe will respect the handling protocols that we want. Is that an issue? So we've never had a fisherman say no because the argument is really simple, right? We have passed on fishermen just because we have a feeling that they're just not someone who's going to like it stay true to their word or they'll try and sell some product or whatever have you. And that's a small risk. We know that's been, you know, we have a really long backlog and we've only had to reject one or two people.

23:48But it's always a risk because these fundamentally are partnerships, right? The fishermen are not our customers, our partners. We together are basically a transformation function on the balance sheet that makes their economics much better. Do you have any really good stories of going out on the water? Yeah, so I mentioned the tropical storm. That was really tough. You know, it was like 25 knot winds. You know, the boat was, you know, the pitch in a yaw was like, I mean, 67 degrees. It was like kind of crazy. You know, it was like eight 10-foot swells. And I mean, I didn't think I was, I did not think I was going to lose my life.

24:24I was worried about it. So, you know, I feel like that was, you know, that was definitely a tough one. You know and I think like there I mean I generally have like a lot of tough You know stories about the company the company and building especially the early days There's a time when I took a friend out for Pinkberry and I ran out of money And so when I swapped my card to treat him It was rejected I've definitely felt that huh? Yeah, I've definitely had that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it was cuz I have to like pay interns It was a long time ago You know there's been times when like so like you know running out of money to eat, you know, it was very tough Um, you know, on principle, I feel like I wanted to, you know, grit through it.

25:05Um, and I think that a lot of people were saying that, you know, this was an idea that didn't make sense or whatever have you the time. And like, now it's like one of those like obvious things to go. This is an interesting idea. And I didn't really think about it. You know, how long was that, uh, kind of period where there was a lot of uncertainty? I mean, basically right up until our C round was, was wired in January of 2024. So like two years. So like, yeah, I'd say like a, you know, like a year or nine months. You're not that. Yeah. Interesting. So that that definitely put a lot of gray hair inside my head.

25:34But, you know, I think it was worth it because I think in going through the down market, I think like we have a lot more resiliency and like are trying to focus on the business fundamentals for like what they are and build the business the right way. You know? Yeah. And why why did this like in particular matter so much to you? I've always thought about myself being a food guy. You know, I grew up very close and, you know, kind of eating in harmony with nature with things being seasonal. You know, for example, when, you know, in the Middle East, we'd have, you know, we'd have, you know, kind of the premise of like honoring the story of Abraham, we would sacrifice a goat and we would share it over a meal.

26:10And so like, you know, as a kid, I'd go and like feed the goat myself, you know, and I'd have that close relationship with the meat that I was eating. And so I think like in this modern day and age, it's kind of been so disassociated with how the food that, you know, we kind of like trust some general large system. Just magically shows up and then you just swipe a card. Yeah, exactly. And it's almost like, I mean, I very much believe in the most simple format, you know, the reducing the schizo as much as possible, you are what you eat. And so I think, you know, when we have, you know, we talked about this intimate, you know, relationship with the food that we're actually putting atoms into our bodies for the things are becoming, you know, then it generates a level of self-respect that you then fully like deploy into many other aspects of your life as well.

26:59You know, the food you eat, the water you drink, the air you breathe, all these things, you know, are basically in dynamically kind of shaping who you are becoming as like, you know, in some epigenetic expression. So can you just talk about like one of the first deployments that you had? Yeah, happy to. So I mentioned, you know, I always thought that we want to work with wild fisheries, But, you know, it's funny, all the venture investors that we initially spoke to, not all, but a fair, you know, a large, large proportion of them were like, first of all, wild fisheries are too stochastic. It's a crazy, you know, model to work, work with one.

27:30And then two, um, you know, uh, like the environments are so crazy, you know, maritime environment building, you know, surgical equivalent robotics, you know, and, uh, it was just extremely unreasonable. So for some very short period of time, I was convinced to instead of selling fish, we should sell the technology. We're doing robotics as a service. And instead of selling it to fishermen, we would sell it to fish farms, which was the incorrect decision. You know, you should always follow your intuition. And so we had this farm in upstate New York, a salmon farm, very small, you know, at the time.

28:12they were buying our technology in these cases of robotics as a service model. And, you know, so we deployed our technology, you know, in sometime like January 2023. Basically the entire like week and a half leading up to it, I was averaging with a team like two and a half hours of sleep a night on average. It was very, very stressful. Have you ever done that before? No, and I feel like I'm really, I really kind of want to go through a hard thing again so the rest of the team can experience it. Like, you know, I'm a physicist, you know, by background, like business and physics. And so I was, you know, only so helpful when it got really down to like, you know, design and computer vision.

28:52Like I was a self-taught engineer. I did like initial prototyping with the team. There's a certain threshold after which I was focused more on the business side. Right. And so, you know, we, the only thing that I could do as a leader and kind of stepping up was just be there. You know, I basically every few hours, I go and bring Chick-fil-A and like, you know, cigarettes and you know like the whole nine years just to keep them going and I think like that going through that of just like first of all being told that the idea was not going to work for a very long time and then going through the period of like pushing that hard to the point where I was like getting like almost like heart palpitations for you know basically like nine days I mean there's multiple nights right you know I average it out because it's just multiple nights I wouldn't sleep and then other nights I get like five hours right and And then deploying the technology and actually seeing and opening up our first fish and seeing the side by side.

29:41It was just one of these like really surreal moments where everything just finally clicked for me where I was like, you know, independent of what anyone else says, I'm just going to brute force through willpower, you know, the entire company into actualization. Where do you think that comes from? Like where? So I know most great founders are like they definitely listen to people and they hear opinions and thoughts and ideas, advice, but then they do kind of follow their natural drift or intuition. And if some advice that they get doesn't match that intuition, then they kind of say to hell with it.

30:15I'm going to go do my thing. Where does that come from for you? I had a pretty tough childhood. I am actually, I'm very close to my parents, but, you know, we were immigrants into the Middle East or specifically into the Gulf. And, you know, maybe you can take me for a beer and we can talk about that offline, but it was very tough. And then then myself being an immigrant here to the US, the culture shock of that. And then, you know, having to kind of like, or not really having family support here, I think it kind of had generated this independence of, you know, generated this independent lifestyle for me.

30:51And then throughout college, I've been working on a lot of, you know, crazy art projects, you know, in human computer interaction. And that was like what I was planning to like, you know, spend five years of my life working on. and there was this basically like perspective on safe as a person where he had you know all these cool projects and this and that but he didn't really have a straight career path and I found like you know a lot of friends are saying that about me and I think that that was kind of like the last that's like the straw that broke the camel's back where it just like generated so much like anger and frustration I'm a very I'm sure you know I hope you know this by now I'm like a pretty calm level-headed guy so for me to get angry it's it's pretty rare it's a lot it takes a lot um and so i think like that you know kind of experience of just basically being you know these like you know basically like multi-decade long rejections i think and seeing myself just like through it and slowly kind of be positively reinforced um getting a little bit of a callus built up exactly yeah it's led into this really high pain threshold where you know i can no matter what it takes just like grit my teeth and do it even if it's something i haven't done before What has been the biggest moment where you did follow your intuition when other people were telling you to do something else?

32:08Everyone told me from the start of the company that I should just find someone who's technical and call them a co-founder. And you know, I met probably 40, 50 people, you know, in my search, maybe more all from my top companies, what have you. And there just wasn't that click of just knowing that they were going to be the person that I wanted to spend the rest of my life working with. And then I got introduced to my co-founder Reed, where, you know, even from our first call he was, you know, in Starship, you know, he's calling me from his like trailer, you know, and I could see his bathroom and we were on FaceTime.