From the future of flight to brand building, insight from Liquidity Summit 2024 | E1969

0:00I'll walk you guys through Science Ventures. We are a studio. When we think about brands, we think about fans. We build entertainment companies that monetize their entertainment through products. We want you to feel something. We want you to be offended. We want your brain to be like, what is this tension? So the story of Liquid Death, which is a story of even the name science, is there's a tension. It's not a fantasy. This is a Joby flying in Manhattan a few months ago. We went to the downtown Manhattan Heliport. We're working with the mayor and the city. We're electrifying it because we need a lot of electricity.

0:33Kind of like building a Tesla supercharger right there. And here it is. And it's real. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. OpenPhone. Create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop. Twist listeners can get an extra 20 % off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist.

1:16And Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. My name is Alex. I am not Jason, but I am his co-host here on the show. And you may know that earlier this month, we hosted an event in Napa, California called the Liquidity Summon 2024. It brought together a lot of general partners from venture capital funds and also LPs, the folks who actually invest into those venture capital funds.

1:56We had events and a lot of talks. And the good news for you is that we are picking two of our favorites from the event to bring to you. So even if you weren't there, you won't get left behind. Now, there was a lot of competition, a lot of great talks, but the two we've picked today are one, Sky Dayton. He's a partner over at Dayton Family Enterprises, and his talk was entitled Aviation Safety, Air Taxis, and the Future of Flight. Now, if you travel a lot, as we all do, you may have read some news about Boeing or maybe traffic control and gotten a little bit worried. The good news that Sky brought to the audience, and now to you, is that there's quite a lot of hope and optimism for the future of flight, and it won't all be Boeing jets flying you to random places.

2:39No, it's going to be local, electric, and vertical. Then for our next talk, we have Mike Jones. He's a general partner over at Science Inc. You may not know Science by name, but you do know some of their brands. For example, Liquid Death, my personal favorite, or the very popular Dollar Shave Club. He gave a talk about how to build a brand. So if you're in that world, well, here is the talk for you. We also had three sponsors at the event that I do want to shout out because they helped put it on. So big thanks to Eventus Advisory. They do on-demand finance and accounting support. Then there's Vensure, V-E-N-S-U-R-E.

3:13They do in-demand solutions for payroll, HR, benefits, and risk management. And then finally, Forge Global, a well-known secondary market for startup shares. You've heard of them. I've heard to them. Great to meet them in person. All right. Two talks just for you. A special treat. Let's go. So Jason said, I haven't always been a pilot. I've been a founder and entrepreneur for a long time. And I try to bring first principles thinking to everything that I do, including when I decided to become a pilot. And along the way, Jason has asked me many times over the years, I've sort of become the guy that all of our little group goes to.

3:46Whenever there's a thing, whenever a door flies off a plane or something happens, they're like, Sky, what does this mean? Or even I'll get live sometimes text from flights. Hey, the pilot just came on and said, we have to go around and we're landing on a different runway and it was super bumpy. What does this mean? Literally in the air. So the first thing that Jason wanted me to talk about was aviation safety, because it's something that's near and dear to all of us. We experience it every day. And then I want to touch on the future of flight and then we'll end with a little Q &A. So first regarding safety, despite recent headlines, just to set the record straight, commercial aviation is literally the safest mode of transportation.

4:20It's safer than walking down the street. It's safer than driving your car. It's safer than trains. It's incredibly safe. In the past 15 years in the United States, there's been one, one commercial aviation fatality. It's just incredible. That said, there have been a recent spike in headlines. All right, we see this. And I think this is something we can't take for granted. We got here a certain way. And I want to make sure we stay here and I want to prepare us for what's coming next. I'm going to talk about that. So, you know, we've had airplanes pull on runways that other airplanes are landing on.

4:58We've had airplanes literally run into each other as they're taxiing. You know, there've been miscommunications between air traffic control and pilots, and there's been a lot of issues around this. Okay. So we've seen this yet it remains very safe, but how do we, how do we keep it that way? Well, it turns out that Every time there's been an accident or incident of any kind in the air, whether it's the door flying off or a design problem, whatever, manufacturing issue, when that accident or incident happens, we do an incredible investigation and then we go upstream. We find out how it was designed, whatever, and we change it.

5:35to the point that everything you see in a modern airplane, literally the fabric on the seats, the way the seats design, the way the wings design, the way the tails design, everything is the result of an accident or incident. It's pretty crazy. We've had this recursive loop for a hundred years. And as a result, our planes are incredibly safe, incredibly reliable. And that's really where the core of the safety is. But when you look at the things that have happened recently and continue to happen. It's actually much more increasingly about the pilots and the air traffic controllers. It's the humans that are in the loop that are increasing the issue.

6:16And when you go upstream of that, you look at training, you realize that the same kind of feedback loop doesn't exist in training. So how do pilots get trained today? So the gold standard in pilot training is the full motion simulator. It's a giant apparatus. It takes up a three-story building. It costs up to$20 million. It costs thousands of dollars an hour to operate, like almost as much as an airplane itself. But these simulators work. They're actually incredibly effective. A pilot will do about 1 ,500 hours of, that's the minimum requirement, 1 ,500 hours of aviation experience. And then they'll get in one of these, and then they'll get in a 737, and they'll be able to fly as an airline pilot.

7:03But most of those hours are done in little single-piston airplanes, like the one I flew, J. Cal, into Vegas, that are not representative of what pilots will ultimately fly, and that's an issue. So this is actually the machine I went and trained in in France. I spent two weeks in this thing, and it looks like the real airplane on the inside. This is actually, it's a foggy day out, but normally you can see everything outside. and it works. After two weeks in this, I actually got in the airplane, that's the plane, on a refueling stop in Iceland and flew my wife back to the United States from France.

7:41Simulators work. They're incredible. The limitation that we have, and this is where it comes full circle to staying safe in aviation, is that these simulators are so expensive, they're only used at that tail end of a pilot's training journey. They're not used constantly and at the beginning and in the middle and everything. They're just sort of like the finishing school. It's a little like if you were trained to be a doctor, you'd spend eight years working on and learning about animals. And then in the last few weeks, you've got a training course on humans and then they call you a doctor. That is how pilots get trained.

8:17It's kind of bizarre. It does work, but it has failure points. So what if we can make these simulators is way more ubiquitous. And this is the first point I have today. So I thought about this problem, having gone through this training myself in multiple airplanes, realizing how powerful simulators are. And I thought, what if we could make them smaller and have them be just something that pilots do all the time? And I came across this little company in Zurich. They had figured out how to take VR. It's actually the first application of VR, I think, that makes a ton of industrial sense. and combined it with a full motion platform.

8:57And we decided to start with helicopters because helicopters are actually the hardest thing to simulate because they move in multiple axes that airplanes don't move in. You put the VR goggles on and you can see the avionics are actually just pieces of plastic, but all the haptics are there, the knobs and everything. You can see in the little circle what's actually happening and you can see what the pilot sees. You can see that it's vibrating just like a helicopter vibrates. as the pilot's going and adjusting the knobs and everything. And you can simulate pretty much everything in this. It's incredible.

9:30The first time I got in this simulator in Fluid, as I was landing, I could actually feel the asphalt of the runway I was landing on. I could feel the skids grating against the asphalt. The resolution of the motion is that good. So this is not only, you know, the best VR simulator ever built. It's actually the best simulator. It reminds me a little bit of the Tesla story. It was the best car. It just happened to be electric. This is so much better and builds on the state of the art that we've used over the past decades. We have all the weather. We have, you know, here you are flying in mountains.

10:07We have you flying in cities, full digital twin of a city that you're in, landing and taking off at, you know, dusk, creating different scenarios. So the idea here is to take every accident or incident that happens and instead of just fixing the plane, have it be something that the pilots fly to. So you fly every possible scenario. And when a news, like, for example, airplane loses two engines departing New Jersey from ingesting a bunch of geese and has to land in the Hudson. Well, miracle on the Hudson. We should have every single pilot fly that scenario. And the way we'll get there is by making simulators like this much more ubiquitous.

10:52So that's kind of the first idea that I want to get to. I think that if we do that, we will ensure that we have this incredible safety record that we continue to have. Listen, I got a lot on my plate. You know, all the stuff I'm working on. Founding University, the Accelerator, This Week in Startups, the All In Podcast. How do I manage it all? I use an incredible all-in-one collaboration tool. It's called Coda. And it combines documents, spreadsheets, and apps. And that last piece is what I'm currently obsessed with. I've been doing documents and spreadsheets forever, but my team likes to use Coda to superpower that data.

11:28So every week, my team at Foundry University gets a report from all of the founders who are building their MVPs. And they put that into Coda, and we have automated this. So it sends automated reminders to the founders. Hey, you didn't put in your update this week. We'd really love to see what you got done with your startup. Then the investment team looks at it and they track it and it's got built-in charts. So we see charts of their revenue, their customers, if they've raised money, and all of that allows us to quickly make decisions on who to invest in. If you've got an investment firm, you should do what we're doing and you should do it with Coda.

11:59There are a hundred templates waiting for you to use from product roadmats to OKRs to mapping. And once you start going down the rabbit hole and you start learning the powerful features, every day, every week you use it, you find a new use. So here's your call to action. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track your goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited time offer that's just for startups. Go to coda.io slash twist today and get six months of the team plan for free. coda.io slash twist for six months of the team plan. coda.io slash twist. That leads to the second thing, more better pilots.

12:36And I'm thinking about it for today, but also for what's coming in aviation. And the next thing is pretty nuts and pretty mind-blowing. So we all experience this on a pretty much daily basis. Our cities are clogged with traffic. We cannot build the physical infrastructure to keep up with demand on roads. Where we used to live in LA, they spent, I don't know, billions to add a single lane to the 405. And it was going to be this wondrous thing. No impact. Zero impact. In fact, it got worse because the latest demand all just comes rushing out from the shadows where it's waiting. As soon as there's a little more supply, boom, it chokes the traffic again.

13:21Right? So this is not a problem we're going to solve on the ground. Traffic has gotten worse by double or triple over the past 30 years in terms of length of commute in our largest cities. It's just horrible. So, okay. I love this quote. It says so much. And it's true, right? This idea of flying cars, it's been around for a long time. People have talked about it. Crazy idea. It's been on the cover of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics like 50 times more than any other topic. It's, you know, since the 30s, people have talked about this Jetson's dream of a flying car. This is my favorite. This is from the early 90s, the Sky Car.

14:03And it never happened. It's never happen, right? And it's just this thing. It'll never happen. Forget it. It's just a dream, the pipe dream. Well, I'm here to tell you that it's going to happen and why. Okay. So because of what Elon did with cars, with Tesla, there was a drive to get incredible energy density per weight and per volume and cost to a level that had never been before. We have the rise of composite materials. In fact, most of those airplanes that you fly on, you get on a Southwest airplane or wherever, have tons of composite parts, have whole composite planes now. It's well understood, which is lighter and stronger than steel.

14:45We have fly-by-wire controls, which means instead of having the pilot move a control yoke and having a pulley or cable control a flight surface like an aileron or flap or rudder or whatever, we actually have just a little computer that sends a signal to a little actuator that causes that thing to move, which makes it way lighter, way more precise, and way safer. We have the ability to model in computers very complex physical systems that we didn't have before. Distributed propulsion, which means we can put electric motors on wings, which are, again, way, way lighter and ultimately way quieter.

15:22And I'm going to talk about that. So this company that I got involved in many years ago, 15 years and more than a billion invested, thankfully most not for me. And we have been working at this, vertically integrating because none of this stuff existed, building flight computers that are the size of iPhones or iPads, incredibly light, building the highest power to weight ratio motors that have ever been built on planet Earth. incredible torque and power from these motors, working with robotics and composite materials, the most advanced level, and we have built it. This is it. This is the Joby S4.

16:08This is a vehicle that takes off vertically, flies on a wing, so it takes off and then the rotors tilt forward, and by flying on a wing it's able to get incredible efficiency so here uh we continue to do a ton of testing we have flown 32 000 miles in this vehicle here it is that it was taking off uh vertically and you can watch the the rotors the propellers and as it begins to accelerate they will tilt forward and then it will begin to fly on the wing which again gives incredible efficiency. So this is a vehicle that will fly, will carry four passengers and a pilot, 100 miles on a single charge, plus in that reserve on top of that at 200 miles an hour.

16:59So here you can see it transitioning. Now it's flying on the wing. And it's an airplane now. So it takes off like a helicopter, flies like an airplane. Okay, full wing-borne flight now. Full fly-by-wire, which, by the way, anyone in this room can learn to fly this in a few minutes. It's incredibly simple. We radically simplified the flight controls. You can take the stick and just crank it over one side or the other, and it stays in its safe envelope. So here it is coming around to land, and you can see the rotor is beginning to tilt back to the horizontal position. So now it's becoming a helicopter again.

17:44and coming in for landing. This is where we do testing in a remote military base, Hunter Liggett military base in California, which you can see from space. It's so huge. Coming in on final approach, and coming in for landing. So you're seeing the future. This video was from three years ago. We have been testing this, quietly testing, testing, testing, iterating, building multiple versions of this vehicle. We are the only company in the world that has fully transitioned a vertical takeoff land electric aircraft at full scale.

18:27So an incredible team, over 1 ,800 of the brightest engineers they've ever met. And I'll touch on the last topic here, which is why this is such a big unlock. and it has to do with noise. So I was having lunch with Jason Chang and he mentioned this to me so I decided to throw it in the presentation last minute. This is Jason Chang. Jason, raise your hand. Where are you? Okay. Cheapishly raising his hand. So he made news in the Daily Post trying to get a helipad installed but official says residents won't like it. Why don't we like helipads? Noise. It's a huge issue, right? So the Joby is designed from the ground up to be incredibly quiet.

19:15And I'm going to actually play you the difference in sound, including the aircraft that we flew to Vegas and other helicopters so you guys can hear it yourself. This is the Cirrus. Beechcraft Baron. Robinson R-44. Bell 206.

19:37that's the Joby. Basically, I mean, that's basically background noise you're hearing. If you just turned a microphone on on a day with the wind, whatever, that's basically what it would sound. You don't hear it flying overhead. So it's incredibly quiet. And that opens up a ton of applications. You think about the noise signature in cities, you know, the light helicopter on the right, a Joby on the left. On a decibel scale, it's 100 times quieter. during cruise. So here we are flying into the South Manhattan heliport, and we're coming in for landing. And you can just see all that noise on the light helicopter.

20:19Joby comes in. And this is another really interesting thing about a Joby versus a helicopter, is that when it lands, the motors go off instantly. Helicopter has to keep the motors running. You can't turn an internal combustion engine like that on and off instantly because of heat. Heat's got to dissipate. So it takes off, motors come off, passengers come in, out, and it takes off again. So incredibly light. Okay. Juggling multiple devices and apps to run your business is a mess. We all know that. OpenPhone is here to make that simple. I have an open phone number. I use it to communicate with founders and it really works for me.

20:57I have a desktop app. Boom. I can go in there. I can do voiceover IP in this beautiful, elegant app right on my phone or on my desktop. I use it a lot on my desktop. I'm being totally honest because I have my headset on. And sometimes founders want to do a call. They don't want to pop open a video conference. My sales team loves it. Why? Because they get to keep their private phone number for their private phone number. And then they have all of their business stuff tracked in one location. So if they need to make a phone call to somebody they talked to last week, they can see their call history, click on it, send a text message and start a phone call with that person.

21:27And the ops team uses it. When we have people calling, they have questions about their investments, LPs, etc. We have a round robin phone number. So it will forward the call to two or three people on our team because we like to have really good customer support. And all this is easy to do with open phone. It's super affordable at just$13 a month. But twist listeners get an extra 20 % off of any plan for the first six months at open phone.com slash twist. What if you have an existing phone number with another service? No problem. Easy peasy lemon squeezy open phone is going to port them over at no extra cost.

21:55So head over to openphone.com slash twist, start your free trial, get 20 % off. You're going to love this product. It is so affordable and it's so elegant. Just to the product team at OpenPhone, great job. I look at products all day long and yours is elegant and simple and powerful. Well done. We've got some incredible partners. Toyota on the manufacturing side. It's been incredible. Uber, Delta. Delta is actually building VertiPorts on their terminals. It's going to be incredible. And this is what the experience is going to be like. This is a rendering of a VertiPort. They're going to be these beautiful facilities.

22:28And this is how you're going to do it. You're going to pull up your Uber app. So it's being integrated in the app. You pull up your location where you are. So you're in New York. You want to go to JFK. You select your flight, your route, et cetera. It's a degree, start trip. It's multimodal. So it knows that needs to send an Uber, typical Uber to go pick you up and it picks you up and this is your trip. So it picks up the riders that are gonna share that Joby and it takes you to the downtown Manhattan heliport. As you saw, you're going to JFK, seven minutes. Seven, seven. Wow. Seven minutes. Look at that, going around the Bell Parkway past Bay Ridge, where I come from.

23:14That's about 50 minutes. There you go. At least. On a good day. And this is not a fantasy. This is a Joby flying in Manhattan a few months ago. We went to the downtown Manhattan heliport. We're working with the mayor and the city. We're electrifying it because we need a lot of electricity. Kind of like building a Tesla supercharger right there. And here it is. And it's it's real. So it's coming. And our plan is to begin commercial operations by the end of next year. Wow. Amazing. That was Sky Dayton. I really love his vision for the future because I have spent way too much time going to and from the airport and I hate driving.

24:00So the whole idea of EVTOLs sounds perfect to me. Sign me up. Strap me in. Next up, we have Mike Jones from Science As Discussed, talking about how to build a brand in today's market. No matter what you're working on, this is critical. Let's go. I've known Mike Jones for, wow, we both sold our companies to AOL almost 20 years ago. I met him there. And the idea of doing a studio model is the worst idea in venture, I tell everybody. And they say, why? I say, because I have seen this pitch no less than a hundred times, and there are two people who have made it work. John Borthwick from Betaworks, and I think he retired because he was exhausted from doing it.

24:47And then Mike Jones and Peter Pham from Science. And they're like, well, I'll just do what they do. And I'm like, you can't. Because those people are unbelievable product, go-to market, and betters. And to have both of those things has only existed in Bill Gross from Idea Lab, which was where we all got this idea from, I think, right? Yeah. Originally, Idea Lab. He was the OG guy with Idea Lab in LA. And then you figured it out. John figured it out. John retired, I think, and you're the last person standing. So I said, come here and explain to us what you figured out. Please welcome my good Thank you.

25:55We are a studio. We do focus on brands, and I'll touch on both here. So there's kind of four core components, and I'm sure you've touched some of our brands. Someone here probably was a subscriber to Dollar Shave Club, which was a company we essentially co-founded with Mike Dubin. And right now, our biggest business is a business called Liquid Death, which maybe some of you guys enjoyed yesterday on the bus. So we work at the very early stages, meaning that when people are pitching us, it's typically a person with an idea. They may have a prototype. They may not. They may have zero team. And they're literally like, hey, I want to spend the next 10 plus years of my life building a canned water company or changing the way men buy razors.