Monumental Makes Construction Bots Play Nice Together | E2217

23:09So you build hardware, you can kind of get something working very quickly. You can build software and sim, you kind of get something working pretty quickly. Then you try to run it, you're like off by like three millimeters here. There's like a small angle here. Like, why is that? And then you kind of like go into this rabbit hole where like, again, these two things intersect. And that is like, I think, I feel like we've kind of like collectively have as a company, like the most Spain or like whatever, like in that section. And because it's kind of like cross-functional between these two roles, it's actually really hard to even know like who you're going to put to work to fix that problem.

23:41So I read somewhere on your guys' site that you can do sub-millimeter placement of bricks now. And so I presume that with that level of precision, you guys have been chewing in glass for a long time to get that right. How far were the tolerances to begin with? How fast did they come down to that sub millimeter level? What we've seen is it's not even about like that, you know, it's not like we went from three to one millimeters to give you a sense of like how complicated this turned out to be. So I'll give you two examples. One is we do this thing called 3D reconstruction, right? The map of three structures, you know, similar to what you just described.

24:10Had you asked me a year ago, I would have said like, we already got it to like sub millimeter precision. It works like literally like we were just like it works. We felt good about it. And then we started going from like small pilots to bigger size. And we were doing like 100 feet kind of like walls. And then as we were doing that, we actually started regressing. And then we got like warping. Like we actually still had like precision, but then suddenly like in the middle, if there was be like a big window frame or some feature, like featureless plane, we started to get kind of like weird inaccuracies or like literally like straight lines would not be straight anymore to like millimeter level.

24:41We have actually at some point built a wall that was not straight as we were building is like, what is going on there? And then we discovered it was not the robot. It was actually our 3D model of the world. Solving those things is so hard. Actually, even just like finding, and I actually think this is one of those things that is underrated. If you'd have this problem, like who else does this? Like people who work on augmented reality. But when they have this problem, they can just ignore it. Like you don't care about like a two millimeter issue. But if you're building a wall, a straight wall that's supposed to be there for a hundred years, you will care.

25:09So you need to get it right. And then the other example is just like, I feel like temperature affects everything, right? Like camera calibration. So like that's been also like a continuous issue from like a tech stack. Does that mean that the robots don't work as well in extreme heat and extreme cold? I don't think that's the right way to think about it. It just means you need to collect more data. And so maybe you calibrated them at one data point, and now you have to calibrate it like 10 data points at different temperatures. Or you need to make sure when you're snapshotting a picture at different temperatures, you're not comparing them for like, right?

25:38It's more about that kind of nuance, which is all just like more code, more logic, more complexity. We just need to deal with it. So you guys are based in, as far as I can tell, kind of the city center of Amsterdam. And you're right there in the middle of one of Europe's most beautiful urban centers. I bring that up because some people say that there's less capital available to companies in the European market. And I'm just curious, as you guys work on building out your robotic fleet, it sounds expensive. Do you guys have access to enough funds? What's the climate like over there? The first thing I'd say is I don't think of our company as a capital intensive company.

26:10I think one of the things kind of like I have to explain to like investors, the VCs is there's a default, you know, model of like, oh, you know, hardware, it must be capital intensive. Meanwhile, you look at like all these software businesses that literally raised billions to get to like IPO. And then you look at SpaceX, who I think, you know, raised only one billion to get to the point of like from capital markets to get to the point that they got. Right. Like the cost of our robots is not insanely expensive. Their payback time is really good. I would start with saying it is not that capital intensive.

26:37Interesting. I think just like salaries, just like an other startup, just like paying high quality people, just like is, you know, that's your, your, our biggest word is just like team size. Right. Just like as any company. Right. It's not like, you know, the building the robots. Honestly, I think, you know, ultimately, capital is global, you can raise from American funds. You know, if you ask me, can you raise money in the Netherlands as a Dutch company? Probably. I don't think you can access a lot of money. I don't think you're going to get the best kind of, you know, investors and board members.

27:03I don't think you need to do that, right? Like, there's plenty of like great funds in London and the rest of Europe, but also in the US. And some of these funds actively operate in Europe with like European offices. Some don't. I don't think it's that hard to raise money, honestly. No, I'm really glad to hear that because I feel like you guys are really onto something. And the reason why I brought up just housing and people having kids and stuff in the beginning is I think that as we become an increasingly urbanized species, we need to find some way to rapidly increase our ability to build housing.

27:32And so I'm hopeful that Monumental isn't just a cool name for the company, that it's the impact, the scale of impact you guys can have on getting more homes built. Because God, it seems like every single nation where I look, no one can do this at scale. And it just boggles the mind that one of the most basic things humans do, build shelter, somehow in the modern era, in our current economic environment in which working in major cities is critical for career advancement. We can't do it. I completely agree, Alex. And you just mentioned, you know, we're in this beautiful city center. you mentioned to me before the call that you spent time in Amsterdam.

28:03The thing I would add to you is we need more housing. It's one of the most urgent things we need to get tried in almost every Western country. But I would also add we also need just beautiful housing. One of the things that is shocking to me is how much we've regressed in aesthetics, how we just stopped caring. It kind of makes sense. If you don't have food, you're not going to be picky about the food you need, if you're hungry. If you don't have housing, you're not going to be picky about the aesthetics of your house. But to me, that's actually like a sign of poverty in a way, right? And so we need to break free of that.

28:34And I think one of the things that excites me about what we're doing is we actually will not only, you know, lower the cost of housing, we'll be able to like actually build aesthetically pleasing, diverse types of houses without raising costs, right? And that is exciting to me. But you stole my last question, kind of, because I was thinking about the robots and the bricklaying. And one thing that very, very good bricklayers can do is do interesting patterns, different size bricks. you can make a wall almost artistic if you're good. And it seems like, you know, based on the GIFs and images that I've seen, you guys are doing kind of standard wall creation today, but it doesn't seem like it'd be impossible to down the road be able to do some kind of more aesthetically pleasing, more artistic bricklaying.

29:14So we've actually done it. We're actually doing like really exciting stuff. And I think, interestingly, this is again the stuff where a lot of mesas actually like will go much slower, making it more expensive, much harder for them. But we've actually built our robot. But for example, if you want to do brick patterns, if you want to combine two or three colors of bricks with a very intricate pattern, you can go as far as like actual pixel art with bricks. You know, the robot's not going to be slower. It's not going to get more expensive. You can do things like indents and outdents really easily.

29:39And so we can do everything that a really skilled craftsman can do. But like we can do a lot of like amazing things at the same speed at the same cost. And that is exciting. And so we're going to coin the term not brick pixel art, but brixel art. It has to be the new phrase, right? I'm not sure if that's going to work. Alex. I think it's brilliant. Let's try it. Let's try it. I want to have you back on in a couple quarters to check out how progress is going, but this is tremendous. Before I let you go, though, where can people find you on the internet? And also, is there a job that you're looking to fill that you want to shout out to the This Week in Startups community?

30:12Yeah, so you can find us at monumental.co.co. I think we literally have like 15 open roles. The thing I would want to say is a lot of software engineers, we're always looking for great software engineers, think that we'd be looking for like embedded people or robotics people. We are a full stack software company. You just showed Atrium. It's a React app using Rust. It's just like a proper software app. We're not some like industrial robotic. So if you're like an amazing software engineer, if you want to contribute to this and actually like help build robots that build houses, you should just like apply now, basically.

30:41I'm going to do you a little favor here and show part of the site because this made me laugh when I read it. There's a note on the Monumental website entitled, a quick note on our tech stack. And it just lists all the different languages you're using and where you're using them in the hierarchy of the application. I don't think I've ever seen that level of detail about how software was built on a startup's page. It was pretty cool. I like that, Salar. Thank you for doing that. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you so much. Monumental.co, part of the Twist 500, one of the awesomest companies in the world.

31:09Shout out Holland. Salar, we'll see you soon. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Alex. Probably the best part of being a founder is watching a project that started as just an idea blossomed into a full-fledged startup. The worst part? It's bookkeeping. It's boring. It's detail-oriented. And it takes time away from building your product and, hey, growing your team. It's time for you to let Pilot take care of all this bookkeeping so you can get back to running your company. Pilot's the largest accounting firm, and it was built just for startups. They understand the technology industry and the landscape.

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32:15And Twist listeners get$1 ,200 off their first year. Just go to pilot.com slash twist to get started. On the show, we love to talk about drones, usually in the sky, sometimes underneath the water, but there is a class of startups out there building drones that sit right on top of the ocean. One of them is called CSATs, short for C-satellites, and I'm gonna learn lots today about dual-use technologies, re-industrializing America, and also, when can I buy one? Please welcome to the show. It's Mike Flanagan, co-founder and CEO of CSATS. It's really good to be on here. Thanks for having me and excited to talk about the world of maritime drones.

32:51I have sailing merit badge, sir. So I'm a literal expert in all the... I kid. I want to actually go back in time, though, and not talk about the company to start. Because if you rewind the clock, you and some buds were sitting in Tifferton, Rhode Island, very close to where I live. And you were working on a crazy science project that ended up leading to the company. So just for fun, tell us that story. This story, in many ways, CSATS has been a journey of technology disruption, technology innovation, going to directly solve customer problems or end user problems. But then really, like you have all these things are driven by like global collisions, like technology change, making new opportunity.

33:25This absolutely happened for us in this childhood story. You know, the Scout Transatlantic Project, if anyone wants to go Google Scout Transatlantic Autonomous Boat. It's really cool. I recommend you. I did this earlier today. Fantastic. Do it. There are fun stories out there. It was like, you know, pre, I mean, to the end there, it's like, this was basically a garage project, a couple of kids doing something just on the side out of like passion and kind of like intellectual curiosity, pushing the limits of what's possible with like consumer hobby grade tech. And it really went viral. Describe the challenge.

33:55Yeah, so the challenge was to send an autonomous boat from Rhode Island all the way to Spain, like across the entire. Yeah, exactly. Go Rhode Islanders. Great maritime states, you know, grove around the water. And, you know, we wanted to send this little autonomous boat across the whole ocean, just pulling in solar power, charging its batteries, spinning its propeller, sending back updates over satellite and across the whole ocean. I mean, this is something that had never been done. There's a Transat, there's a many year running competition to do this. And I don't know how many years it went, like five or 10 years of teams trying every year and always failing.

34:30So this was a huge project for us. Talk to me about how you kind of went from there to founding the company. The Scout project actually like propelled our trajectories, our career trajectories. So I was the youngest person on the team at the time. So I was still in school. That project spans two and a half years. So I was going through engineering classes and like all of this was really clicking. I was like, oh, this is why we do this. So I started changing my own career interests based on that project. And what I saw is like applied engineering. Several of our other team members went off to work for various places like America's Cup teams.

35:00And Dylan, our now CTO at CSATS, went on to help start Ocean Arrow, another USB company. So it really kind of propelled us all into this space. Take that forward another, you know, five, 10 years. I guess that was 15 years ago now. We started CSATS five years ago. When we started CSATS, we really were like, hey, a lot of the companies in this space, the first gens kind of are doing incredible work, work that, you know, we're standing on the shoulders of giants, et cetera, et cetera, technology development. But like the wave gliders, the sail drones, a lot of these companies were very first gen.

35:31They were kind of like these weird products that were hard to use. You had to know a ton about sailing or about like be a deep mariner to get any value out of it. And even then it was really complicated. Yeah. We were like, hey, let's build seasets. Let's make this easier, more scalable. Let's hammer in on like an iPhone style product. Like let's make drones easy to use in the ocean. That's where I want to start because you have two models kind of currently in market, the Lightfish and Quickfish, both of which I think have solar panels and bring in some power and such. But it's the autonomy element that I want to start with because you guys talk about how you can train people up in like three days to use these boats.

36:03In my experience with anything on the water, it's very tedious and difficult and not to be mean, but like it's tricky. So what did you guys build and what did you invent to make it possible to have these drone boats that are so easy for basically anybody to pick up and get ready to go with? Two days. That's our standard training. Two-day calls, start, start to finish. Industry standard is like two weeks to give, you know, audiences who don't know, like a frame of reference. So it's like, we're cutting that dramatically. And then take that even further. We've done stuff where it's like, hey, two days, if you need, you know, your boat owner, you're going to use all the different features.

36:35I've personally trained people who are doing like harbor security applications in like three to four minutes where I'm like, OK, this guy has very little time. I'm going to teach him the basics of how to drive the car in a video game style thing through our remote interface. And then I'm going to walk away because he's got a job to do. Can you explain to me the human inputs required and then the autonomy element to this? Because I'm trying to figure out exactly how autonomous these boats are. But clearly there's some training required. So if you could just tease that out. What is autonomous on these boats?

37:00They go out, they self-power manage, they self-propulsion, steer, they self-pale. manage, like they're basically managing like there's automation across the whole stack where the human operator comes in is really like mission desire. It's like, hey, are you trying to patrol a harbor? Are you trying to go to a target? Are you trying to go do a specific thing? So that's where like you still need like human level intent. You know, we're not at Skynet yet where it can just like kind of think of what we might want possibly. It's like a little more deterministic than that, but otherwise highly autonomous.

37:30So essentially we're telling it roughly where to go and what to do. And then it handles it from there. I presume this opens up the possibility of having fleets of these things with relatively few humans in the loop setting directions. Absolutely. If you want to deploy, let's say north of a hundred of these, your real time bottleneck is deployment because we focus on long endurance vehicles. So vehicles that are out more than like eight hours, then your actual launch becomes kind of negligible in terms of like, Hey, we're going to monitor a country's economic exclusion zone, their maritime border.

38:01You might put out a hundred vehicles, but like you and me could go to the ramp. If, you know, we got a couple of 18 wheelers to drop off all the boats to fit them all. Then, I mean, we just put them in one at a time and we hit go on the mission. We put in the next one, hit go. And like, you can probably launch one every three minutes or something with two people. So I mean, we could just carry it off the truck together, throw it in. So the ability to be out for a long period of time is made possible by charging while it's out on the ocean is my understanding of this. My other thing that I know is that we don't put solar panels on the top of EVs because they just wouldn't really add enough juice to make it economically viable.

38:37Why is that different when we're on the ocean? Excellent question. Yeah. So autonomous, yeah, autonomous vehicles like a Tesla, I think is driving around with like a hundred kilowatt hours of stored energy. Their motors are typically, I don't know exactly, but I'm guessing it's like a 50 to a plus kilowatt motor. We're talking extremely efficient electronics. Like we're talking like, even though it's a big vehicle, it's like a 12 foot vehicle. It's able to go significant payloads, long ranges. It's all combining lots of optimized electronics. So we're talking about watts, watts, tens of watts, hundreds of watts to run usually like high power payloads.

39:12We might be carrying like, you know, surveying mapping sonars are pretty high power, a couple hundred watts. So we'll run, we've got solar and then also a hybrid generator system. So we basically, if you've got bad weather, you can run the generator, or if you're running like a high power operation, you can run the generator. What does the generator run on? It's a methanol fuel cell. Oh, interesting. Very interesting technology. Whenever I think about fuel cells, I think about projects from Honda that are Japan only that end up fizzling. I presume that's an archaic perspective. How expensive are these fuel cells?

39:41And also do they have any risks to them? Like we know EVs, batteries can set on fire, for example. Anytime you're dealing with a high performance system, you're dealing with risk, right? Like jet fuel is very combustible. Like lithium ion batteries are the highest energy density. Several times, like our Navy customers are like, you know, can we go to lead acids? It's like, okay, here's the performance hit. And they're like, okay, you know, if you want good things, they're going to be pointy. Like your Ferrari can go fast. It can also wreck hard. So the fuel cell is definitely not fizzled out. I won't say too much because it's a little bit of like, you know, it's out there in the world.

40:11People could go buy it, but it's a reliable product. It's a great system. We did a lot of engineering to work it into our products so that our customers, it really solves the range anxiety issue. Because like for solar to get multi-month performance, you have to optimize a ton to get the power right. So we've done that. But then even so, like you might have two weeks of bad weather. Like customers using their boat, they get down to 50 % payload or battery. They might be like, hey, send it home. It's like, oh no, if you can just recharge multiple times, you're just like turn on the charge button.

40:39And even they don't even have to do that. It's automated. It's like the boat is like, hey, I'm going to turn on the charge button. When you have one of these fuel cells on, let's say the light fish, which is the smaller of your two boats, it's more like 12 feet versus 17 feet, I think for the quick fish. Okay. So if I had no solar power whatsoever and the batteries or the system needed a juice, how many times could the power cell charge it back up? Depending on the configuration, like four to 10 times. Oh, okay. Great. That answers all those questions. Yeah. A lot of times like from zero, imagine me able to charge your Tesla battery.

41:08You're like, oh, I didn't quite make it to my spot, but you're like, recharge. You know, it's not super fast, but you're like, I can recharge. I thought you were going to say 0.5 times, and then I was going to have a series of follow-up questions, but four to 10, good. We'll move on. Single-use combustion stuff, the energy density is very high compared to batteries, even though battery technologies improved dramatically. Yeah, single-use, still very high energy density. I wasn't going to bring it up, but one of the coolest things about this company is that it works with today's batteries. You move that marker 10 years into the future, and you're going to have much more efficient storage, and it's going to be fantastic.

41:37Totally. I mean, and if you say, if you look at back in our garage project, we're using rudimentary SATCOMs. We're using rudimentary batteries. We're using rudimentary solar charging systems, rudimentary compute. Everything now, like over 15 years of working in this space is like has gotten better. And then when you're working in the space of combining these into also like into combining them into really clean, beautiful, usable products. Because like you were saying, like, just because you've got all this great stuff does not mean the interface. You can't train someone in three minutes because you've got great batteries.

42:08That requires product design and people who are aligned and being like, I hate using buggy technology. Like our CTO's Dylan is fantastic. Cause he's like, I'm so frustrated by banking software and this software is like, it's such, you know it's crap how bad software is. And so it's like, bring that level of desire to have like smooth products to a user group that rarely has a good product experience. Government technology tends to be pretty rough. But you said SATCOM earlier, satellite communications and that brings up a point I wanted to get to which is the customer. Because I think it's not hard to see the military possibilities for your ASVs, autonomous surface vehicles.

42:44Cool. But you guys also talk a lot about research and commercial operations. And so I presume that there is a panoply of different ways to use these, which might necessitate longer deployed times and therefore communications, it becomes incredibly important. You don't want to only talk to your boats when they come back to port. So what's a standard-ish connectivity package and what do your customers do with that? I would say standard connectivity package, we're connecting across high bandwidth satellite connection or like satellite constellations to older constellations that are kind of mid bandwidth to the oldest constellations that are like breadcrumb bandwidth.

43:16And then the boats are also able to connect to like local, like other boats. You can use them in fleets. We've done that. Can you coordinate their movement based on? We typically, we have like some rudimentary coordination, but we really focus on like extremely good vessel autonomy because there's quite a few players focusing on like coordinated swarms. Like, I mean, Yeah, like the government's working on it. Andrel's working on it. L3 Harris is working on it. There's people, really smart people working on like, how do I get good individual assets? Planes, boats, submarines, ground vehicles, manned assets, troops on the ground to fuse together into a big complicated picture to affect an outcome.

43:55We basically are like, hey, our best way to help that is to have extremely good individual units that understand high level commands and can execute them really smoothly. Like you can trust their data. That's fantastic. So back to the customer point, research labs, governments, people that are trying to track ocean currents, what's the non-military customer base like? People are trying to do like survey work is one of the most, I'd say, understandable ones. So anytime we do construction work, right, you've got like a crew that comes in kind of like site surveys the land, like where are we going to build the skyscraper?

44:24Then like, you know, people build stuff and then people are coming in and checking along the way. Did we do it right? You take that underwater. It's so hard. It's invisible. So like you need to build a bridge piling. You need to like lay a pipeline or a cable, an internet cable. Well, we don't really know what's down there. We've got some old chart from, you know, the 1800s that some guy lead blinded. So it's like, okay, you need to know what it looks like today. Then you need to know, like, you know, dig the trench. Then we lay the thing. Then we need to say, like, did it, is it right? And then two years later after a storm or like a month later after the storm, every hurricane season down south, you need to go check and say, like, is this infrastructure still okay?

44:57Or do we need to go do something to fix it? That requires actually going along with a sound sonar. So it's sending out sound pulses, getting that picture back and then building a high resolution 3D bottom map to say, hey, here's what's going on. So in the commercial world, that's like a huge use that like robots are great for because it's just extremely precise, repetitive work. And it's like, yeah, drones are fantastic for it. I was thinking oil and gas and then subsea internet cables with the two things that I was thinking of as clear, clear use cases for this. There are like dozens more. There's like tracking whales, doing harmful algal blooms, preventing shellfish poisoning.

45:29I mean, it's like it's a very interesting industry. There's like a gazillion things people are doing with drones. It's almost like the ocean is really big and really important. It sure is, as it turns out. Yeah, it's far away. Not many people think about it because it's like, oh, out to sea. But it's like actually like the whole world is getting kind of fed by the ocean. Those people live in Nebraska. Like those of us who have lived near the ocean. I used to live in San Francisco and now I live in Providence. I'm close to this other ocean now. It's pretty important stuff. Let's talk about manufacturing.

45:54You guys are based down in San Diego, as we discussed before the show, close to the El Segundo area. But I'm just, I'm curious why that was the right place to build the company. And then also, how has it been working on products that I presume can't have an enormous footprint of Chinese made supply? So I would say the two things there, San Diego is a great city for this work. It just has an amazing intersection of like leading scientific institutions, like the Scripps Oceanographic Institution, a really big military presence in terms of like Navy Special Warfare's headquarters is here. I think one of the biggest like aircraft carrier, you know, hubs in the world.

46:27So huge military presence. Everyone kind of understands working with the military and what that brings to, you know, the city and the nation. And then also just, I would say, like good tech hub. Like you've got companies like Qualcomm and like biotech companies have been here for a long time. And then also very good, I would say, mission driven people. Like people who have like generally are looking to create an impact and also have like a stable, like planted life. Got friends who are up in SF who are like, oh, yeah, you know, there's like a new sauna perk at this other company. So I jumped, you know, ship as soon as my stocks vested at the one year.

46:56I just quit and went to this other one because I can get free saunas. And it's like, I see we have the same friends. Exactly. Right. It's not super conducive to talent retention and people aren't necessarily there for like a good reason. It's like, Hey, go gold mine over in SF. But it's like, if you want to build something impactful, I come to San Diego. You guys have discussed expanding your manufacturing footprint down in San Diego area. So I'm curious, what is your boat creation pace? I'm not quite sure the term of art there is, but that'll get the done. And I didn't touch on your Chinese component or supply chain question, which is like, you know, in government terms, like NDAA compliance, National Defense Authorization Act.

47:29Yeah. So we build a remarkable amount here in San Diego. In the early days, that was not very popular. When we were raising our first round out of like tech stars, so many investors were like, hey, don't work on hardware, just be the software app for boats. We luckily had people who are experts across all these different things, like Max Kramers, who's, you know, one of our co-founders is a total expert in like naval architecture, mechanical engineering, boat design. He gets it. And it's like, hey, we could compromise. Like we could outsource this. We could chuck it over the fence and hope someone else builds a good enough product.

47:59But if you want a good product from start to finish, like Apple, you know, needs to touch the hardware. They need to touch the software, the firmware. You have to kind of do the whole thing. There's also the yin and yang where you need to make it easy to play with because in defense, there's a lot of partners in the ecosystem. So you can't be closed, which we do. Anyway, so we own a lot of our supply chain. Honestly, getting off of Chinese components, it's a challenge. have to meet defense requirements. And we might start with a prototype component. And it's like, hey, this component is$100 or$80.

48:29And it's mass manufactured for consumer users. Then we like go ahead and get the non-Chinese version. It's like$800. And you can do a literal 8 to 10 to 15x cost increase. I look at this from like a high level standpoint of like, this is tough, but it's something that we kind of have divested in for 20, 30 years. I went to school at Notre Dame and, you know, the Midwest. And it's like, you see the Rust Belt. It's like, you see all the industry that's shut down. Yeah. So from just like not investing and having manufacturing in America. So now, yeah, we do need to pay a premium. It's going to be hard.

49:03We need to think about how to do it, but it certainly is helping, you know, bring manufacturing and tech back to the States. Do we need to have some sort of like pooled domestic manufacturing capacity that like you guys, Andruil, L3, and Regent, and Vatten Systems, and Cerronic, and everyone just kind of puts in 10 million each, and then we just have better injection molding, and better CNC machining. It just feels like everyone tells me the same thing, and everyone's trying to solve it in a small way individually versus coming together to have a real industry-driven industrial policy. I agree.

49:37I mean, I think that some definitely top-down policy can affect this in a big way. And I mean, on the shelf behind you, it looks like you've got an Xbox and a PlayStation 3 controller. You're the first person in the history of the show to notice that. I mean, but those are such good, tangible examples. The circuit boards in there are almost definitely made in China. It's not that we can't build them here, but we do need to invest in the incentivized companies to build up that flexible manufacturing capabilities that, you know, us, Anduril, Sironic, Vatin, everyone can source their components that are not that exquisite from a U.S.

50:10company instead of going to China. Do you think the government's doing enough right now to support this? Because I'm actually pretty bullish, not just on your company, but the entire, like, we might say generation of hard tech companies that I think you're a part of. And I'm just curious if in our currently volatile political system, Congress and the executive branch are able to actually do enough to support here or if there's lots of room for more activity from them. That is a good question. I don't think we should adopt kind of like authoritarian like dials like China has done, but I do just want to comment on the effectiveness of some of their policy.

50:40Like I used, when we were starting this company, I was learning about the regulations. I was like, oh, that's pretty, you know, controlling. Then I read about like, like, why does Chinese battery tech like rule the kind of whole place? And it's like, oh, they had a smog problem, like an air quality problem. So, you know what, we're going to rule out that you can only drive like IC, like internal combustion cars, certain days of the week. If you have an EV, an electric vehicle, you can drive all the day. And then they're like, hey, and if you're going to build EVs in China, you have to have a certain percent domestic manufactured.

51:07And it was like really high. So like Tesla and all these companies went and just like, I forget the name of the company, but there's a battery cell company that went from like a nobody to today's biggest battery provider in the world in a couple of years. If anyone's curious why we don't just ape that here in the States, it's because it leads to perverse incentives and you know about the manufacturing glut. That's why you get the term involution regarding Chinese cost cutting and you get industrial deflation. Thank you for saying that, Alex, because I've referenced that once or twice and no one has really articulated like that flip downside.

51:41There's clearly a downside. So I'm not saying we should do that, but it's a lesson for us that like, Hey, top-down regulation can work. It really can change things. You have to be careful about what happens, but it's like, if you want to drive change, if a government sets the policy, all the companies will react. Sure. I mean, we had this through cafe, like fuel economy standards and so forth. And we have industrial policy in the form of tax rebates for EVs or dead until recently. I just would like for you to say, you know what, Alex, actually it's so easy to get out of Chinese parts because there's so many great options here in the States, I can build 10 times as many boats as I could last year.

52:12Cause there's just, I'm drowning in machinery, you know, that's what I want. Cause then there'll be more flexibility to innovate. Cause you won't be worried so much about getting the fricking parts you need. It's true. And you know, it is better like for the optimist or optimistic side of this, like it's better today than years ago. It's like, things are getting better. There are people like all the time we're getting contacted by suppliers who are like, Hey, we have this new clever way to do composites. We've got this new clever way to do batteries. We're trying to get into this game. And it's like, that's great.

52:37I mean, there's a lot of disruption happening. I think people see the need now, which is really good. How many boats can you guys build per month, per quarter, whatever the right time of reference there is? We've got the capacity to go into the hundreds. So I mean, the nice thing here is per year, I would say. The difference here between, I've got a background working in like consumer goods and medical and then automotive, working for a consulting automation company. So I had the privilege of going inside of a lot of American factories, help them automate and increase throughput. Those are the scales of what's possible.

53:06Maritime right now is way below that. So I really enjoy it from CSAT's perspective. Like we're much closer to consumer goods or to automotive than we are to shipbuilding. The new like kind of like shipbuilding pushes I think are great. And like people going after the medium sized USBs is very interesting. Those are big bets. But for small ASVs, the reason we like them is we can proliferate them very quickly, very capital efficiently. And we built a lot of them. And I mean, you get really good effects from. And just to be clear, we're describing this basically up to 17 foot boats as small. So in the in the USV world, these are the 500s of the USVs.

53:40Yeah, totally. These things are very small. I mean, the Navy is very used to, you know, ships are big ships, boats are submarines. And like our size of thing like hardly registers. You guys are like a pimple or something like incredibly small. What does that fly on the water? However, it's changed. I mean, the power of small things has changed. Like Ukraine used small USBs, you know, 15 to 20 something feet to completely drive the Russian naval fleet out of the Black Sea without putting anyone on the water. They did other places, but I mean, asymmetric effect, small robots against big ships. The fight was a KO.

54:13But when I think about the future of warfare, I think about not just Ukraine, I think about, you know, future conflicts around Taiwan. And it's going to be a drone based battle in a large way. And I do think that, and I'm not saying that you guys are selling them to Taiwan, but like I could see equipment like the Quickfish, I keep getting the mix up in my head, which has a built-in like a payload area. It seems like according to the drawings play an enormous impact and they don't have to be big. They can be small as long as they can carry what they need. In fact, size might be a net negative. Actually, I love that you said that.

54:43Our thoughts are the smallest platform you can make that does the mission capability is what you want because that's the best for stealth. It's the best for cost equation. It's the best for manufacturing, logistics. Like you get all these benefits by being small. Yeah. Make it just as big as you need for the specific mission. Are we still behind? Because I think what the Ukrainian war or the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, whatever you want to call it, really showed us that we were behind on flying drones, that our domestic supply chains were crap, that we were just behind the curve on the future of warfare and so forth.

55:12But I keep talking to people like yourself who are building autonomous naval vehicles, either above or below the sea, but like it feels pretty pretty quick and so are we doing good enough today or are we still playing catch-up yeah that's a good question you can look at this from two different standpoints like you can look at this from warfare or you can look at this from operational impact and like it's like we're a dual use company we do scientific work we do survey work we do like and we work for you know militaries around the world on that side like cstats is one of the leaders like even some of the companies that have raised huge sums of money like they don't have you know fleets of boats around doing like real value add or positive ROI work, which is one of the problems with like, you know, these like humanoid robotic companies right now.

55:52It's people like, it can fold laundry, but it's like the ROI is wildly negative. So it's like - Yeah, 50K to fold laundry is something that, you know, the billionaires can afford. But currently I'm still gonna either do it myself or pay someone 20 bucks an hour to do it. Exactly. And so you've got that problem in Maritime too. It's like, okay, you can build a multimillion dollar vehicle. That's very cool. But no company in the commercial space is gonna pay for that because it's just ridiculous. us. And so it's like, we build a more affordable vehicle. It does, you know, commercial sales, it does commercial positive ROI work for our customers.

56:21It also is very useful for defense and militaries, and they can scale it and use it in these various symmetric ways. In terms of operational capability, you know, I would say that the US has incredible technologies. I think we're probably ahead, probably the leaders in many areas in maritime. Ukraine definitely has, you know, They have the pressing need of being in an all-out war where it absolutely matters. And they're totally the leaders in terms of operationalizing USVs and warfare. I mean, no one's done what they've done. No, and that's why it's still a nation. Yeah, exactly. To their credit.

56:53There's another company based out of Rhode Island that I talked to recently called Regent. And they're making essentially electric boat hover glide planes for regional transit. and they kind of blew my mind because they're like we can get you to new york from providence in like an hour and a half it's gonna be quick and you don't have to go to the tsa and i was like oh my god this is fantastic prepping for our chat today i was really curious like when can i go to the harbor here in providence and put something into one of these boats that you make and just ship it down the seaboard because it strikes me as like why would i need ups when i could just have my own or a shared local community uber style rental of a light fish so you're talking shipping of like packages and goods, right?

57:31Sure. Why not? Or myself or a baby, you know, or a bike. I don't know. It just, it just seems so cool that we have these boats that can go so far, so autonomously, and they're so small and easy to serve. Nice. One of our customers sent, I think like a bottle of bourbon or something across an entire ocean. It's not in the public yet. So maybe we'll hear about that. But yeah, I would say, you know, it is true. Some of our products that we've looked at right now, the shipping industry, because they're in a very safe commercial space, they're essentially protected by the U.S. and many allies against piracy against, you know, adversarial nations, because of a total safety bubble, they've slowly expanded the ships from like, you know, the mega tankers to the super mega tankers to the super mega uber tankers, because it's basically like efficiency of economics, you just put it on.

58:12The downside is now to get anything across the world, like we do a lot of international shipping to get one of our boats, it's only like a pretty small wooden crate, a couple hundred pounds, to get it to where we want it. It like guarantees by sea that it's going to take like 60 to 90 days. I'm like, man, why is it taking so long? And it's because there's just, we put in air tags and it sits and waits at ports for the load and the unload. So actually I do think there's an opportunity here for scaling more flexible, kind of like, Hey, if you need to move that bottle of bourbon quickly, like we can help you out.

58:44We can cut, you know, several weeks off of the shipping time. Especially if you're in and around like something like the great lakes where the seas don't get as rough as I understand it. And so you could probably get something from Chicago to something else in the Great Lakes pretty easily, pretty quickly. Who needs a train when you have solar powered drone boats? I'm just so excited about the future. Things like this, it sounds like something that I could have read in my childhood in a book about the future. Like, you know, in the future, we'll have small boats that are autonomous. And I would be like, oh, that's so cool.

59:10And here we are. We have them. Yeah. Have you read The Ministry for Future Affairs? That is the book by the guy who did Red Mars. I did. It's about like future crediting, future society. It's kind of like a climate change, sci-fi, futuristic, because it's only like 50 years in the future or something or maybe it's like 20 or 100 years it's near future and it gives the author this freedom to just kind of tweet things and one thing i loved is like oh he actually plays out he or she i forget who the author is plays out it's kim stanley robinson ksr nice with like amazing stuff on small drones on maritime drones there's like a bunch of stuff where it's well the weapon that you're describing is it's a missile that doesn't impact itself instead it breaks into like 10 000 little missiles and then there's unstoppable i think is i forget what they call them, but it's a swarm weapon of a type.

59:54The problem with that book while we're doing this is that the change agents end up being terrorists in a way that forces governments to change their, like that's, these swarm weapons is how they take down global air traffic. So pretty gnarly future. Hopefully that's not where things go, but it's a good point that, I mean, what we're dealing with right now, there's a lot of people, you know, that I talked to who are in the counter UXS, counter anything autonomous, anything thrown. And they're freaking out. They're ringing red bells and 10 alarm fires. And I'm like, fair enough. We're not living in that dystopia today, but there are very few defense nets against people with$500 drones wreaking havoc.

1:00:31I mean, it's pretty, it is a scary kind of like, it's when you realize that your doors are unlocked and have been unlocked for a year and that suddenly people know where you live. And it's like, Ooh, I probably should lock my doors. Yeah. And is that why your company is going to have their next major product line be anti-surface. Seriously though, I mean, is that something that you guys are going to, are you going to worry about this stuff? I mean, so some of the quick fish applications are to put a robot in between a potential threat and a friendly vessel. And if you look at some of the stuff, like there's this, you know, kind of wild and very bad attack in the Red Sea, where it's like the Houthis were shooting, you know, aerial drones and low-cost missiles at ships.

1:01:08They were striking them. They were causing damage. They were causing some fatalities. Bad problem, not good. I think that maybe they sunk one ship in a span of time. They sent a surface vessel that looked like a fishing boat. It had like a dummy, like a scarecrow in it. And so there's this incredible video on Twitter X of all the security guards standing on the bridge with their machine guns up in the air, trying to determine why is this fisherman coming towards us kind of. And it's like, you see the kind of terror. There's a horror movie, but then they're like oh crap this is that's a scarecrow and it's too close and it hits the ship it doesn't kill anyone i believe thankfully but the ship sinks i'm using an entire tank from one usb that is a scenario where the quick fish could have played it's like oh of course you send a little high speed robot first because like you can play bumper cards safely it's not going to cause damage to the boat in question and you don't care if you sink the usb because it's cheap yeah and you're standing off of you know your multi-million dollar ass so if people aboard it with a little bit of a buffer.

1:02:08Well, I think this is why your company is not only going to reinvent trade and warfare, but also billionaire yacht defense, a critical growth market for all. Mike, this has been tremendous. Where can people find your company on the internet? And also, is there a job you are hiring for that you want to shout out into the audience? CSATs.com is our website. I think there's a new one rolling out pretty shortly. Yeah, we've got multiple jobs open. There's a career page there. We're always trying to hire for great tech driven people. Anyone who's willing to push maritime autonomy forward and has something to bring to the table.

1:02:36I appreciate it. The next time you're in Rhode Island, you hit me up and I'll take you out to dinner. I'd love that. Alex, it's been great talking to you. A pleasure. Thanks, Mike. Bye. Thanks. All right. We have some founder questions. Let's do it. There's a great one over from the startup subreddit, Jason. A man was applying to work at a company and he says, I'm interviewing at a small startup. The CEO has been setting up a series of interviews over the past couple of weeks. All his emails have been sent late in the evening or on weekends. Is this a red flag? Most of what I know about the company so far is good.

1:03:04but should I be worried that the CEO is seemingly working all the time? Now, a lot of folks actually had a pretty positive taste on this, but before we get to those, what do you think? Why are you going to this startup is the question. Do you want to make a lot of money from your options or do you want to have work-life balance? What he's signaling or she's signaling to you is this is not a place for work-life balance. When the CEO emails you, you're going to be judged whether you like it or not on your response time. Period, full stop. How do I know this? This CEO is me and every other successful CEO I know.

1:03:38I get a flurry of energy on a Saturday or Sunday, sometimes a Friday or Saturday night. And I judge people, sorry, it's just the way it is, by the people who respond quickly and thoughtfully and the people who I get responses from Monday morning at 9 a.m., 10 a.m. At a startup, you're gonna be moving 9, 9, 6, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. That's the expectation. If you don't want that, please, for the love of God, do not join a startup. You are reading the room correctly, dear subreddit member. There's Reddit rapid response here. Listen to everybody in the audience. This CEO is going to maximize shareholder value by working himself or themselves and the team to the bone to beat their competitors.

1:04:20They're not going to give you a work-life balance. If you want work-life balance, pick a different company. Pick a bigger company, pick a smaller role in a bigger company where your contribution is narrow and the expectation is lower. That's why people join big companies. They look at the benefits that the big company gives you. That's why people like to join the government. Some people want to be teachers. God bless them. You get three months off as a teacher. They want that lifestyle. It's a free country. Pick and choose. If you choose this company and you're seeing it as a red flag already, that to me says says original poster, OP does not want to work at this company.

1:04:58If you see it as a red flag, not a green flag. Yeah. Okay. You tell us everything we need to know here. Don't join this company. If you saw this as a green flag, Hey, I'm up. I'm thinking about the company. I'm obsessed with my stock options being worth something by all means, then go work there. This is a red flag for you. Get out of Dodge. Best comment was the red flag would be the CEO working a nine to five and not the weekends LMAO. But there was a couple of other points that I just want to bounce off you while we have you in the CEO chair. People were saying, hey, look, you know, the CEO is going to be swamped all day.

1:05:27Sometimes they only get to email at the end of the day and they may not expect a response right away. Do you think that carries water, Jason? There is some truth to the first part of that, but not the second. You do. Like my email might come at the end of the day because I'm talking to my direct reports. I'm talking to founders. I'm doing podcasts. Yes, my day might be full. I might be traveling around the world to Saudi Arabia and then Japan and then home. Literally went around the world recently. So yeah, they might not get to it later, but they're still going to judge you on response time. Sorry, just the way it is.

1:05:57Pick wisely. This original poster sees it as a red flag. It is a red flag for you. Go work at Intuit, which is famously good work-life balance. Okay, great. And shout out to Intuit. Go there. Yeah. I mean, there are some companies that were espousing four-day work weeks and offering four-day work weeks. 37 signals. Hard company to get a job at, but I think they take Fridays off in the summer. So go work at 37 Signals. And you're going to have to fight for that job. It's not easy to get in there because people don't leave because the benefits are so good. Different founders, and this is something you can decide for yourself as a founder.

1:06:36Some founders like to overpay team members. Sometimes they like to shower people with benefits. Why? Why? Golden handcuffs. They want to make it impossible to leave and they prefer to have no turnover. Other founders see turnover as energizing and a plus. Okay, we outgrew people. Netflix was famous for having everybody reapply for their jobs in January. This was shocking when people heard this. What? You're not loyal to your own people? No. Reed Hastings said it. We're not. We're not loyal to our people. We're loyal to the mission of the company. if you can't provide and explain how you're going to provide value in January, then okay, you shouldn't be here.

1:07:19It's a sports team. And a sports team, you know, analogy is going to be cutthroat and you're going to get cut. So do not join this company under any circumstances. Corollary to this is make sure you understand your equity package and don't 996 for a company where you have$4 in potential future equity, because that's not where you want to spend your time. Another good point. You would want to know your strike price. You're going to want to know how many shares are outstanding. And you have the ability to ask those questions. And if you do, people are going to say, okay, this person's thoughtful.

1:07:49So if they say, we're going to give you 10 ,000 shares, you say, okay, is that 10 ,000 of a million shares and it's 1 % of the company, or is it 10 ,000 of a billion shares? I would like to know. And okay, I understand I have common shares. Can you explain to me just broad strokes, the preference stack, this company's been around for five years, you've raised$300 million. That last$100 million that came in at a billion-dollar valuation, do they have a 3x liquidation preference? What are the general terms? Now, they might say that's confidential. We can't explain it. Then what you could say is, okay, if everything converted, here's the little secret.

1:08:21Let's say we IPO'd at a$10 billion valuation. We're currently worth a billion. We IPO at$10 billion, and I have 100 ,000 shares. How many fully diluted shares would there be if everybody converted to common at$10 billion? Can you just run that scenario for me? And then you would actually know. Because what happens at an IPO is all the preferred shares, all the common shares, become one class of shares, essentially common. So the preferred converts into common. Everybody has the same style of shares for the IPO. And their preference goes away because there's a liquidation that's about to occur in the public market.

1:09:00So therefore, everybody gets the same shares. This is generally what happens. And so then you would know the total number of shares, because if they did have a liquidation preference, if they did get a multiple on their shares, if they did get interest on their shares, that would be done in the calculation. They could say, yeah, you went from having 1 % ownership to having 0.5 % ownership because of the liquidation preferences. And you would actually understand$10 billion company. I own 1%. You know, I have 100 million. I own 0.10%. I have 10 million. You could just literally do it, man. If a startup CEO or the hiring manager in question is really coy about that information, Jason, how much of a red flag is that to the potential employee?

1:09:39Yeah, if you can't get the denominator at the very least or the ballpark denominator and there's not a discussion about this, that means it's probably other people who are flying blind in the company. And yeah, that would be a red flag. Generally speaking, people know what their percentage ownership is of the company and they do this math all day long. So if you were going to Uber in the early days, you would understand like roughly what your percentage ownership was. And then when new dilution occurred, they would just say, yeah, just, hey, that new round we're doing is gonna be about 15 % dilution.

1:10:12So if you owned 1%, you own 15, you own 0.85. All right, next question is about pink and red flags. Jason, this is a rubric that you introduced to me that there are sometimes a red flag at a company, sometimes a pink flag in between. I came across a tweet from Ankur Nakbal. He's the CEO of a startup. And he said this, which I thought was very interesting. Hot take. Startup founders using company credit card points for personal travel is low level fraud. No. I had that same position for a long time. There's a long tradition in this space, points, of companies like, you know, the visas of the world, marketing to employees to use their cards so that they can get personal travel.

1:11:01I have always had the position like, well, that is then a bribe to like run up the bills. And in fact, when I was at Sony Corporation, you know, a lifetime ago, people would pick more expensive flights on purpose so that they could earn more points. And they would say, well, what's the limit for my cross-country flight? And they'd say, oh, the limit is$8 ,000. You're in business class. You're in SVP. They'd say, OK, I need to book my ticket later because I'll get more points. Just torching cash. Torching the company's money. And then they would say, which hotel can I stay at that would get me the most points?

1:11:41Because I do five trips a year. I get those points. And then that's how I pay for my family's vacation is I use those points to pay for my family vacation. So yes, it is the most modest of pink flags. I have always taken the approach. Now, if you own your company, you don't have investors. Well, then the owner can do what they want with the points, right? Like, so if this is your company. Oh, yeah. This is for venture backed founders. For a venture-backed founder, you should be saying, hey, everybody use this card. So if you think the American Express Platinum or you think the Robin Hood card, you know, that gets money back or the Platinum card that gets you, you know, upgrades or I have the United cards from Chase.

1:12:25I also have the Platinum card. Those ones seem to, according to my peeps, get you the most rewards. By all means, you do that. And then you use those to get free hotels for business travel, etc. It is just a tiny little pink flag. Yeah, it's a little integrity test. That's what I was curious about was the integrity element. Because you talk a lot about how if you make a small mistake and someone catches it, then they're going to have less trust in your ability to make 100 % decisions. Yeah. So it fits into that. All right. Next up, we're going to talk about a company called Cursor. You may have heard of it.

1:12:59I think they just reached like$2.3 billion round at a hot new valuation, but everyone's not talking about that. Instead, they're buzzing about how Cursor hires. We talk a lot in this podcast about how to retain the right people. Well, the way Cursor goes about it, it's a little bit different. There's a piece in Colossus, a well-known kind of technology magazine of sorts that discusses this. I'm going to pull it up and talk you through it. What is Colossus? People have been telling me about Colossus. I think I've been pitched a couple of times on having the founder on podcasts and stuff like that.

1:13:26What is Colossus? It is a print magazine. I think it's quarterly. It comes out and does, I would say, friendly profiles of people in and around the technology industry. It became, I think, best known for its Jared Kushner Thrive Capital. I'm not going to say profile because that implies journalism. And I don't think that's really the goal here. I think it's more like insider is my guess. They're pro tech and less hard hitting journalism. Yeah. And like that, I'm not trying to like throw stones here. I'm just trying to like put it into context. This is not like we're going to call someone up and really put it to them.

1:14:01This is more like, what are our friends doing? And that's why I think this is an interesting point. Kind of throw a stone. It's okay. You can own it. The article in question is written by Brie Wolfson, who according to her LinkedIn works for Cursor and it's about Cursor. So there you go. She writes that Cursor's recruiting machine is on another level. And what's interesting here, Jason, is that - objective is what you're saying. Oh, entirely objective. Entirely. There's no bias here whatsoever. Wait, what does she do at Cursor? Is she the hiring manager? She says, it says, head of employee experience, Cursor full-time September 2025 to now.

1:14:34So Cursor's secret to recruiting is to treat the atomic unit of the hiring process as a person, not a job spec. So mostly what you do, Jason, is you think about a job you need. You think about what the requirements are. You put a listing out there. People apply. You go through them. You pick one. You hire them. you're off to the races. Instead, she says, quote, at Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this. Post the name of someone really, really good in the hashtag hiring ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews. And if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

1:15:07This is an inversion of the hiring process. I'm just curious how often you've seen ideas like this work at startups. And if you recommend that founders take this approach. Wait a second. What they're saying is they take a person who doesn't work at Cursor, then they have a group of people try to peer pressure them into joining Cursor, like a full court press. Yeah. Like a love bombing type of thing. They love bomb. Okay. I like that term. Okay. So it's like a hardcore recruiting. But about the individual, not about like the specific corporate needs. So I would go to my friends and say, you know, I think this Jason guy's real sharp.

1:15:41He know he doesn't fit any for our current job openings, but I really think we should get them on the team. This to me is almost like how a venture capital firm might hire like a new partner versus like hiring for a traditional startup. But Cursor is high impact, 300 people or so. And they're doing, I think a billion dollars in ARR. So clearly it works. This exists in the NBA. So when Donovan Mitchell was gonna be available, I think he was playing in Utah or something. And Donovan Mitchell, known as Spider, he's an NBA guard, right? And he's currently with the Cleveland Cavaliers. But when he was going to be available, because the Utah Jazz were going to trade him for whatever reason, a bunch of the Knicks started publicly courting him, liking his tweets, you know, meeting him at games, going to Mets games with him, going to Rucker Park.

1:16:31They just did a full court press to try to recruit him. They failed because the general manager of the Utah Jazz hates the Knicks. And he like purposely like sent him to Utah where he's done very well. And, you know, the Knicks didn't get Spina. And it was kind of a bummer, but we're the best team in the East. So it is what it is. So I like the strategy, actually. I think it's a great strategy. Also hiring extremely talented people is something where if you have extraordinary resources, you'll find something for to do. So I like that as well. In the NBA, you pick in the draft the most talented person, not the person you need most.

1:17:11So let's say you have a great point guard on your team. Okay. And another great point guard comes up. Or you have a great shooting guard and then another shooting guard comes up and you just take the best person. Why? Because the difference between the best person in the draft and the next best person could be the difference between like LeBron James or Kobe Bryant and somebody whose name you don't recognize when I say it. You always draft the most talented person. So I love this advice. I think it's great advice. And I think showing people love with five or six different people love bombing them or recruiting them or full court press.

1:17:49Great idea. Works in sports, works in venture capital for partnerships. Why wouldn't you? At one point, there was a venture capital firm who watched This Week in Startups. They needed a new partner and they came at me hard. And that's actually happened twice in my career where people were like, hey, join us. We, you know, together, you know, you have This Week in Startups, you plug it into our billion dollar franchise. Boom. Even to this day, people are like, oh, Founder University, This Week in Startups. You've really conquered that like media thing. Look at like Andreessen Horowitz started Speedrun.

1:18:20Pear VC has their summer program. Sequoia has the ARC program. People have looked at the things and Sequoia has a podcast, Crucible Moments. A16C hired Eric, who I guess was talking about this, Torrenberg, to lead their content. So those things have just naturally happened, right? This is actually happening to me now. People want me to come to leave Twist and go start something to talk about their portcodes. And it's interesting. Yes, every venture firm wants a podcast plugged in. It is absolutely the right way to go. Yeah, I think it's great. For the, back to Colossus, the publication, having insiders write about their strategies is great service journalism, but it's not objective journalism.

1:19:03So you are correct. What if you're a founder of a company, Jason, that isn't growing at 3XP? What if you're at our friend from Familify, right? And he is in the wilderness, right? This hiring approach probably wouldn't work that well, is my guess. This strikes me as a, you're growing like a rocket ship and you have lots of cash strategy. Well, every company has something to offer. The company that doesn't have product market fit yet has a higher equity and more responsibility and the joy of going from zero to one. And that's what they're offering. So you're just offering something different. If you look at cursor in year zero, hey, we know that somebody is going to crack making developers 10 times more efficient.

1:19:43And that should be us. We can offer you 5 % and you could be a co-founder. Like you You could actually, in year zero, offer the co-founder title. Hey, we've got two co-founders. We're willing to add a third. If you join us, those two people go and they recruit them or her. That happens all the time, actually. You're just offering a different package. Great idea. All right, Jason, one more thing before we let you go. Bilal Zuberi of Red Glass Ventures, previously, I think he was over at Lux, has some advice for the early VCs in the world. And I wanted to get your take on this. So Bilal writes, dear young VCs, two cents from me.

1:20:16Stop going to so many conferences. you may not realize it, but you're likely meeting the same people again and again. And instead of having your own perspective, you're essentially repeating consensus views on the same few startups and business models that everyone already likes to discuss. This strikes me as very good advice, but I was curious if you agree with it and where these young VCs should be spending their time, if not at conferences. Obviously meeting founders is the number one thing you should be doing. Building a network of other VCs to get pocket listings for them to tell you about their investments or to introduce your investments to is equally important.

1:20:49I would say probably equally important. If you're going to succeed, having a network of people you can send your deal flow to to do the next round, critically important. We have something called the Whisper Network. We build systems as opposed to having goals. So we have the goal of being able to help our founders meet new investors to do their next round of funding. But we have a system called the Whisper Network. It's a piece of software we made where our founders can go in, pick which folks they want to meet. And then whoever in our organization has the best relationship then can forward that information on, we might open it up to other founders at some point, let them join the Whisper Network and be part of it, or let investors join the Whisper Network and receive information through it.

1:21:29Anyway, long story short, both of those things are important. He does make a really good point about groupthink. The reason why I think I did well is I made my own event where I invited founders I met. It was called Open Angel Forum back in the day. And I would let angel investors, now it's called the syndicate basically. And we do an online thing where every week or two, I have a deal committee, which now has 150 people on it, about 40 of them show up, and we show them two or three companies with the founders there. And then they pre-commit or don't pre-commit. And if they pre-commit, and we get 10 people, 50K in pre-commits or more, we tend to share it with the rest of the syndicate because we have enough early indication that it would hit the 250K minimum that you need to run a syndicate because of the legal expense associated with the syndicate.

1:22:14So I like the idea of starting your own. So I'll take his advice one step further. Instead of going to those conferences and being one of 500 people there, one of 300 people there, or 1 ,000 people, instead of going to TechCrunch Disrupt, I would say do what I did my whole career, which is I threw the party. So when I had the Open Angel Forum, there were 21 people in the room, famously, when Thumbtack and Uber and other data stacks, companies like that presented there for their seed rounds or pre-seed rounds. And people, three people invested in Uber, myself, Cyan Bannister, and First Round Capital at that Open Angel Forum, famously, at a pier in San Francisco 15 years ago, something like that.

1:22:55Shout out Cyan Bannister. Yeah, Cyan Bannister. It was like a$4.5 million valuation back then. So anyway, that's the long and short of it. You should start your own event. So pick a category you really care about or go to niche events. So I went to the Wikipedia conference, which was a very niche conference with a hundred of the Wikipedia editors in Boston. Dave Weiner was there myself. A couple of interesting people, Doc Serials, really interesting people who were kind of in the tech business in the seventies and eighties. And I was coming in in the nineties and the early two thousands. And I got to kind of be with those elders, the really wise Doc Serials, the really wise Dave Weiner.

1:23:33They had two decades of experience. I mean, I got to sit there and just be a fly on the wall and listen to them talk about wiki software and larry sanger and everything jason schumann primary he's a general partner over there early stage investor he thinks that what vcs should do is go to niche conferences to your point but he thinks they should be industry specific so yes that's exactly what i'm talking about yes yeah yeah i think it's dead on shout out to jason he gets it when you go to those then you have an advantage over other competitors because if you're at this legal tech conference you're getting to see those technology companies in the wild.

1:24:05You see them at their booth, how they're pitching folks. You see their presence. You see the talk they gave, whether people in the room in the talk, did people in the room go up to the founder after? Did the founder give a good presentation? Then their director of sales and co-founder give a good presentation, all that stuff. So yeah, the niche conferences is also a power play. I like the idea of starting your own. I've done that my whole career. And man, has that paid off for me. If you throw the party, people remember you. People remember TechCrunch 40 and TechCrunch 50. They, you know, Dropbox launched at that.

1:24:37Gary Tan just tweeted me and Mike Arrington interviewing him and Tyler Crowley and my former like chief of staff interviewing Gary Tan. Did you see that, Gary Tan? He found a video. He wrote me a very sweet note. He's going to come on the pod. Gary just did a very public tweet where he's like, look at this, JCal. And he sent me a very private note. He basically is like, wow, Jason Calacanis has done the same thing for 15 years consistently, which is support founders and interview them on his podcast and be enthusiastic. And he was just talking about how when he was young and he was just starting his career, I was kind to him, I guess.

1:25:09Look at where he is now, you know? Great questions as always. All right, everybody. Another amazing This Week in Startups is in the can. He's x.com slash Alex. Cautiousoptimism.news. Throw him a hundy, subscribe and get Alex every day in his email newsletter. I am, I think, calacanis.substack.com. If you care about my newsletter, I'm starting to write a little bit more. and most importantly, write a review or put a comment, screenshot it and send it to the team at thisweekinstartups.com or DM it to us and we will shout you out at the end of the episode. Post a really great comment. If you post a really great review, we'll shout you and your company out.

1:25:45We'll give you a little promo for your company for free at the end of the show. If you write a review or post an intelligent comment on Spotify and YouTube and you can write reviews. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.