OpenAI taps Jony Ive for “iPhone for AI," FTC/Amazon + Roam Around CEO Shie Gabbai | E1820

0:00This is crazy. It's a crazy concept. I'm not saying she's crazy. What I'm saying is it's a very bold, audacious way of looking at the world. I would say it's also a little bit narcissistic that you, Lena Kahn, are going to be able to predict future harm. I know I'm super humble having been in the industry for 25 years and invested in 400 companies. I can tell you that she cannot predict the future. Nobody can. This Week in Startups is brought to you by SuperGut is the only nutrition brand clinically proven to improve digestion, balance blood sugar, sustain energy, and manage weight. Save 25 % on their delicious shakes, bars, and prebiotic mix at supergut.com with code TWIST.

0:42Catalog. Stop wasting time and money with expensive design firms and unreliable freelancers. Get fast, three-day turnarounds for a flat monthly fee with Catalog. Get$1 ,200 off right now at trycatalog.com slash twist. And Codecademy. build the future you want to see with codecademy codecademy pro helps you learn everything you'll need to shape what comes next in the tech space try it free for 14 days visit codecademy.com slash twist all right everybody uh some quick news here at the top of the show before i do an interview with roam ai one of our great uh incubator investments open ai made a lot of news this week first uh there's news that open ai is an advanced talk with johnny i of apple fame and masayoshi san from softbank to uh raise a billion dollars to build the iphone of ai i don't know if this would be a form factor of an iphone if i'm being honest i would find it very surprising if johnny i've wanted to come back and just do an iphone i think this will be um some very interesting uh wearable and this is uh the interpretation by the financial times by the way who broke the story uh if you don't know johnny ive when he left um apple started a firm called love from it's uh you know like a design firm he's done a couple projects he's obviously a genius and and was um steve jobs's partner in crime uh and so they've had some brainstorming sessions sam altman and johnny ive according to the ft it's very early stages and masa would lead a billion dollar seed round according to the reporting and i think multiple outlets have talked about this it's unclear if this would be a new company or it'd be an open ai project or you know where this would sit it sounds to me like this would be part of the sam altman collection of companies and i think they would probably make it its own company and then just give it access to uh opening eyes stack but you never know they could um you know do anything now because in our second story opening i is discussing a secondary uh share sale that would value the company at 80 or 90 billion dollars according to the wall street journal that's 3x the valuation from earlier this year which was 30 billion which was stunning um it seems like opening i wants to sell a couple of hundred million dollars in shares and that they're on track to do a billion in revenue in 2023 a billion in revenue is uh pretty extraordinary because the product costs 20 a month that's 240 a year uh and if you had a million people using the product that would be 240 million if they had 4 million people paying for accounts that would be a billion dollars ish right and so let's just break that down for a second there's 100 million people uh signed up i think for uh open ai's product chat gpt4 if four percent converted that would be a very large number but it is possible that that that they could be generating something that range and of course there's the api so maybe half their billion dollars in revenue if that's in fact true which i wouldn't be it would be shocking but i wouldn't it wouldn't be unexpected that they were trending towards that because the product is so helpful so many startups are using it so um keep in mind though that open ai is 49 owned by microsoft um and then sam says he hasn't owned any shares personally but he controls the non-profit anyway this would be a big gain for microsoft once again microsoft has made some big gains from their investments over time uh and uh sounds really interesting um the multimodal mode which launched from open ai that we talked about with sunny earlier in the week would make it very believable that they have something here and that something might be the ability to use glasses um audio so i could see this being anything from sunglasses to uh you know something like the um personal communicator on star trek that you put on your vest like a clip on to your jacket we oppress it and you talk to it and then you know airpods so you know the possibilities here are endless it could be something on your arm so imagine if you had something on your arm that was a display something in your ears and then a pair of glasses you know you have like some really interesting wearable because if it's multimodal well you might want to hear some answers you might want to see some answers um in your glasses because you're doing an activity and you might want to tap on your wrist here if you were wearing like a bracelet So if you look online at wearables, about 10-15 years ago, there was a huge wearables moment in startups, but the technology wasn't ready because AI didn't exist.

5:36And really, you need a keyboard, right? It's hard enough to use your iPhone typing on that keyboard. The keyboard's gotten better. It does guess your words a little bit better. But generally speaking, people are not writing long emails on their phones. it's just starting to be the case that maybe doing voice to text is starting to work i know i use voice to text if i'm driving i can send a text message or i will have siri read me text messages when i'm driving or walking so all of this put together is i think now is the time and so this sounds like a great idea this is a very interesting thing is it a coincidence that all of this open ai news dropped in the same week you got the iphone for ai with masa and johnny ive that's really interesting open ai launching multimodal um and open ai discussing a secondary share all of that together uh to me sounds like a massive masa uh push i'm not saying masa's the leak here but uh you know he likes to make bets on number one uber we work doordash all of that and an open ai johnny ive collab is like yeah that's just like peak silicon valley and masa being the backer of it is insane i mean we're talking about like this is building a super team it sounds like a super band right like david lee roth with slash with robert plant like or you know chris bosh and duane wade and uh lebron taking their talents to uh miami this is an absolute super team masa loves a big swing he would love to put a billion dollars into this project and have it have a 1 % chance or a 5 % chance.

7:16And, you know, hey, listen, Masa just had that big liquidity event with Arms IPO. That's got to take a little edge off. And maybe Masa's, you know, getting frisky again. And yeah, I'm here for it. I like it. I like an exciting, dynamic space. To me, this is huge, huge. You know, it's like bringing the X-Men and the Avengers and the Fantastic Four back together. It's going to be great and great for technology, great for consumers, and great for this podcast where we talk about all these things so uh really interesting moment in time we'll keep track on all this and of course remember mondays are this week in ai with sandeep madras so every everybody's talking about how you know all in is a great episode and they look forward to it and it's event viewing everybody's now saying mondays on this week in startups are event viewing so life is more fun with masa in the mix life is a lot more fun when masa is in the mix that is 100 percent true.

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10:34And basically, you know, she wants to change the typical benchmark for antitrust. Does this harm the consumer? And she argued that Amazon should not get a pass on its monopolistic practices because it delights consumers. Anybody who uses Amazon is delighted. So, Lena Khan got a lot of attention for saying, no that shouldn't be the test consumer harm should not be the test she wants to change the law and she wants the law to be and her view is we should protect consumers in the future as if she is some clairvoyant and she can predict the predict the future and she can ensure that there is not future harm right this is crazy it's a crazy concept i'm not saying she's crazy what i'm saying is it's it's a very bold audacious way of looking at the world i would say it's also a little bit narcissistic that you lena khan are going to be able to predict future harm i know i'm super humble having been in the industry for 25 years and invested in 400 companies i can tell you that she cannot predict the future nobody can the second anybody thinks they can figure out how they're going to define future harm and they think they're a precog from you know minority report if you've seen the movie um you know it's just it's the height of arrogance i think we want to protect consumers but the idea that you're going to be able to predict that amazon's going to beat google or google's going to beat microsoft or microsoft is going to beat apple you know none of us know now i like the idea of going after tactics to be clear i think that this lawsuit is got a lot of tactical stuff in it So even though Lena Khan's philosophy has been, you know, future harm, and I'll just quote her here, we cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output, she wrote.

12:31She thinks instead regulators should look at how companies like Amazon use low prices to undercut rivals on their way to controlling, you know, all this critical infrastructure, right? And okay, great. I think that's interesting. But again, it comes with this, you know, arrogance that you'll be able to predict the future, which you will not. And, of course, we can make arguments all of us all day long about who's going to win. ar is it going to be google's glasses is it going to be oculus is google going to release a new version of google glass is it going to be microsoft who knows the idea that amazon won cloud computing and it wasn't microsoft or oracle that won cloud computing or google is crazy right nobody knows who's going to win um lena khan's a bit of a loser uh in terms of her track record here and i think she's a loser by design she said she wanted to be much more bold and lose a bunch of times in order to win big right so she wants to take bigger bigger swings she wants to attack tech companies she wants to stop them that's the agenda here uh you can you can debate it all you want but she said that she wants to take bigger swings and get bigger results she wants more shots on goal so just a quick recap the ftc sued meta and lost over their acquisition of a vr app maker within unlimited the ftc's argument meta having two beat saber like products would give them an unfair advantage in the vr space the ftc lost um they've got an antitrust lawsuit of instagram and whatsapp acquisitions that occurred a decade ago i mean people kind of expect the ftc will lose this you never know um ftc versus illumina uh they lost but it's technically ongoing it's a biotech company that they blocked the acquisition of and then the ftc versus microsoft they lost this technically it's ongoing but the ftc lost this case famously against microsoft to stop the 69 billion dollar activision uh blizzard um they lost the case against microsoft to stop the 69 billion dollar activision blizzard acquisition so um you know the ftc is appealing all this stuff it is uh maybe if you are a fan of breaking up big tech and stopping their ascension i guess uh then it's noble that she's trying uh i've said that we should really be looking at the tactics so let's take a look at the amazon uh suit here and what they're alleging They're using, this is what they're alleging in the suit, that they're using anti-discounting measures that punishes merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere.

15:11So if Amazon sees that, I don't know, you know, some, you know, provider of cables like Anchor, if they see them offering lower price goods elsewhere, they can bury the sellers far down in search results, which is basically the same as killing them. So they're on the platform, but they don't get seen. okay so they want to stop discounts off amazon so that amazon has the lowest price by the way i think a lot of uh distributors negotiate for this like uh walmart and target and then they say they're using the market control to keep prices artificially high and lock sellers into its platform which then harms rivals and the way they um claim this is happening is that they are controlling the competitors prices effectively raising them for consumers by controlling the buy box on their site if a product is offered for less on another site amazon reviews the buy box button etc and then coercing uh sellers on amazon by forcing them to use their fulfillment service i've heard this is actually true um and uh you know if they if these things are true and proven these could be very easy sanctions and i bet you amazon will do exactly what microsoft did which is cut them off at the pass basically change how search works change how fulfillment works you know just make little tweaks if you remember activision there was a question would you know microsoft allow activision to be on other platforms and um not have exclusives for xbox their platform and and they basically said they're going to do that so the the most charitable interpretation of lena khan's success is that by her rattling sabers and filing these lawsuits that she's getting tech to behave better and that might actually be a pretty good legacy she might lose the cases um so she loses these battles but maybe she wins the war because people start on a tactical level allowing uh a fairer uh marketplace right she did do that with the activision case uh she got satya nadella to guarantee for 10 years that call of duty would be on other platforms so you know in some ways uh you even though she's racking up the l's she might be racking up a lot of little w's right other things that they're claiming is that amazon degraded customer experience by replacing organic search results with paid ads well we all see that uh when we use the service but does it i don't understand that that's illegal i mean you could say the same thing about google you do a flight search on google or product search on google it's all paid ads uh and um You know, the Amazon, of course, disputes all this.

17:48Quotes from Amazon's rebuttal. We fundamentally disagree with the FTC's allegations, which are in many cases wrong or misleading, and with the overarching, and with their overreaching and misguided approach to antitrust, which would harm consumers, hurt independent businesses, and upend longstanding and well-considered doctrine. So I think, pull all this together, you know, there's plenty of rebuttals, and I think this might be a turning point for Lena Kahn. because you know it's been underwhelming what she's done here uh but she could be making progress on scaring big tech and you know just maybe the saber rattling will get people to behave better because they don't want to be in her crosshairs so on that case maybe that's her big strategy i don't know she's been invited to come on uh the all-in pocket she's certainly invited to come here on this week in startups but uh you know i don't know that she wants to sit in for a hard discussion with hard questions i think she'd probably like to do interviews only with anti-tech journalists which there are many for her to choose from but my prediction right now is that lena khan loses the amazon antitrust case and i think she's going to lose it badly and i think amazon is going to fight and amazon will just tweak their model so i think this era of antitrust is going to fail in terms of the lawsuits, but I think she'll win in terms of getting people to behave better tactically.

19:17So mixed bag for Lena Kahn. And next up on the program, roam around stick with us. When I see a startup that's got bad design, it's hard for me to take it seriously in today's day and age. Why? Because having great design, having world class design, it's kind of table stakes today with consumers, with employees, with partners, and of course, with investors. But design agencies, they're very, very expensive. And there's a lot of back and forth to figure out what you want. It's not for startups. You can't spend a quarter million dollars, a half million dollars getting some design agency to do your look and feel.

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21:02You can go to skift.com. And I got to meet with all of the executives in that space. We had a really thoughtful discussion. I spoke at it. And a lot of the discussion was on how AI, language models, etc. are going to impact the travel industry. My big observation was, I think society is going to become more wealthy because people are going to work less, three, four day work weeks, because AI is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting which means there'll be more time to travel that being said the travel industry is going to change dramatically because the model that we currently use of using google and making documents and bookmarks and maybe using a bunch of different google flights kayak expedia etc to look at grids and sort through our choices is going to change forever how is it going to change i believe it will change because of uh startups like roam around roam around uh attended our launch accelerator uh in april of this year 2023 and they were part of launch accelerators 28th class and they uh have a very simple idea which is uh itineraries for travel can be done by ai really well and the product uh proves that out with me today is shy goodbye uh the ceo of roam around welcome to the program shy thanks for having me how appropriate during skift week yeah did you go to the conference this week or you know of skift i guess yeah i know of skift pretty well i mean they're obviously mammoth in the industry uh they've also interviewed us back in March.

22:46I've been in close contact with Justin and obviously I've been following Rafat and his journey for months and years. Rafat worked for me back in the day at Silicon Valley in the 90s and I'm an investor, a small investor in Skift, which is just a great data source if you're in the travel industry. So I thought I'd have you on and then just maybe show your product and talk about the progress and then, you know, there are some big issues here about who's going to win travel and how will travel change And then why should you even exist if there's these incredible language models everywhere and just the journey of doing a startup in the AI space.

23:23So maybe we just start with a quick demo. If you're watching this, great. If you're not watching it, we'll do sportscasting and explain what happens. And we'll describe what's happening on the screen. You can always use Spotify, which has our videos. If you are listening to This Week in Startups, there's a button where you can turn the screen and see the video. Or you can go to YouTube and just type in This Week in Startups and you'll find our channel. Hit the subscribe button. Hit the bell. You get an alert every day or two when we either go live or we have a new show posted. So go ahead, Shai.

23:52There's your app. And it says roamaround.io is the URL. And I just typed in two days in Barcelona. So you typed into this chat interface two days in Barcelona and then describe what we say. So rather than spending hours or weeks planning a trip, you just type in two days in Barcelona. We create a complete and actionable itinerary. and what i mean by actionable is that you could actually book it right then and there if it's not perfect you can iterate it so you can say it's our anniversary and we'll recommend romantic beach walks hot air balloons etc um from there you could also say something like at a beach day and we'll recommend day three and costa brava and then once it's perfect you can say translate it to spanish it'll translate it and then you can quickly share it via sms email WhatsApp, whatever.

24:40Great. And so these itineraries, and the AI, maybe talk a little bit about what is the difference between using chat GPT or barred to do this and using roam around? What's the best pitch for why people will use roam around versus Google's barred or just the native chat GPT interface? Totally. So there's a few things at play here. Number one is if you were to go to, let's say, Bard or Chachapiti and say, I'm going to Costa Brava, it would say, while you're there, you should definitely go for a bike ride. Well, now you have to actually start researching what's a good place to rent bikes. Are they going to scam me?

25:20Are they highly rated? Are they in stock for the day that I'm actually traveling? What we do is we do that for you, where before we show you something, we've already queried all our API providers and ensure that they're in stock, highly rated. And within one click, so you no longer have to start researching within one click, we take you to a provider that's highly rated and you can book it right then and there. So that's number one. Fantastic. Yeah. The second thing is when it comes to data cutoff and hallucinations. So the way we actually work is when you say two days in Barcelona, what we first do is we actually start querying all of our points of interest providers, TripAdvisor, GetYourGuide, etc.

26:03We get a wishlist of the top 100 things to do in that city. And then and only then do we query ChatGPT and say, of these 100 things, create a compelling itinerary for me. And so what that does is two things. Number one is it solves the hallucination issue. So a funny story is before we implemented this little fix, If you were to say, I'm going to Tucson, Arizona, it would say, while you're there, you should check out the Pearl Harbor Museum. Yeah. The reason it hallucinated that is because the ship was called the USS Arizona. Right. So because we limit it to the things that we know are in that city and in stock, we solve the hallucination issue.

26:46And then the other thing is, is we solve the data cutoff issue. So we're not going to query restaurants that have been closed for two years since September 2021, like Chachi Bt. We query, let's say, OpenTable. We say what's in stock or what's available for reservation on these dates. And only then do we include it in the itineraries. So when you're doing verticalized AI, whether it's travel or it was medicine or it's legal, there is a lot of nuance to what data you're going to query and then what you're going to advise and what you're going to send back to the user. We saw this week multimodal come out from open AI, which basically means you could take a picture of something and then get text back or vice versa.

27:32Obviously, we use text right now, but we don't get images back. And then Bard, Google's product, now includes Google Flights, for example, and your Gmail, etc. So maybe you could talk a little bit about what you think those two advancements will bring for Roamaround. Totally. And then another one actually is the meta AI glasses, right? So combining meta AI glasses plus, um, the multimodal, right. You can already see a walking tour taking place here, right. Taking shape. Right. So you're walking through my work. We're in Barcelona. What happens? Yeah. Um, yeah. So you're in Barcelona, you're wearing the glasses, you see Sagrada Familia and you're like, okay, this is an incredible building.

28:16What's going on here. um you take the images you feed that to chat gpt you feed that to roam around you say you are this all-knowing um travel advisor what am i looking at here and what's the what's the context here and so it'll tell you it's this famous architect in in spain um it's been uh in construction for um yeah you know 100 years and for another 200 years from now um it could tell you all of these things and then going to google bart i think like the most interesting thing is gmail and calendar so one thing right now we're in like the discovery phase right you have to prompt roam around say hey i'm going to barcelona it's more interesting that it could say something along the lines of hey i know you and your wife have been meaning to go to barcelona i see that you have um open week in july i have all of these places that you've already bookmarked on instagram um this is an itinerary do you want me to book for you and that's where things could even say hey this is a great weekend to go because uh i see your calendars open and uh travel costs are down and it's before the peak season so the costs are going to be lower and this hotel's got this grade thing so it's almost like having not just a travel agent but a travel agent plus your personal you know admin if you had an executive assistant acting in concert to optimize and then it could even learn over time what your preferences are hey you like to walk because it has information on how many steps you did or you told it you like to walk or it knows you like to do active things so it says hey you can go kite surfing in this area on the coast of spain so this has got unlimited potential and it feels quite disruptive to me.

30:06Totally. And we're already laying the groundwork for that. So in the example that I gave you, it says it's our anniversary, right? So now we know when your anniversary is. So next year, we can say, hey, we saw that you booked this on your anniversary. Do you want to maybe check out this on your next year's anniversary? Or if you were to iterate the itinerary and say, recommend vegetarian restaurants. Okay, well, now we know that you're a vegetarian, right? And so, like what you're saying is correct, is this all-knowing travel agent that's a personal admin for you. And it sounds kind of like far-fetched, but think about, you know, 50 years ago, who had chauffeurs, right?

30:43It was the ultra-wealthy, the powerful businessman, right? And now, everyone, with the click of a button, have a personal driver, right? Yeah, that was the promise of Uber, yeah. Exactly. And you don't have to tell the driver where you're going. You don't have to reach into your pocket. It's a personal chauffeur. And so the idea is just as Uber brought chauffeurs to the masses, we're hoping to put a travel agent in everyone's pocket. Yeah. And it's even more than a travel agent because this is, like I said before, they understand some things about you that maybe even a travel agent wouldn't be able to query.

31:16And you could even, I think, when I was speaking at this travel conference, talking about how I think experiences are such a big part of travel today. And that, you know, explaining how you want to feel after your vacation. Do you want to feel inspired? Do you want to feel like you learned something? Do you want to feel exhilarated? You know, for me, I want to learn some new, I learned how to play pickleball and I learned how to e-foil on my last vacation. It was a lot of fun for me. You know, I got to experience deep powder skiing in Japan last year. All of these things are peak experiences. So I'm curious if you've given thought to, hey, I have this amount of money, I've got$5 ,000, I've got 10 days, I want to feel renewed, refreshed, you know, equanimity and exhilaration from some activities.

32:04Now explain to me what I should do. Have you thought about that working backwards from an emotional state and with other criteria? Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is something along the lines of like in our roadmap, it would closely align to like the personalities. So we did it in a way that we don't want any friction before we show you the itinerary, right? Right now, we're still proving ourselves. So a lot of these other, let's say, travel planners, before you actually jump into the itinerary, they're asking you all of these questions. And what you see is that people are bouncing, people are falling out of the funnel, right?

32:40because you're adding too much friction. So for us, it's like we're two. And then we show, we prove ourselves and say, this is a really great itinerary. And then from there, you can iterate it as much as you want. You can say, I'm traveling with the family. I want to go shopping or I want to feel exhilarated. I want to do extreme sports. But first we want to prove ourselves and then earn that right to actually delight you. And so the initial business model here is you get an affiliate fee. There's all these affiliates in travel, travel is right next to e-commerce as the number one and two affiliate opportunities every time somebody books a flight you can make a couple of bucks books a hotel you can make tens of dollars per night books and activity you can make single digit dollars i think uh so actually that's the affiliate oh so so our bread and butter is actually activities um hotels um you do earn money on flights you earn almost nothing nothing but on activities right now we're we're making a percent on each activity our median activity is 265 bucks so right um yeah so but we're actually moving towards a model that will give us 20 percent um but you would have to have a direct relationship because the of the people who provide the affiliates those activity marketplaces take 25 % take rate typically you get eight points of that 25 for bringing somebody if you did it yourself and you went direct you had the kiteboarding relationship directly you can then ask them for 20 % which is 20 % less than the 25 % that the majors take exactly so that's that's stage one stage one is the eight percent stage one and a half is the 20 % right stage two is what we're actually doing right now is we're shifting into the enterprise and we can talk about that in a second but stage three is actually um ai model as a model right so or as a service and so the idea is right now we have millions of interactions millions of itineraries millions of clicks um thousands of conversions and so we're able to train our model and say this is a good itinerary this is a bad itinerary and so we're going to be fine-tuning our model such that in in the future uh travel startup isn't going to be using let's say gpt4 they'll be using gpt4 hyphen roam around right and we'll be selling them our api keys got it and i'm curious uh knowing what you know we'll get into the b2b side of this in a minute uh how are the uh different platforms that you can use shaping up obviously facebook has their open source one if you want hugging face there's a ton and there's falcon from the uae and there's a bard and there's going to be a lot of providers here um is chat gpt4 just far and away the best one to work with or are you starting to see parity across the different uh services that are available and what's your take if we're sitting here two three four years from now uh will these language models be generally commodified and just like you could store something on google cloud you can easily store it on rackspace or you know any other cloud provider how do you see the shaping up yeah so just to be clear like we we never intend to create our own uh model right we'll be forking or fine-tuning um one of the larger players but we don't want to be competing with sam altman right that's not our game um uh in regards to what's the strongest model it probably changed since the start of this uh conversation like three or four times but when we started and like the multiple times that we've tested gpt4 is the strongest model for our use case um not just because it's the it's the one that is strongest in terms of output but also in terms of like the infrastructure right there they were the first mover and therefore you start seeing all these plugins right so in order to do what we discussed earlier of this like proactive uh booking uh ai agent you need the infrastructure you need these apis to be tying in together that isn't to say that that meta and Google aren't going to have that, of course they will.

36:39And they have the advantage of also like the user profiles. And so once they actually start releasing, that will be really interested because that's where we could really create this bespoke itineraries at scale that we're really interested in. But in our first tests, GPT was by far the best. Everybody knows technology is moving at a blistering pace, but Codecademy's goal is to help you stay a step ahead. So whether you have some experience or you're brand new to coding, Codecademy offers everything you need to build the tech career you want. Gain specialized skills in artificial intelligence, full-stack engineering, data science, cybersecurity, and more.

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38:03So start your free trial today visit codecademy.com slash twist to try codecademy pro free for 14 days. That's c o d e c a d e m y.com slash twist codecademy.com slash twist. I met with all these business to business companies and I by a show of hands in this room full of 500 people i said how many people use chat gpt in the last week and uh like two out of three hands raised it was pretty amazing then i asked how many people used bards connection to google flights which came out last week and two people raised their hand so it is uh the case that i think the travel companies you know they're very busy running their businesses it's a very challenged environment maybe there's a recession coming who knows the consumers don't have money right now or they're starting to run out and the revenge travel of the last three years is kind of over post-covid they need help so on a business to business side what's your strategy here because hotels um and airbnb providers and activity providers they don't have developers sitting around they don't have startup energy they may not have the cycles to do ai in travel so so how do you work with them and what's the business to business plan here for white labeling what roam around us yeah so it's actually interesting that you bring up google because uh the travel industry as a whole has a love hate relationship with google right more hate than love um you'll have to ask and i'm sure it depends and i'll try to stay politically correct right yeah well well so i can actually like i would love to share just like one quick slide here right go ahead um because i think it's like it's pretty um telling okay so an interesting thing happened right we were minding our own business and joining the consumer side of things and hotels and airlines actually started reaching out to us as well and we're like why why is this the case what was that last piece you said dmos yeah so it's like um like um destination marketing organization so it's like visit miami right so it's like the city the economic city travel group it's economic council tourism yeah all those different folks yeah come to barcelona group yeah exactly so so they're reaching out to us and we're trying to figure out why that's the case and so it turns out that it's because the otas have commoditized airlines to the point where airline brands or hotel brands are just a footnote on the user's journey.

40:40So consider how you currently interact with your airline. They say, okay, here's your boarding pass. Then you go enjoy your entire vacation. And at the end, they say, okay, here's your baggage. Right? And so going back to Google, it's pretty telling that Google gives more real estate to emissions than to brand. Think about like the dynamics at play here, right? So here is North Atlantic Airways. Their name has been truncated and Google has highlighted in green 11 % emissions. So I think that that shows you what the dynamics are here, right? Like Google spends more energy for lack of better term, virtue signaling than they do for highlighting the brands, right?

41:27Yeah, they don't care about the brands. They care about the click and the money they will make from the click, right? That is their mission. um and i guess arguably their mission is to satisfy the user of course if the user gets a perfect answer then they don't click around which is the great paradox of google's business model if they give you an answer uh then maybe you don't click on an ad and so there's a natural tension there right and and i think it's like it's even more surprising since like you know you're you're an eco-friendly person right can you really contextualize what 431 kilograms yeah like literally going through the amount of co2 an airline is using is the most silly thing for consumers to contend with like they can have no impact on this this is ridiculous right like literally no person in the world is looking at the amount of co2 that their airplane takes and then making the choice based on that it's it's it's the it's peak virtue signaling nonsense i mean it's nice to have don't get me wrong but that would be the equivalent of telling me like my hamburger co2 emissions and then i'm not going to eat the hamburger at shake shack like there's other ways for me to make a better contribution to society and the point isn't that they're they're they're showing this information it's useful to some people i guess but they're doing it in lieu of the brands and so that shows you maybe why there's this tension between airlines and um and otas such as google right so um so essentially what like this it comes as no surprise that airline loyalty keeps degrading this is actually from skift uh maybe two or three days ago um and so what we're doing to combat this is the same product that is uh the roam around product that's been enjoyed by millions of users we're actually white labeling white labeling it for all hotels and as well airlines so this is gonna be a home run we had we had an investment in this space that didn't work out but it was using humans to be uh an outsourced concierge and obviously the humans were a big part of the expense and part of the reason it didn't work out uh training and finding humans but this is an incredible one because if the hotels in brooklyn you just need to know that area if it's in arizona this is so brilliant great job exactly and so it's like imagine you're saying like the airline is not just telling you like your baggage is here it's also telling you okay your reservation at the at this restaurant is now what's the dress code this is the dress code okay and don't forget your tour is tomorrow so you're interacting with the airline's brand throughout your trip it's no longer just a footnote it's no longer just a pipe you're actually interacting and reinforcing the brand throughout the trip and so this is what it looks like um it's the exact same um roam around but without our brand looks great yeah great job so uh for anybody who's running a hotel if you want to do this uh how can they email you and get this for their brand or anybody who owns it yeah so enterprise.roameround.io it's 24 7 concierge your brand your fonts your logos your voice and most importantly no code right give Give them your email.

44:43What's your email so that they can email you and you can close to do it? So it's shy at roamaround.io. S-H-I-E at roamaround.io. Yeah, listen, I'm an investor in the company. I'm trying to get you a couple of customers here. I want to move any friction from it. What a great idea. I think both of the businesses are interesting. The B2B business is fascinating because you don't have to bring the customers. They have the customers already and you can get the value to the customers and they're not going to build it anyway. it gives them a competitive advantage and it would fall into the win-win-win the customer wins the hotel wins and you win so what a great idea um and it gives them an advantage because direct booking is amazing for these hotels i was i had lunch with a very very very very very famous hotel magnet and they were just talking about their relationship with hotels.com expedia etc and how what percentage they take versus direct and all of these hotels are trying to get people to book direct because they don't have to give that 20 % or whatever they're forking over to these travel agencies and they're just trying to get everybody in the habit of going direct.

45:48And this would increase the chances of people going direct because you have this great value. So if you're ever an end user and your hotel is helping you plan your entire vacation, is it constantly being reinforced throughout your trip? The next time you're planning a trip, you're most likely going to be going back to that hotel that's providing you so much value. that's the idea fantastic awesome well listen uh it's so great to be in business with you congratulations you did really well in the accelerator everybody loved your idea i love your idea we've invested i think twice in the company and you've got some other investments so stay focused and you know really delight both of your customers that enterprise customer you have to delight them and you got to ultimately just absolutely delight save time save money and delight those those end customers and you're well on your way to doing that the reason we loved investing in your company was we saw you have product velocity you really have been making roam around better and better every time we see the product so congratulations everybody check out roamaround.io or enterprise.roamaround.io depending which bucket you fall into and we'll see you all uh next time on this week in startups bye bye