The Defense Tech Startup YC Kicked Out of a Meeting is Now Arming America | E2280

28:15So they get poked fun of a lot, but there's some incredible technology coming out of them. I guess my question would be, we hear so much today about drones that, I mean, when I picture modern warfare now, I'm thinking about all these drone swarms that have been doing all the heavy lifting in sort of Ukraine and elsewhere. So where do missiles sort of fit into that stack? Like why are missiles still so important? And looking ahead 10, 20 years, Are missiles still going to be sort of at the core of our arsenal? Absolutely. So my big belief in defense is it's a components-based business. Like Firehawk, obviously we build missiles and rockets.

28:52But the hard part about building a missile or a rocket is building the motor. The hard part about building the motor is producing the propellant. So once we master that foundational piece, the world's our oyster for what we can build. And the reason why drones became so popular is because in Ukraine, they shot off about 14 million artillery shells. That was that was artillery shells were about 75 percent of all of the, you know, death tolls in Europe. It was the lowest cost to kill. And when they ran out of the artillery shells, they had to make use with something else. And that was drones. So as soon as the drone or the artillery capacity comes back up, I mean, it's always going to be relevant.

29:30What's on the roadmap for you when you solve this problem? Is there dual use here that this, you know, 3D printing of this fuel source could be used in other non-military applications? Or do you just look at, hey, what's the next logical, you know, evolution of this 3D printed material? We've got some breaking news to announce. Agree.com has just surpassed 100 ,000 users. And guess what, folks? That list includes my team here at launch. And that's because Agree is the number one fastest way to go from contract to cash. Agree is the all-in-one solution, and it's got all of your needs in one place.

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30:52You know, I think we're going to acquire companies that are adjacent to what we're doing, might not be in the material science propellant. Yeah, we've been approached for using our technology for oil and gas, like, you know, using that to help with fracking. But I'm not certain that that's the best use of our time. We are so focused on, like, I want to be the biggest propellant maker in the United States, the most efficient one, at least, and artillery shells, rockets, missiles. I mean, it's such a massive market that needs to be addressed that I can't take my attention away from it yet. I'm really not thinking.

31:28And that propellant, the core ingredients of it are available here in the United States in bulk. It's not like a scarce set of chemicals, is it? Very. It's available anywhere. And the other cool part, and this was what we did different, is I know people have tried a 3D print propellant in the past. What they did is they tried to make custom printers that could print traditional rocket propellant um so you have to become a printer company it's actually it doesn't really work out very well we made this feedstock that yes everything's readily available but i can send that feedstock to korea i can send to europe and the printers that are over you know abroad would work to print our grains or to compression mold are our small motors.

32:16So it's very everything is very achievable to stand up your own workshop anywhere. And we kind of want to be the gas station of rocket motors and propellant around the world. We think that's a cool vision. It's going to be a great way to describe this on YouTube. People will understand it. I think a lot easier to that editors. That's great. Yeah. All right. Well, listen, continue success. Thank you for protecting the homeland and sharing with us. I'm sure you're hiring. Where are you based and what positions are you hiring for? And where can people find out more? So we're in Dallas, Texas. Engineers.

32:48We're going to be hiring a lot of technicians in Oklahoma. We just opened up that big facility in Mississippi. So Mississippi, Texas, and Oklahoma. Wow. So you get to just zip between those three cities. Yeah. Perfect. Direct flights from DFW everywhere. Yeah. I mean, I think at the rate you're going, I'm going to go recommend a PC24 or Phenom 300 corporate uh jet card for you so you save a little time pj time yeah vljs let me know yeah deal yeah pc24 is the winner i think it's uh that's the workhorse that it's a it's the company pilates they make the pc12 which is their like swiss turboprop incredibly safe like landed on a commercial airstrip uh recreational airstrip your backyard airstrip or on like a dirt road like it's made for all of those.

33:36Then they released their first jet, which is PC 24. And it's got a cargo. You can literally load a cargo pallet into the back of it with a forklift. But it's for, you know, families going skiing or corporate executives. And it's got like some of the lowest hourly costs. And I've charted one before. Here it is, the PC 24. I think you can operate these for, you know, if you own the plane, $4 ,000 an hour. And if you charter it, 10K an hour. But they're going to change the world, these smaller planes, mid-sized jets, I guess is what they're called. And they're going to be available like Surfare. Use the first one, PC-24, for those routes between Los Angeles.

34:17And you could buy a membership, and it was like$500 a seat. This next one is going to be like the next level up. There's a company called PlaneSense that has a fleet of these PC-24s. And I think Austin, Bay Area, LA is kind of their little triangle at Nevada. though. Oh, I see. It's like a timeshare, but for a jet. I mean, you could buy shares in it, or you could just buy hours. You have both of those options. So it's just, you know, without making a commercial for any of those folks, it's just a new layer of aviation beneath the$30 million planes. They're down to these like$10 million planes that, you know, have a long lifespan and they're safe.

34:53All right, brother. Great. Yeah. We just have to figure out air traffic control. Also, the safety on these things is incredible now. I don't know if you you've seen, I think it's Cessna now, has a button you can press, land the plane. Oh, yeah. So if your pilot has a heart attack, you press the button. Or tragically, JFK Jr., I'm watching that love story. I don't know if you've seen it, Will. I'm only a couple of episodes in. But I had met JFK twice in New York, once at a Knicks game, and once I had drinks with him and John Perry Barlow, rest in peace, from the founder of the EFF. And he died unnecessarily.

35:31He wasn't rated for instrument rating, and he went into some choppy weather and got that. I didn't know, I forgot the name of the term when you lose your spatial ability to understand where you're at, but got into the literal death spiral where he couldn't get out of it. A tailspin? Well, he got into a tailspin, like on a death spiral thing, because they have the tracking. But if he had had that button, the second he was like, I don't know what's going on here, could you just click the button? Let the AI land for you. And they've used it now. It actually got used last year by a family. Pilot had literally the scenario, a heart attack, passed out.

36:11They pressed the button, it landed. It was a real world scenario. They've done plenty of tests of it. And then the Pilatus, the other one has the parachute in it. We're probably five, 10 years away from just, you're going to be able to own one of these jets and not have a pilot. You still would, but you wouldn't need to, which is pretty crazy. The Tesla FSD of airplanes. Yeah, it's like my self-driving Tesla. That's awesome. Which almost killed me the other, not killed me. I almost got in an accident. What if Elon's watching? Don't say that. Well, no, he tells people to be vigilant and he's taking his time.

36:46It's only one out of 20 times now I have to disengage. Last year, I think it was probably one out of five, one out of 10 rides I would wind up disengaging. Sometimes critical, sometimes non-critical. But it didn't see those little white sticks in the road. well and it just in the rain just drove right into the cones i went and i was paying attention but let's just say maybe i was partially paying attention which is what this technology does to you just you kind of drift because it's so perfect you're like okay it's it's perfect bop bop i hear the first one hit just take this very well over uh so be careful out there folks you still have to we're 99 i don't know what's your experience what you do track your percentage percentage of miles oh yeah i mean i would say 99 is about right i mean but it does it does make it harder to rent a car i rented a non-self-driving car oh my god three hours yeah that was terrifying it's terrifying um literally this is what i hear from folks now it's like you get into a normal car and you're like i i shouldn't be trusted with this yeah why am i driving this car i should not be trusted behind the wheel all right we'll drop you off will thanks for coming on show have a Great weekend.

38:00It's like they say if you write with ChatGPT, you forget how to do it for real. Maybe it's the same thing. You're forgetting how to drive. Atrophy. Yeah. Well, before we've got another great guest, you remember ViewBuds? We talked about ViewBuds, the earbuds that can - Yeah, they were on the show. It was a college project. Yeah, but we showed them off, but we actually got Marucci Kim, the creator. He's coming up in just a moment. Oh, you're kidding. Great. Great to do things. But before we get to that, I think we should talk about another magical innovation that you've been enjoying, GLP1s, Jason.

38:32Oh, well, listen, everybody's like, J. Cal, you look like you are younger than ever. You look great. Fat Cal is gone. Yeah. Chubby J is gone. It's now Slim Cal. It's J. Ranch. I took GLPs for the last four years, row.co slash twist. Two, go right to the front of the line. They'll check if you have insurance. You can get into it. I think the lowest offering, the starting price, if you don't have insurance, might be as low as 150, 200 bucks now. And it's gotten to the point where this is so affordable. It's so affordable that there's no reason to not consider it. There was a reason to not consider it when I started taking them.

39:16Four or five years ago, when I first tried Ozempic, kid you not, they wanted to bill me$2 ,400 a month, which, you know, it's like$30 ,000 a year, which, hey, that's a pretty steep price here. That's like somebody's apartment rent or their mortgage payment. That's a lot. It's a bit much, yeah. And it basically became something for people who either had diabetes and could, you know, get it covered under insurance. But now this has come down in price. The companies that make the GLPs have decided to expand the market and insurance companies are realizing, hey, if you can lower the overall obesity rate, you're going to have less healthcare costs down the road.

39:57So everybody's aligned, but you need a place, a partner that's going to manage this process for you nice and quick. You could start it literally. You could pause this podcast and go to road.co slash twist, do all the work, or you can listen while you fill out your forms and they check, do you have insurance? If you don't have insurance, it's not covered for whatever reason, Boom, they move you on and you get a really great price. So thank you to Rowe.co. Go to Rowe.co slash twist for your free insurance check. That is Rowe.co slash twist. All right, Jason. Easy. Let's bring on our next guest. He's the creator, as we said, of the Viral View Buds.

40:32These are earbuds with a camera that have very low power draw. You run a AI model on your device or your laptop, and then you can interact with the world through your View Buds, much like the meta ray bands but easier faster quicker cheaper everything maruchi kim thanks for joining us hey thanks lon and jason thanks for having me on all right you know we saw what you built and i just thought wow that's brilliant um you have a pair of airpods essentially ear uh and you get nice audio from them but you put cameras into them the cameras stitch together and you get a nice i'm assuming 180 360 view i'm not sure where you've got it right now but if you have the cameras facing forward, you could obviously have facing back.

41:15And you're able to take a snapshot, use AI in real time to help people navigate and understand the world, which means you don't have to take out your phone and you don't have to wear creepy glasses. And people are already wearing AirPods as like a standard. So this to me feels like you created a Tesla with its safety cameras all around it, left SD, but for humans. So how'd you come up with the idea and explain technically how it works? Yeah. I mean, you kind of sold it better than I typically sell it to my friends. But ViewBuds kind of started basically when I started the PhD. A lot of my dissertation and my thesis focused around bridging wearable technology with deep learning networks.

42:01And so as AI advances and it continues to advance rapidly over the past few years, I think getting people to be able to connect with these models faster and more seamlessly is going to become extremely critical. And so we actually considered bringing cameras onto earbuds very early on in the program. But at the time, there was not a really strong use case for AI and like that wasn't around. And so it was very much, OK, we put cameras on earbuds, but now what? And so just last year, a lot of these big companies started open sourcing their models. And so that's kind of what enabled this sort of end-to-end interaction to start.

42:37So how are you thinking about this project and its commercialization? Or is this just, you know, a fun skunkworks project to do at school? So I graduated. This was actually my last project in the program. And when I initially joined the PhD, I was actually trying to find something that I can incubate into a startup. And so maybe this will be it. We'll see. Tell me more about how you think this might get commercialized. Who would be your ideal customer profile? And what do you think the reasonable price point is for this? Yeah, I think there's actually two sort of business options for this kind of system.

43:19The straightforward one would be, you know, develop earbuds in-house, put cameras in them, sell them. But then you suddenly hit this problem of, okay, now we have to build an audio brand. We have to compete with every other OEM out there. Bose is strong. Apple is strong. There's Sony is strong. There's lots of audio companies, right? And so I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think, you know, what would be better is if I could provide a platform that OEMs could partner with, and I would provide reference hardware, license the software, and essentially be able to scale with other OEMs as this technology gets adopted.

43:54Well, if you do that, you're going to quickly sell the company because what will happen is Sony or Bose or Apple will say, hey, you've got a six to 18 month lead on whatever we're going to build. So if we just take this company out for$50 million and get the team in here, we're going to sell 5 % more headsets. So that's what you actually really have to think about is you have a lead. And do you want to build a company for the next 10 or 20 years? Or do you think there's an opportunity to flip it? Because this is, everybody has a similar idea here, right? Like this is not, you're not the only person who's thought of putting cameras in this location.

44:35So yeah, the application layer will be super important. How, explain to the audience how this is a better opportunity than wearing metaglasses. Why is this a better opportunity than Meta Glasses? Yeah. Smart Glasses are trying to solve a real problem, right? They're trying to give AI the ability to see what you see. But I think when Google Glass came out over a decade ago, they really hit a cultural wall. People really don't want to wear a camera on their face. But we want to put that same visual AI into the device over a billion people wear every day already. And so that's kind of, I think, the advantage here.

45:09We're not really trying to compete with Smart Glasses. We're trying to deploy AI into a wearable that people already use every day. You think it'll cost$500 for a good pair of these? $300? If you were going to do it as an independent company, you were going to produce, say, a thousand of them in the first run. Have you gone to Shenzhen? Have you started researching what the bomb is? Bill of materials? Not bill of materials. Bill of materials. Yeah. Yeah, I've been to China. I was actually at Apple for five years working on AirPods Max and AirPods Pro 2. um okay well that's part of that process um i think the 300 might be extra i haven't really done the math yet to see what what the cost of one of these would be but um the the camera module itself is actually only about one to two dollars and um there's a little extra silicon in there to make everything to tie everything together but a lot of the the bulk of the challenge is getting the firmware and getting the software to be able to stream reliably to a host device lon i had a couple of ideas here for very interesting applications and customers.

46:15I wanted to let you go first, but when you see this, what comes to mind as a customer? I'll tell you. I had the first thing that popped into my head. When we went to Japan, one of the first things I did was I wanted to get fiber. I like to take a little fiber supplement every day. Okay. Yeah, You're an old man here. I'm an old man. Old Jews. We have to. And I didn't want to fly with all that powder. It looks weird. So that was like my first stop. And the Japanese pharmacy aisle is the most intimidating. It's got little boxes. It's all in another language. Nothing is in English. Tiny fonts. Tiny fonts.

46:53It was so bewildering. A lady took pity on me and just saw me. A customer at the pharmacy saw me, took pity on me, helped me out, helped me find the thing. But if I had view buds, I could have just scanned with my eyeballs and been like, which one of these is the fiber? Language translation and travel is huge. And correct. That would be such a breakthrough. So this is an obvious great one. The one I was thinking of was security and safety. You're a woman. You're running in Central Park. You're a kid walking home from school in Japan. you don't have to worry about, maybe here you do. And having the ability to see behind you as a person on a bicycle, as a person who's skiing, as a person who's jogging and could be attacked, or a person even walking through a city, the ability to have your own security system that would alert you to somebody who is quickly approaching you and blare an alarm, and then just say to you on your six on your eight on your four five feet four feet three feet beep beep beep beep like okay yeah it's my friend they're coming up from behind to surprise me and give me a hug okay but otherwise yeah when you're skiing knowing that there is a downhill skier uh the the the uphill skier is responsible for the downhill skier as a downhill skier you're constantly living in fear of a downhill of the uphill skier the one who's above you going too fast and you're making some nice gingerly turns and they just hit you in the back.

48:28That's how most injuries occur on the mountain. Most fatalities are either two people crashing into each other or one person crashing into a tree. So I was just thinking safety is the other one from all different aspects of it, personal safety, skiing safety, bike safety, so many different applications just in that. So - Could have saved Gwyneth Paltrow so much hassle, that whole trial she could have gotten out of. Oh, yeah. That is part of what happens is people bump into each other on the slopes. Okay. So what have you been thinking about in terms of the first commercialization of this? Have you started to study that since you want to go the entrepreneurial route?

49:05Yeah, I think you guys touched on some core, like what I like to call foundational use cases for wearable visual intelligence, right? And so, I mean, another strong use case is helping vision impaired people who have low vision to read books. I have a grandma and my when I told my mom about this project, she was saying my grandma would love it because she's currently unable to read books because of cataracts and things like that. Wow. And I think I've never heard of read books as a concept. You buy the audio book, but even with these or with metaglasses, if you open a book, you could literally have Speechify reading it to you.

49:42Oh my God, that's an incredible use case. Yeah, that's cool. Exactly. And I think for my grandma, at least, she's pushing 90, right? She's not going to know how to open Spotify or Apple Books and download the audiobook, right? She's used to having tangible goods and interacting with those every day. And so I think this technology would be really helpful for her. But yeah, regarding ViewBuds, right now, it's sort of a question-answer oracle, right? You ask a question, get an answer back. But I think as this technology improves, we're going to start to see something like proactive intelligence. You can imagine gentle reminders for like when you forget your keys or you pick up the item at a grocery store and, you know, an Amazon agent is immediately like, hey, are you sure you want to buy this here?

50:22It's actually cheaper if you buy it online. And so I think there's going to be a growing space of AI applications. And so I think what's going to happen is if this can become a platform and we can open some sort of wearable AI app store that opens it for developers to create these niche but profound, strong applications like skiing, it's going to be really tough to implement every single one of these as a solo company. And so you want to open that option for developers and bring them. Yeah, the app store of these would be amazing. But, you know, if you look at a product like Whoop or Fitbit, they quickly found three or four use cases that people really care about.

51:06In their cases, you know, the pedometer, sleep, heart rate, you know, stress monitoring. These things are all kind of very quickly coalesced around a really great product that you would spend$200 a year on. So I think you've got a great GoPro angle, and then you've got the kids angle. Kids now are buying Apple watches are what parents do for safety. They get the LTE Apple watch, so you have GPS, and you can do a call with your mom or dad, or you can text with them, or you can call an Uber. So they kind of, you know, hand set up watches for kids. It's like a big deal. So really interesting. If you want to go to an incubator, I know a guy running one.

51:44I know a couple of guys running them. I'm super fascinated by what you're doing. Come to an accelerator, mine or another, and just do a dev run of 1 ,000 or 500 of these for$1 ,000 and start getting people excited about what the possibilities are. And there's got to be 1 ,000 developers out there who would want to start playing with this. I think you've got a clear path to making an interesting company. Thanks, Jason. I was just going to say, it does feel like, to me, a real proof of concept of like we're locked into this idea that the visual AI has to be this camera that you're somehow affixing to your front so that it can see everything.

52:21And I thought this was such an interesting idea that it could be more subtle, like a thing you're already wearing could just have a little camera in it and now you can see the world. Thanks, Lon. Yeah, and Jason, yeah, I'd love to chat with you after the podcast or touch base with you. They'll give you my phone number right now and I'll talk to you after. I mean, listen, I'm not the king of France over here. I just, we're like, oh, a scheduled call with you. I'm like, Ori, I can just give you my phone number and you call me on the phone. We'll connect you guys. I want to share one more thing. I was checking out Marucci's website and he's got a page.

52:50He's like an inventor. I'm going to try to share my screen again. Hopefully it works this time. He's got all of these different kinds of products and gadgets that he's made. There's one I wanted to draw everyone's attention to that if my mom could have hooked me up with an orthodontics wearable that would monitor my daily retainer usage, this would have changed her. Smart retainer? This would have changed her entire life. Every day it was like, Lon, are you wearing your retainer? But I would go to work, go to school all day. She wouldn't know if I was wearing it. A way to electronically monitor my retainer uses would have changed her whole life.

53:24Genius. Absolute genius. I think also, has anybody created a Pixel Buds or AirPods case, or the Sonys are really good. I use the Sonys right now. WFM, whatever they are, O5s. has anybody created a case that has intelligence in it and an internet connection and wi-fi so that you could leave the home with the airpods and the case and be online and get that experience like the apple watches and if you leave your phone behind it's just kind of operating outside of your phone has anybody ever built anything like that that you know i don't know of any yeah but these are also things that i've been i've been thinking about in the back of my mind I think this is like, could be an incredible asset because when I go skiing, I use a product called slopes.

54:13And when I would use my, use my Apple watch, I would fire up slopes on my watch. I didn't need to have my phone with me if I didn't want to, I would, but I could run it on slopes. It had GPS. And I think that's going to be like a next piece of this, uh, because you need extra batteries. They're slopes, really great product. Um, and it tracks like how many days you ski, what routes or speed on certain routes. It's kind of Strava for whatever. But if, If that case could be pretty big, it could be like the pack of cigarettes and you could have 360 views. You could have cameras front and back. Have you considered or is it just too bulky, too short battery life to have the cameras facing front and back?

54:48It could be possible to drop two cameras. I think the challenge there would be then the wireless link between the earbuds and the phone. We barely got two cameras working streaming over Bluetooth. And so one of the challenges with bringing this to earbuds is the fact that there's no higher bandwidth protocol like Wi-Fi because that just draws too much power. Wi-Fi draws too much power. You may not want it in your ears either. So that is a key, which then speaks to intelligence on the AirPods or on the pods themselves. All right. We'll drop you off, Maruchi, Kim, and let's keep the show moving.

55:27Great job, man. All right. That's a great get. and thank you for getting another guest that I was fascinated by. We do what we can. You know, I'll just give people a little angel investor advice. Never underestimate anyone is a credo I live by as an angel investor. Why do I live by the credo, never underestimate anyone? The people who have the chutzpah and who build things without permission just because they like to tinker or they have some motivation to itch a scratch that they alone have or fix a problem that frustrates them, or they see in the world and they think should have been solved already.

56:04Well, those people by definition have separated themselves from the rest of humanity. They've moved from the people who are non-playing characters who don't build anything in the world to the group of people who build things in the world. They've moved from passive to active. That is like the great first step. And then there's a step of active to company builders, right? And, you know, you could be active and tinkering, but then to want to scale and use the company format in venture capital, that basically is like saying, you know, I want to be in the big leagues. I want to go to the NBA or WNBA.

56:42I want to be a Navy SEAL. I want to open a restaurant, you know, in New York City. I want to be on Broadway. You wrote the screenplay. You did the short. But now you want to make the movie, right? And so right before people get very serious about venture capital, they are exactly like Mr. Kim, who we just had on. They're tinkering. They're making the orthodontic thing. They're, you know, making these, you know, camera buds. They're doing all kinds of interesting projects. And the people who do projects and tinker, toys, today's toys, often become tomorrow's innovations and tomorrow's breakout products that change the world.

57:22I get the sense that this could be one of those. I mean, this is what you see, I think, with so many of these AI tools. At first, you have to play. You have to just get interested in it and goof around with it, and that's how you figure it out. I don't know if there is a way to figure it out without doing that, necessarily, at this point. Yeah, it's part of the process. Yeah, that's how you unlock knowledge with technology, I think. Somebody can explain it to you all day, but it's really the trial and error is where you unlock things and learn things. Well, he unlocked that. It's really hard to get the images.

57:58You know, you can't even listen to a high fidelity song on AirPods or a phone over Bluetooth, which is why I use, and we'll talk about it in off duty. I use certain hardware, certain stack of hardware and high fidelity hardware in order to experience hi-fi music, which is 20, 30, 40 times as large of a file size, which means it cannot go over MP3. If you're listening to MP3s over Bluetooth, you're listening to 10 to 50 % of the quality of the music. That's why Neil Young was like, I know, I'm founding my own streaming service, Pano, because this dude drove him crazy. As hardware. One last word on ViewBuds.

58:39They stream a monochrome 324x239 image. That's how they keep it so small. So it does miss some fine details. It could be like, what's that thing way over there in the distance? But for close-up stuff, you know, it's good enough. Great. We'll see you all on Monday on This Week in Startups. Bye-bye. Do me a favor. Check out This Week in AI.ai. Sign up for the email. Follow us. You know, we've got to wake up the YouTube channel. So any comments you put under there, you subscribe, you put on alerts. If you thumbs up a video, if you save a video to a playlist to watch later, all of that gives a little signal that YouTube should pay attention to what we're doing.

59:12and we'll see you all on Monday. Bye-bye.