TWiST News: Tesla Robotaxis, Electric RVs, and How Startups are Helping Secure Elections | E2025

0:00Alright, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. I'm Jason Calacadis. He's Alex Wilhelm. And we have a huge, huge, huge docket today. We're going to start off with the Tesla robo tax reactions. then i'm going to show you how to build a model with chat gpt and this incredible new feature called canvas that i've been playing with that came out last week alex and it's going to blow your mind and then i understand we have two live guests today a twofer yes we have the founders of lightship rv they're building the l1 and all electric trailer that is pretty much the coolest thing i've seen in some time jason you saw this on twitter we're obsessed we're going to talk about it.

0:40And then we have the co-founder and CEO of a company called VOTZ, V-O-A-T-Z, that's Nimitz Sawny. And we're going to talk about election security and the startups that are working to make democracy a little bit easier flowing. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code twist to save 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Beehive. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and ad network features, all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20 % off your first three months at beehive.com slash twist.

1:24And Cloud Devs. Building the best remote team is tough, but you don't have to do it alone. Visit clouddevs.com slash twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite LATAM talent today. Last week, finally, after a delay, Tesla sat down and said, hey, everybody, we're going to talk about robo-taxis, big self-driving fleets, and the future of the economics of driving. Yeah, it was a big announcement on Thursday, followed by, I guess, Elon had a big Sunday and SpaceX caught a giant rocket with a pair of chopsticks. Unbelievable week. Pretty good 72 hours for my pal. But let's go to the robo-taxi one.

2:04This was lukewarm in terms of reception. The markets didn't like it because it lacked specifics, as they said. And Uber, actually, conversely, and Lyft went up because I think people felt like, okay, as cool as what Elon showed is, it's going to take a little while. So let's go through it. There was the CyberTaxi, which will begin production. I think he sort of said 2027 would be when these things hit the streets, maybe a little bit earlier. But here's what it looks like. let's start there alex what were your thoughts uh aesthetically and then uh conceptually with the robo taxi okay so first of all i thought the we robot branding of the event was simply an homage to the i robot movie like it's not i it's we it's all of us we but it turns out they pulled actually a little bit more from the aesthetics of that film than i thought so people are comparing the cyber cab to the car that i think it's will smith drives in that and the robo van the the large kind of like multi-person bus type thing that tesla showed off also has some overlap with that movie works for me i'm a science fiction guy so aesthetically i'm in i was surprised that the robo taxi the cyber cab was a two-seater jason i thought it might be more just for capacity's sake but i am i i am encouraged that big companies are putting more weight and money behind self-driving cars en masse because that is what I want.

3:28So I would say I'm bullish about it, but I also understand criticisms that this does feel a little bit far away and not quite as nailed down as some investors might have expected. I think the two-seater is inspired. I wish this was the Model 2 and I could buy it. That's what I heard from a lot of people. And in the biography that they did on Elon a couple of years ago, they talked about this big debate internally. Should it have a steering wheel and pedals or should they just go for it and kind of burn the boats and it looks like they went with the burn the boats i tell you if that was if that has steering wheel i would have ordered two immediately because i love the idea of a of a two-seater that's cheap i could zip around and most rides in the united states the overwhelming are one or two people in the car we all know that so for a fleet uh you want to go with two because that means you can produce more of them cheaper and they take up less space on roads so you know there's a million reasons to do it that way i was super bummed you couldn't buy it if you could buy that i think he would have sold one to two million i think he would have sold one million of them if you could put the full deposit down as even like if they said ten thousand dollar deposit i think a million people would order that car so um i wonder if at some point that will be available for purchase I like the design too, because it's kind of somewhere between the Model 3, which I aesthetically find pleasing, my daily driver's the Model Y, and the Cybertruck, which I also like because it's futuristic, on the Minority Report and like, is it a ripoff or whatever.

5:02minority report obviously was inspired by the delorean for their car and then somebody showed a bunch of 1930s 1940s 1920s whatever trains and it's kind of like minority report ripped off those designs or was inspired by them so and then there's only so many ways to make c3po i would say that you know if you're making a humanoid robot it's going to look like c3po and i think both of them have that so i thought that was aesthetically you know that aesthetic thing like it's a rip off of um minority report was like well i think everybody's been inspired by the same source material right it's the old like did apple started microsoft steal a graphical user interfaces from apple no apple stole it from xerox and on down the chain uh why though do you think tesla is not going to go ahead and just call this the model to two seats ship it with the steering wheel because i agree with you it would be a hit and i have my own guess but i'm curious why you think the company is moving towards robo taxis versus selling the model to it's a great question i i haven't talked to elon about it i don't know the thinking other than at some point you have to make a commitment to take the steering wheel out and build for production without those in there so i guess you know sometimes you want to this is just me taking a guess i think sometimes you want to force your team to do the hard thing and take off the uh the training wheels kind of right and also regulators like regulators are going to have to get used to no side mirrors no steering wheel at some point and there's a long list of things that they're going to need to figure out to get these into production uh but before we build our model and i'll show you uh gpt with canvas in a moment i think like the the next thing is the bus and so the bus to me was super inspiring because as i tweeted and this is what resulted in um the rv company we're going to talk to on the second half of the show i thought this was this stole the show and the reason i think this stole the show is because this is a platform this reminds me of a shipping container we've been talking about shipping containers on the show and this to me is a sled i think this is like a skiff if you know like what they used to call boats uh s-k-i-f-f i think is how you pronounce it not to be confused with skiff.com the travel website i'm an investor in uh my uh you know shout out to rafat um but this thing you know he it's beautifully designed for a night out or you know a bus but imagine this at a bathroom a bed a desk this is a mobile home if this was a mobile home it would be a mobile home with enough battery power for perhaps a month of usage if it wasn't moving around and if it's got that big roof you could actually put solar on the roof so the reason solar arrays don't exist on top of cars is because obviously it's not enough to make a difference you could add like one or two miles or something to minimus and you know maybe eventually 10 but this you know if it did have solar arrays on the roof or ones that opened up wide you know like they do in space you could actually plot these around and i gave a couple of scenarios hey people are fleeing florida because of a hurricane you could if airbnb owned a fleet of these or if they owned it and joe jebb is on the board of tesla and he's working on an adu company imagine a million of these or 10 000 of these going to walmart parking lots autonomously in the middle of the night and then people fleeing a hurricane situation terrorist attack i don't know you know pick the or you know opportunistically it's coachella it's the super bowl and you need extra housing or you know you have a ski resort and there's always this issue with ski resorts with housing you don't need it in the summer you do need it in the winter you could ship a hundred of these in put a bunk bed in them or two and then you'd have housing with a hundred of these for 200 to 400 people and so and then there's also obviously transportation of goods and services imagine an amazon truck where the amazon doesn't need a driver it just needs somebody to be in the back you know with the safety harness on taking the packages and when it gets to a donation jumping out ringing the bell putting the package taking the picture and leaving uh so this has got massive application i think that this thing could change the world so it sounds like what you're really excited about is the the skateboard element of this thing with the self-driving technology because the cab is highly variable based on do you want seats do you want a bathroom do you want beds do you want this that cargo whatever but i love the idea of there being several million self-driving multi-purpose vehicles in and around our nation just going around doing cool stuff and making life better because i would attend a heavy metal festival in the uk if i could stay in a luxury thing i'm not going to go in the mud and the tents i mean i'm too i'm too old for that now so that that hits me but another thing you didn't mention i'm shocked because you have kids is can you imagine um you and some other parents putting together your own private bus for your kids to get to school i mean wow i didn't think of that and you know when you know that you have a really game-changing uh product when you can do things like you're describing uh so yeah i do think that you nailed it um if you could purchase these or program these and it was a platform like sprinter vans there's an entire genre called van life and this is adjacent to fire uh and this alternative lifestyle uh economic alternative economic lifestyle we could call this in our themes but you know like sort of opting out of capitalism or opting into fierce capitalism whatever you want to call it man you could do some really interesting things couldn't you you could very simply um you know send these to a beach and you know with your family you could work off the beach for the entire summer so you have two kids now congratulations imagine you could take one of these to the cape or two of them to the cape one's your office one's for the kids or three of them and you know somebody owns a five million dollar home that on two or three acres and they just parcel out put three of these in the backyard and you know now you and your family can join your in-laws or whatever so i just a million uses for this i think it's absolutely fabulous the robots are obviously making progress there was a little back and forth of where they remote operated obviously if you're going to put i have no inside information on any of this but um and i couldn't make the event sadly because i had to travel earlier in the week but um the uh robots obviously you do need to have remote monitoring of robots and robo taxis until they're perfect so it doesn't surprise me that they were being remote controlled and in fact that's how you train these uh the best way to train these is to have a human with gloves on and doing like essentially AR and have it make, I don't know, pancakes.

11:50And then after you've made 100 pancakes, the robot knows pancakes. That's the scary, amazing part of all this. All right, Squarespace is the place to build beautiful websites, you know that. And you can bring your startup to the world with an amazing design and unbelievable functionality and you don't need to hire developers or a web shop to do it and if you do hire a web shop to do it they're going to charge you an arm and a leg it's going to be thousands to tens of thousands of dollars they're going to disappear they're going to change careers they're going to ghost you and then you're going to be left with a total mess and have to start over again where you can trust squarespace who i've trusted for over a decade to maintain and really evolve and grow our web presence every business needs a gorgeous website startups schools banks projects books and you can now do it with AI.

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13:12And everybody likes to save a little cheddar and Squarespace is so generous. Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial when you're ready to launch. You go to squarespace.com slash twist and you get 10 % off your first website or domain purchase. That's squarespace.com slash twist. We love them here. Longest running partner on this week in startups and we really do appreciate that. And Jason, we're going to be talking a lot about robotaxis clearly over the next couple of years but you had a thought experiment you wanted to run and this run actually ran headfirst into your i'm not gonna lie absolute love affair with chat gpt lately you've been raving i have been and um i want to show you uh canvas here because on wednesday uh we're going to do um a model so one of the things we're going to try to do here on the show we've got a little extra production resources is we are going to follow some of these threads, you know, over multiple episodes.

14:04So we're going to follow the thread that we've been is self driving, you know, deployment going to happen or not? And how long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? And in order to do this, I started using chat GPT because, you know, just work. So here you'll see my screen. And this is chat GPT for with canvas. and so when you use chat gpt 4.0 with canvas if you say use canvas the chat room moves to the left hand side do you see this on the left here and here's my initial prompt build a detailed model for those of you who are watching are just listening i said to it build a detailed model estimating the cost of creating a robo taxi fleet for all car trips in the usa including waymo cruise as a case study of the model should account for number one total car trips in the usa two uber and lyft trips three fleet efficiency estimate how many trips a single robo taxi complete per day assume 20 to 30 trips factoring in time for charging cleaning and downtime for maintenance fleet operation determine how many days a year a robo taxi can operate assume six hours a day for charging cleaning in five hour five days annually for major maintenance uh required fleet size you get the idea so i gave it all these qualifiers and here it is it's now given down a breakdown.

15:21And it says here total car trips in the USA, the Federal Highway Administration estimates 1.1 billion, and that's 400 billion annually. So daily car trips, annual car trips, it puts it there, then it says Uber and Lyft trips, Uber and Lyft, account for approximately 6.9 billion trips annually in the US combined. But they don't have the daily there. So what I could do here is I could. And this says this implies that they represent around 1.7. So I can just highlight this section here. And I could say, um, uh, whoops, sorry. I can highlight a section here. And this is what Canva does. That's unique is when you highlight it, it gives you yes, chat GPT, a little pop up.

16:01So I click and I say, uh, include daily trips and a citation for this information. and then i hit uh you know the query and what it will do is it will go do this query and it will rewrite you see it rewriting it rewriting that section and so daily uber lift trips 18.9 million sources ubers 2022 annual report lifts 22 statistics right so this is where things get really uh interesting here you can see um you know how many trips per day operation per day the required fleet size and required fleet size i think is a super interesting one um you're gonna need 44 million cars based on these rough estimates to replace all cars in the united states right then you could say well um how many public transit rides are there a day they say 34 million rides i think that's incredibly low and i think it's wrong but we could say here let's say 20 of them got replaced by taxis uh by robo taxis that adds another seven million rides a day and then here's the cost and this is where it gets super interesting if it's a 30 000 car you know what elon said his cars will cost you need 53 million of those cars for 1.6 trillion dollars to replace the fleet in the united states and then you have 100 000 vehicle costs for um waymo or cruise that's five trillion dollars is a lot of money and uh you can do very interesting things here like if you didn't believe this public rides a day i can highlight it again ask chat gpt i don't think this is right how many individuals ride public transit per day in the usa and give me stats on the new york city um subway per day so just to check the work kind of situation and this is what canva does really nicely it's one document so we've moved from um we've now moved from a chat room alex to one document being edited and cleaned up this is a pretty big deal i think and this is um i think claude had something like this already but you can see how this will make you bionic in your work um and any thoughts there you know i have so many thoughts so first of all on the number of cars that we need.

18:28I know we're going to get into this more later. I know this is just a tease, but it turns out the average pace for cars sold in the US right now is about 16.2 million. So it's only three or four years of total car sales to get to this self-driving number, which is less than I would have thought, to be honest. So that's actually optimistic to me. Two, this is super cool. And it's the end of homework. Like, I mean, there's no way you're going to get an eighth grader to not use this and get good at it i i don't see a way around that this must be this is it's a report maker where you can edit individual sections live with intelligent ai and nearly perfect data uh critical thing is going to go down but oh my gosh look at this it's it's awesome section on how many cars tesla can make per year and how many years it would take to build a fleet to service the usa and so it just added another section uh you know of um I attempted to add a section.

19:29I don't know why I didn't do it. But anyway, I had done that yesterday. And, you know, if they're making 2 million cars a year right now or 1.8 or something, you can kind of really start to understand how long this is going to take to have even put in regulation here. So here it's putting in Tesla's production in how long it would take if they're doing 2 million per year. It's, you know, it looks like I failed to do it. So I'd have to do a new one. It's interesting to watch it. Same. So if you're listening to the podcast on audio right now, first of all, we love you. That's great. No worries at all.

20:06But you might actually want to pull up the YouTube of this one just to watch the last two minutes, because this is an interesting example of kind of current state of the art. But Jason, one question for me, why not use ChowchubT01? Does that not work with Canvas yet? It doesn't. Yeah. And it doesn't have the ability to search the web. So although it does advanced reasoning, it doesn't do it. So I guess they got to put these things together and glue it together. But here's interesting. Assuming Tesla dedicates 50 % of their production to robo-taxis and grows at 30%, I didn't even ask it to do that.

20:44It's like showing how many years it would take. like year one, 1 million, year two, 1.3, year three, 1.69. It would take approximately 11 to 13 years for Tesla to accumulate a fleet of 50 million robo taxis, which I think they could do. And I think that's actually what's going to happen. And I think Toyota, Waymo, Cruise, all these other folks are gonna be doing the same thing. And what we will see is the wholesale replacement of all cars in the world over 30 years, I would say, with robo automated taxis, and then the retirement of all those old cars. And that's gonna be absolutely wonderful. for society youtube.com uh and search for this week and startups and you can subscribe and watch the video of us doing all this modeling we're going to have a model finished and we'll share it with the audience but anyway this makes me super bullish on you know both waymo cruise uber tesla byd etc because this is not going to be winner take all that's my prediction and i if If you look at the model, as incredible at production as Tesla is, and as incredible as their self-driving is, and then Waymos is obviously, and Cruise are actually active in making it happen in the real world already.

21:55These things take time to build, maintain, and to get those fleets out there is going to be a multi-decade process. And of course, regulators are going to have a say in this. And, you know, when we had a person get dragged and it wasn't the fault of Cruz, they've been off the road for every year, I believe. So, you know, just keep in mind, every time this happens, you're going to have a year of a jurisdiction or a country saying, not ready. so i think it's completely possible these things get taken off the road completely in a city like or a state like california because a waymo a cruz or a tesla kills somebody the second that happens it'll be a one-year pause and you're going to see that happen in multiple jurisdictions in china maybe they won't because they value life slightly differently in that jurisdiction but it's going to be a stop and go kind of situation is my prediction what are your thoughts i'm actually more bullish you on that part of it.

22:53I think that the fact that we have Waymo's operating around the clock for pay in San Francisco, which is a place that I have walked on nearly every street. And so I know how wild that city is. The trolleys, the people, the tourists, the buses, the ups and downs, the blind corners, the pusty roads. The fact that Waymo is right now, as we record this, doing paid self-driving rides there, to me implies the technology, even in difficult jurisdictions, both regulatory wise and also geographically, I think this is going to be faster. The thing that I think is going to take a long time is getting people to give up their cars.

23:29So I think urban centers spreads out, but I'm more bullish on regulation not getting it in the way here. We switched to Beehive and it has been huge for this week in startups. We have this Twist 500 newsletter I've been working on this entire platform where we're trying to find the 500 most important private companies. So twist500.com. And we've been using Beehive for this email newsletter. Beehive, B-E-E-H-I-I-V. It's a service that's built for growth. And when you're doing an email list or a podcast, you want growth. And they've baked it into it. Beehive was co-founded by one of the minds behind Morning Brew.

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27:24And when COVID hit, I took the plunge, rented a 30 foot Winnebago motor home, lived out of it that first summer of COVID and covered about 6 ,000 miles around the whole American West. It was a pretty, pretty amazing experience. I talked to a ton of RVers on the road and was really getting into the lifestyle of it. We can talk more about the opportunity, but - Let's show it. Yeah, let's show it. I mean, people want to see it. There's a big build up but i mean people want to see this thing it's gorgeous and it's got some very unique features um we're we're as biased as they come but we think it is the perfect travel trailer for for the electric age uh okay show us let's go let's see it this might be the the instagram video you you caught um so somebody had cut and pasted this i think to to x so i saw it on x when i was talking about you know yeah uh the cyber bus yeah yeah yeah yeah so so so here's what we're doing so we're building a um a towable rv and and if you know anything about rvs at some point they might go autonomous but right now 90 of them you tow with a truck or an suv um and so that's that's really the target market for us to start and and we're reinventing it from scratch right like this is meant to be a vehicle that is built for the age of electrification and what you're seeing here is um is is sort of just that like if you can start from a clean sheet of paper what are you going to do you're going to make it hyper efficient when you're towing it there there you know you can see it we call it road mode so okay so what we're seeing on the screen is a gray uh trailer that you would hitch to your cyber truck or your f-150 it's got glass windows and just like um if you've ever been in an rv you can expand them out when you have those celebrity trailers and they get wider at burning man or on a movie set here it's becoming vertical and becoming very tall so the whole thing raises up what is the height when it's parked where it's in drive mode i guess versus when it's parked and you're in living it mode what's the height differential it goes from six and a half feet to to about 10 feet tall so oh wow it's almost double it grows yeah it's uh It's pretty cool.

29:38Okay. And it looks like it's all Windows 360 almost around it. Talk about that design decision. Yeah. And this, you can almost actually get a little bit of a better concept for it. I'm sitting in our prototype. We call it the alpha right here. And you can see, you can see my ring light, but this is in our factory. And yeah, it is wide open. We're in the factory right now. and and so you know for us like it's really about building a product that's you know you're you're taking this to to a natural environment and most rvs are built kind of like a cave right like you didn't show up to to you know rocky mountain national park in a submarine you you showed up to like experience the the the mountains and uh and we really want to connect you to that so if you're gonna if you're gonna start from scratch we said like we're gonna do it completely differently and we're going to like just build the entire uh what we call the top of the vehicle the canopy um in glass i mean it is stunning and uh it looks like it's very large how big is this on the inside and then alex any questions you might have oh yeah it's uh so it's a it's a you know full-size camper so it's a you know four to six person about 27 foot vehicle so it's it's pretty big And, you know, on the inside, it's really, you know, designed to have all the modern amenities of kind of like a studio apartment.

31:00Another thing you'll find in your typical RV is it's like everything you'd have in your house, but it's really small. So you like multiple bedrooms, a bathroom. And then if you talk to somebody who RVs a lot, they're like, yeah, we don't really use the kitchen because it's small and cramped and we don't really like it. And we don't ever use the bathroom. And so we're like, hey, we're going to do this, you know, very differently and really design a space that's wide open, sort of like multi-use and something you'd really want to use. So this is where I begin to get worried because if I showed my spouse this, she would immediately fall in love with it because she loves the idea of going out.

31:35She loves the old kind of wind stream trailers, the silver ones that are so beautiful. Airstream, thank you. This has a lot of vibes like that. the reason why i'm not going to show it to her is that back in 2023 tech run said that this was going to cost uh between like 125 and 150 is that still the rough price range for it um yeah that that's right that is um that is sort of where we're starting and uh you know airstream is a really iconic brand super popular it's the one that like you know it's a heritage brand people really know it and um and we you know as we you know think about like our story like and this this This, I think, was not something we invented as something Tesla did well.

32:15But when you are a hardware company building a new brand, a consumer market, you really do need to start at a premium price point where you can sort of like, you know, build the company through the technology and move down. And for us, that is a high sticker price. And we don't pretend to say that it isn't. But that actually is really where you're going to start at for an Airstream as well. And that's where we're going to. Yeah, no, I didn't mean to say that you guys are unfairly high price. You're offering a lot here. I mean, just the fact that there's the solar wings that come out to expand the on top grid.

32:46That's awesome. Yeah, we want to be able to like, you know, power everything you need when you're out there, you know, having fun with your family and friends. And so, yeah, we get about two kilowatts of solar just on the roof alone. And we have an 80 kilowatt hour battery. So it's like six Tesla power walls. It's significant. And that how much can you charge per day from the solar? i'm curious because that was something we had in our previous discussion talking about this the cyber bus which you know doesn't have um solar on it because obviously they have uh you guys built out a huge supercharging network so probably doesn't need to have solar but if you're out there you know in the wilderness you probably would want solar and this could be like an off-grid living so you know while 100 100k 150k might seem like a lot when you compare it to buying an adu and having to do all this ADU work of putting it in, this is like an instant ADU.

33:45Yeah. I think it depends on where you are, but if you have a really good sun, assume maybe a 20 % charge in a day. So if you leave it out for a week, you'll go zero to full. Amazing. Are you looking for an unbeatable deal on senior talent? Well, if so, you need to look outside of your borders. According to G2, CloudDevs is the best place to hire top LatAm talent. That's Latin America, a market with millions of developers. CloudDevs is the largest pool of Latin American talent with over 10 ,000 senior engineers who are rigorously vetted for communication and problem-solving skills. And now, LatHire by CloudDevs can even fill non-technical roles.

34:28Very interesting, from accounting to graphic design with elite LatAm talent. Giants like Coinbase are choosing CloudDevs because its talent is matched with your time zone. And it's up to 80 % cheaper than a local hire, with the same Silicon Valley standards. So here's your call to action. Because they're such big fans of the show, CloudDevs is offering Twist listeners an exclusive pay-what's-fair deal. Instead of their usual fee, only pay what you feel the talent is worth, for a limited time only and exclusively for our listeners. just go to cloud devs.com slash twist to pay what's fair for your next five-star hire when when when when can i buy one because i want to buy it now like literally i want one of the first 10 and i don't like to buy the first 10 of anything because i know that you got kinks in it or whatever but i got a ranch man if i put this on a ranch and we've got an extra bedroom and a place to go work i mean this solves a lot of problems for me in a very short period of time so when can i buy one when when are you going to have these ready and they're bespoke to start heck yeah um you can put your reservation in right after we're done recording um and then we're we're building our first production units behind me right now um we'll have a we'll have some done at the end of the year and be delivering them early next year holy cow and uh how much you because you guys watched elon's playbook at tesla and you work there tell me about the playbook of funding a startup when we when i bought the 16th roadster 150k down for the first hundred reservations when i bought my signature the model s i think they did a thousand signatures i have the first one i put 150k down and those were actually turned out to be really good trades because those are collector's editions now and they're worth more than i paid for them but um this was a financing strategy people don't know this when elon almost went bankrupt twice with Tesla.

36:18This is how they funded the company was on those deposits. So how are you doing that? Do you have a signature 100 where you put a full deposit down? And then how much have you raised for this, you know, incredibly intensive capital intensive project? Great questions. I love thinking about some of the early days in history. I love the finance team. My first job there was working on Tesla's IPO. And so I got to be involved in all sorts. I hope you held some shares, Toby. You still have your shares? I do. I've kept a bunch more. So you're funding this company yourself? No, I didn't keep enough shares for that.

36:53I'm keeping a symbolic number to pass on to my kids. I like it. Yeah, so I'd say we're maybe a little less creative in our financing strategy than Tesla back in the early days. So we've gotten some really awesome venture capital investors. We've raised about$60 million. And that's really how we're funding the business. We certainly will have a more sizable deposit as we begin configuring what we call the founder series. So similar to Tesla, I think, Model S, they call it the signature series. We will have that and we'll have a deposit associated, but not really to fund the business. We're going about it in a little bit more traditional way.

37:33But I mean, to your point, it's a capital-intensive business. It's not as capital-intensive as automotive. The scale is slightly different. So Tesla to do a car program, this is back 10 years ago, it's like a billion dollars. These days, a car program is a couple billion dollars. An RV program, we mentioned Airstream there, they invested in a whole new plant. This is about a decade ago and it's like 50 million bucks so it's it's it's a little bit of a different scale um but it's hardware and i mean hardware is you know hard you don't have to hear that from me um and in a lot of ways it's not a traditional venture pack you know company it's a it's a a big complex product um but uh but yeah it's also it's also like a part of americana i think and this is something that you're seeing now is in in electric vehicle world we're we're super stoked we're uv people through and through.

38:29We've been working on it for 15 years now. But in the broader movement, if you've been paying attention, the last year has been a little bit mixed. And I think what's happening there is because we're really entering the mainstream markets, right? You're starting to see products enter categories that are not necessarily just purely adopter markets. And that, for us, we're stoked. We are selling a product to people who might not have an EV in their driveway they have like a dodge ram 1500 and that is that is how we will make a difference so i want to talk about the market a little bit because um toby one thing i realized prepping for the segment today is that the rv market went through a period of really rapid growth and it's since come down a little bit so let's pull up the chart that shows rv shipments in the u.s recently um you guys founded the company i think it was back in 2021 yeah yep um yep that's right Yeah.

39:22And that was the peak year for RV sales in the U S there were about 600 ,000 sold. And I think it was about 544 ,000 of those were the kind of tow behind trailers that we're talking about here. Since then things have come down. Interest rates went up. I know that the RV market is sensitive to that. I'm just curious, how do you guys feel about the company versus the market today versus back in 2021 when things were absolutely popping off? i mean we feel great it's it's no question is it a cyclical industry like automotive right yeah but we're still talking about one of the largest vehicle segments in the united states next to cars like it might be tied with motorcycles or something like that but it is it's massive so a big year it's 600 000 units a bad year it's like 300 000 units you know but by by comparison cars are like 12 to 14 million and then like other really big the next biggest vehicle categories that are on people's minds are like semi trucks or something like that.

40:17That's like 200 ,000 units. So this is sort of massive scale on an up market or a down market. And we're just getting started, right? We're going to be scaling up to low thousands of units. So certainly there's some cyclicality here, but this is one of the benefits of being a startup, right? We're going from zero to one. We don't have a market cap and public company investors that we have to explain things to um but uh i think you're going to induce purchases like i think that this is such a unique product in the same way tesla was there's a million people who want this who wouldn't pull the trigger on a traditional rv but are technological enthusiasts they're not price sensitive and they'll look at this as an adu an extra office for their remote work at home part of their airbnb or they're going to start their own little you know retreat center like we have here in the hill country uh outside of boston well jason even beyond that too you you see there's there's like huge overlap between the people who are early adopting ev pickup trucks and folks who are who are in the market for something like a light ship because there's i mean basically all of those ev trucks are awesome cybertruck f-150 lightning the rivian they're all really cool they all have an achilles heel around towing range and so our you know the the reason that it does the telescoping motion the reason that it looks like a bullet when you're when you're pulling it down the road is all about drag efficiency and aerodynamics because if you're not with our our approach to solving this range this towing range issue with ev trucks is twofold one you have to be really passively efficient so we spent an enormous amount of time even before we were doing any industrial design just on getting the aerodynamics right this thing is for comparison uh it is as drag efficient going down the road at cruising speed as a model three which is a tiny passenger sedan and this is a 26 foot long eight and a half foot wide trailer that weighs double a model three so that that that drag efficiency was everything we then went twofold and added uh this is totally non-standard for a trailer we added an ev battery roughly the size of a model 3 battery plus a motor on board and so that drive unit propels the rear axle of the trailer so this is a self-propelling trailer which is to say that the trailer is helping itself or it's helping the truck does that work that's fascinating we agree i think it's a very very new way to build somehow when you're pulling it it knows it's being pulled and it says instead of being in neutral i'm going to add a little bit and it somehow intelligently knows the speed it's going so it doesn't impact the driver yeah let me tell you so it's a sensor suite there are a few few inputs to a control system that would you know that we've developed and run on a piece of custom hardware the main thing is a force sensor that goes between the truck and the trailer in the hitch in the connection point and so if you know the force between the two like imagine the trailer is trying to drag the the truck back now you can tell the trailer motor to spin up and assist and then the same thing works in reverse so if you're slowing down or if you're coming downhill now you can sense a compressive force between the two tell the motor to go into regen and the trailer continues to float on the hitch so it's an awesome towing experience and there's also next to zero range loss ballpark where are you where are you at with pre-orders hundreds thousands tens of thousands just give us an idea like where's this project at um we we try not to disclose our pre-order and amount over a thousand it's got to be over a thousand because i want a hundred right now it's significant and we'll we'll hook you up um okay yeah what's the down payment you're asking for you're the finance guy so toby how do you think about down payments and getting to the front of the line and all that um so right right now it's it's it's still just refundable orders and it's 500 bucks um so so you can you can you can put in 20 um uh we we are when we when we uh begin our our sort of customer deliveries we'll start start flipping it over as you mentioned to sort of more significant um you know payments so we're talking about probably like you know 10 or so of the of the sticker price um but yeah you get your get your reservation in today okay can i tow it behind my subaru outback this is probably not um dang it because if you slapped a starlink on one of these took the front took the bet out putting a desk my wife could just tow me around and i can have my entire setup and then i will be willing to go like the woods you know like i can totally see my family loving this thing well thinking about the craziest you know talking about avs earlier the craziest instantiation of something like this in the future is platooning where you're you're like platooning with a pod behind you that follows your your tow vehicle come come back to the present because we you know we got to build a company that we can scale now um the main thing you have to think about tuning means it is not hitched it's just following you on an autumn as a full self-driving that's the audacious thought yeah yeah exactly oh yeah i'll take three in that case i'll have my own freaking like we'll have your family congratulations gentlemen you you created a train yes but jason it's a very fancy train that's very cool with blinky lights and that's why i want i mean this was a big part of the self-driving vision you know 20 years ago when they were doing the DARPA challenges was that you would daisy chain a bunch of trucks into the right-hand lane left-hand lane whatever cars and that would you know um you know for resistance reasons and efficiency and safety i don't know if that's still in the cards right now but uh it seems like we're gonna yeah just have them blow with traffic but yeah it's a really interesting idea just to answer your question quickly the main thing to think about is how much weight can my car support?

46:16So of course, we're going to make a bunch of different trailer types over time that are right sized for different tow vehicles. Right now, you want to have a truck or truck or a big SUV. Okay. And then just one last question, guys, before we let you go. Pebble is another company kind of similar to you guys. They're building an all-electric travel trailer. They're theoretically going into production, I think they said, at the end of this year. So are you going to buy them? Are you going to crush them? How do you think about the competition inside of your relatively new niche i think it's cool that we got some people you know following on our heels like you know that's never a bad thing um especially like it's a massive market our products are pretty different actually theirs is much smaller single axle uh camper and we kind of went with like the full size uh you know pretty premium vehicle but we don't need to crush pebble i don't think they need to crush us like i think we can we can both succeed it's a it's a big market um so yeah we're we're we're excited that that they're out there and hopefully hopefully doing good things too and this is going to be amazing thanks so much for coming on the program yeah thank you guys we really appreciate it awesome i'm gonna definitely order one of those i know i haven't seen you this jazzed in some time well i mean i uh i have a lot of acreage now uh and where's the ranch uh it's uh out in uh like the hill country dripping springs kind of outside of austin 30 minutes or so outside of austin it's just fantastic and you just i could park these any number of places uh and it would be just absolutely fantastic and it's obviously got air conditioning and an hvac in it it's got the solar so you know half of like the issues you have when you own a ranch is getting water electricity and internet across the ranch And so I'm learning all of that.

48:06It's bizarre, but like, as about one example, when you're running electricity on a ranch, like if you try to run electricity to two different places on your ranch, that could be very expensive to do. or you can order another uh electrical from your electric company they put it on a different part in the ranch and they pay for it and then you have just like two electrical bills or three electrical bills to different parts of your ranch as if it was like different lots and so and then water obviously is super complicated so like do you if you've got a large enough ranch uh is it easier to do plumbing from one side of the ranch to the other or just drill another well and have redundancy in your wells all of these like really fun interesting things that you can do with your ranch life so i think distributed power is really going to be a huge unlock for a lot of you know more these more rural sparse settings and sterling's already got you know distributed broadband covered universally so this is this is the other the other piece to solve right now i have three different power sources diesel generator propane and electrical from the city so three different and i'm putting in solar and battery so i'll have four different electrical sources then we have three different two well two different wells 300 feet 700 feet and then city water so three waters and right now two internets spectrum and starlink and then there's a third one you can get on this very fancy router i have where you can actually get an at &t 5g card put it into your router and then it will do a series of failover so we lost internet from spectrum nobody in the house new and i got a text oh my god spectrum's down and i was like oh i got to check and they're like no internet's not down and i looked and the router successfully felled over to starlink and i was like wow this is the future like every home will have a starlink as their backup and i hear people are doing starlink as their backup now and not activating the service they just buy it they put it on a shelf where they install it and then if they do have an outage that's more than an hour or two then they will you know turn it on so there's going to be like a interesting you know redundancy and obviously electrical redundancy and uh all this stuff for when the civil war happens in uh january 6th uh hopefully not but let's yeah yeah it went dark your uh your sphere of redundancy let's not have a civil war folks let's be cool all right boys we'll talk to you soon toby and ben uh when you ship come back on and uh i'll have you by the ranch when you deliver mine and we'll have a little party here uh well done you'll have oh yeah a little ranch water oh that's nice with that now you can't use the all-in tequila all-in.com slash tequila for ranch water okay it's a premium tequila you gotta get a more you know uh yeah but i do like that ranch water i have to say uh bill gurley turned me on to that ranch water and uh people who don't know ranch water is just a topo chica with a a lime or a lemon and then just a little tequila in it so you literally take a couple of sips out of the topo chica and then you pour the tequila and you drink it out of the glass bottle it sneaks up on you it does sneak up on you where you got where's your factory is it el segundo or we're uh we're in colorado here oh sweet yep brinkfield colorado so that's actually a good location for shipping right because you'll get whole texas southern california northern california and that's and then arizona and all those places you got all those people who love to do that circuit all right boys thanks guys these guys thanks bye okay uh one of the things uh we're trying to do here is look at the biggest issues alex that are happening in our country in the world and then you and i and our production team trying to get smarter ourselves on topics so we can speak with uh more authority on them while educating the audience through individuals who are builders in the world as we just saw with that incredible RV company.

52:02And that was just awesome, huh, Alex? To get them on the program so fast. Absolutely. I love talking to people who are building stuff. One of the best parts of being a journalist in the technology startup space has been getting to talk to an endless number of founders because they always leave you with infectious enthusiasm. Yes. I've never gotten tired of it, ever. Okay. Well, and one of the big issues we have today, and you and I have been talking about this, and this is not a political program, although all in talks about politics a whole time you can get your politics fixed there election security is something we all care about as americans and i think globally and so this seems to be a huge topic right are our elections secure and today i want to talk a little bit about that so maybe you could queue up our next guest and we'll start talking about election interference are people actually do and we're going to do this over a couple of episodes so we'll start today with a, you know, one founder who you're about to meet.

52:59But we're going to talk over the next couple of episodes of This Week in Startups about the technology, the challenges, and, you know, even maybe some of the politics of this without having, you know, any particular horse in the race here. I think we can, what can we agree on, Alex? What can Americans agree on if you were going to tee this up? Yeah. So the question is, what is the state of election security? Clearly, we're heading towards a massive election here in the United States. Jason made a joke about that in the previous segment. So according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, on the presidential side, Russia and Iran are looking to influence the election.

53:37And on down ballot races, Russia, Iran, and China. So many countries would love to tinker with our elections. This is not usually done through actually changing votes, but more disinformation, misinformation, that sort of thing. But we do also have a very decentralized structure to elections here in the US, we have different state, municipal, and federal elections. That creates many different systems. Now, on one hand, that's great because we can try many things at once. On the other hand, decentralization doesn't mean that everyone has the best cybersecurity at all times. So one thing we have done is prepare a list of a couple of startups that we think are really cool that are working on the issue of election security through different means.

54:16Clear Ballot, democracy live votem which might be struggling and then also votes v-o-a-t-z and i'm very happy to say that we have the co-founder and ceo of votes with us today uh nimit sonny nimit thanks for coming on the show really appreciate it thanks alex for having me here so i want to start with how much progress votes has made you guys talked about having taken part in 130 successful live elections in six countries from the state municipal and federal level uh how active is votes in the upcoming u.s election cycle so our system has so far been used in six u.s states it's primarily available to a group of voters who are called as yokawa voters so these are u.s military any u.s citizen living overseas voters with disabilities and now in some jurisdictions first responders as well so as far as the u.s is concerned it's currently only available to a smaller group of voters but internationally for example in canada 15 cities have selected us there everybody is allowed to use it for their municipal elections and then recently we just completed the federal elections in mexico almost 10 million overseas mexicans were eligible to use the system but you guys talk about you know basically making voting secure and possible in a mobile setting with you know biometrics and real-time id verification and so forth So to me, my question is just, why isn't this more widespread?