TWiST News: Venture-Backed Defense Startups, Anti-Drone Guns, and Querio's AI Data Platform | E2048

0:00All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Weekend Startups. I'm Jason Calacanis an angel investor and podcast host here in Austin, Texas. I used to say Silicon Valley last year. Now I say lots in Texas. And with me, my co-host, Alex Wilhelm. How are you, sir? I am fantastic. We have an amazing rundown today. Yes, we do. And we also have NVIDIA earnings after the bell. That's going to come out, of course, after we record this, Jason. But I am just bursting with excitement. I mean, this is going to be, I think, an earnings report that really sets the tone for the next couple of months. It's going to tell people where we are on the bullishness hype cycle for AI.

0:36So I'm kind of counting down the minutes right now until Jensen tells us if there's going to be Christmas in technology or just coal in our stockings. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. open phone create business phone numbers for you and your team that work through an app on your smartphone or desktop twist listeners can get an extra 20 off any plan for your first six months at openphone.com slash twist and sprig the product experience platform that generates ai powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale visit sprig.com slash twist to book a demo and get a 75 gift card let's just get into it they're expected to report 33 billion dollars in revenue yeah if you put that number times four you get to a 130 billion dollars a year um and the data seven the data center revenue is 29 billion of that if you didn't know nvidia used to be a company that made graphic cards for gaming that was basically their business that's what they were known for if you were a video game nerd you would sit there and you'd buy an nvidia card if you wanted to get your frame rate up when you were playing a desktop game somewhere along the line people took those gpus graphical processing units and started using them for cryptocurrency so then they had two line items and cryptocurrency i think for a time you know was driving the stock those two little businesses that was their tam total addressable market and we're going to talk about tam a lot because i just saw a great clip of bill gurley talking about tam i think maybe we'll put that for tomorrow but that's an industry term for hey what's the market size you're going after and you can do all kinds of fun things once you know the tam the tam of gaming and the tam of crypto well you can kind of figure out what the total addressable market is how many customers are how much they're willing to spend and then you can do interesting things like who has a certain percentage of the market and then how much is the market growing year over year and that can give you some ideas of where the company's going why is this so flawed alex when it comes to looking at nvidia at that time i know we're going to get to the uber example tomorrow, but I'll just kind of tease it for everybody.

3:19But one way to think about Uber back in the day, but before it was big, when it was small, was to look at the taxi market and say, okay, the taxi market is X dollars, Uber will get 30 % of it. So it's revenue ceiling is Y dollars. The thing is a really good product makes the market much larger. Uber made the taxi market larger. iPhone made the smartphone market larger, et cetera. So if you have a technology that breaks out, for example, NVIDIA GPUs in the data center context, you can suddenly go from a company doing a couple of billion a quarter to dozens of billions a quarter right and i call this market manifestation uh and i got that term from induced traffic you know i remember when i lived in los angeles they would always be adding a lane to a highway they'd be like hey you know what the 405 it's getting a little congested here at the 405 and the 10 let's add some bigger off ramps and they did these spectacular off-ramps and i remember reading about it alex these were going to change everything these off-ramps instead of one lane getting off in a tight turn they were going to have two lanes and they were going to be a giant wide turn onto wilshire boulevard or olympic or santa monica boulevard so when you got off the 405 instead of having you know this little quarter mile circle of one lane with 10 cars in it uh let's say 20 cars in it you would have you know a mile with 40 cars in two lanes you'd have 80 cars getting off instead of 20 you went from 20 cars getting up to 80 and that would make the traffic flow because you could get more cars off quicker into that queue to get onto santa marco boulevard you know what happened yeah but people started to realize hey traffic on the 405 has been easy breezy maybe i'll buy a house a little deeper into the valley get a little more bang for my buck because hey the 40 minute commute i can go an extra exit or two out and it's kind of reasonable so i'll get the cheap perhaps or hey you know what i love this restaurant in santa monica i live in the valley or i'm in venice and i want to go to a restaurant in culver city yeah i'll zip across and uh go to that restaurant it would induce more traffic and it never ended so that's what uber did in this example though nvidia became the choice for doing large language models at inference i guess on the margins as well and these h100 servers just started doing bigger and bigger machine learning tasks large language models come out and suddenly everybody in the tech industry sitting on mountains of cash realizes hey we can't buy anything so here's the other trend right the wrath of khan which is coming to an end the wrath of lena khan said no m a that means all this cash builds up nobody's buying whole foods nobody's buying you know what's that so what are you gonna do with the money you might as well build some servers you might as well stand up a server farm it's good use for it maybe a stock buyback and that's when 29 of the 33 billion dollars that nvidia is expected to announce tonight is going to come from data centers they just let that sink in 90 of their revenue now comes from a a product or a business line which was not really on the top of people's minds but five to ten years ago correct oh absolutely and uh court can we get that table back up on the screen for a second because i want to make a make a point to underscore what jason is saying here which is that the scale of nvidia's revenue i think kind of occludes or hides how quickly it came to be because you hear that number you think okay well how much revenue does apple do or does microsoft do whatever but jason if you look at this chart just observe the jump from the first quarter of their fiscal 24 to the second quarter of the fiscal 24 people not watching the video uh nvidia's data center revenue went from 4.3 billion to 10.3 billion in a single quarter and then it went to 14 and a half 18 and a half 22 and a half 27 and then today it's supposed to be 33 that is still accelerating jason it's still getting much bigger very quickly and that's why i think this earnings report matters so much there's a lot of enthusiasm right now in the market in a post trump context the lena con tenure is coming to an end there's still a lot of investment hype and a lot of excitement about what's going to come the vibes are good in other words yeah and i think that invidia will either maintain that or really hurt it ah so give me the case for hurting the vibes what could cause um you know the stock to 10 what could cause people to lose faith what would be the narrative or the plot lines or the vibes that can make people go you know what maybe this is uh over hyped and coming to an end yeah so i think two things there one if the company just meets expectations like i believe we saw in the preceding quarter we could see a stock drop five, six points.

8:17Again, people are expecting a beat. This is a company that is valued on growth. It's expensive by a couple of traditional metrics. People really believe in it. So it's being valued as such. The reason why I think it could harm the vibes if it misses or just barely meets expectations is that that implies quite a lot about the rest of the industry. NVIDIA's quarter to quarter revenue numbers, Jason, are a proxy for the investment that big tech companies, the hyperscalers, are putting into their data centers, which are a proxy for market demand for AI models, AI inference, and essentially just the health of the AI economy.

8:50So NVIDIA is kind of down the pipe a little bit, but it should tell us what's going on upstream. And it's one of the best indicators we have. So that's why I think it matters so much for the software picture, if that makes sense. Founders, do you want to sell to bigger customers? I know you do. You got to get that ACV trending up and you want to push your churn down, right? Sounds good. But to sell to those big buyers, you need to clear all of these compliance checks. You know that. That means you got to have things like SOC 2 sorted out. What's SOC 2? It's a standard and ensures that companies keep their customer data safe.

9:23And if you aren't SOC 2 compliant, you can kiss those big deals goodbye. You're not going to land the lighthouse customers. You're not going to be able to operate at the highest end of the market. But Vanta makes it really easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2 compliance. On average, Vanta customers are compliant in just two to four weeks. It can take months without Vanta. and they automate compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So you can sell it to bigger customers in whatever markup your startup is going after. Vanta is going to save you hundreds of hours of work and up to 85 % on compliance costs.

9:56Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. This quarter, are they on a fiscal quarter or are they on a calendar quarter? I'm curious. this is q3 fiscal 2025 or 2024 am i reading this right yeah so this is we're in their fiscal we're in their next fiscal year a bit like microsoft they're they're offset by a couple quarters got it okay so this is um gonna be really interesting we've never seen a company grow large amounts of revenue in this way the last quarter was 30 billion i'm saying that and uh the year earlier for q2 was 13 billion so they more than two times their revenue that quarter to that quarter q3 last year 18 billion this year 32 so it's gonna just under double right so this uh crazy growth is slowing but it's still significant and we talked about before on the program there have been a bunch of people looking at round tripping as a technical era as a technical term for self-dealing or insider re-transactions they invest in a company that company buys servers with uh invidious money but those numbers were kind of small then there's accounting issues when do you recognize revenue so a lot of the revenue here my understanding is baked in because somebody will put it in order you have a company like x.ai elon's x company they bought a lot of h100s they stood them up incredibly quickly okay those all got delivered in a quarter but they probably have future ones coming in and then you have people like amazon apple google and meta probably programmatically buying x number per month my understanding is jensen's approach is we just take your order and we fulfill orders and me when orders are received but i don't know how the money works do they get the money ahead of time and they get to sit on it it would seem like they have the unique ability in the world to dictate terms and i wonder if you know how much cash they're sitting on now and what they require in terms of people giving them money in advance to lock in those one could argue that they could give people two options one you put a 10 down payment on you're in the queue you want to be in the vip queue you you put down a full deposit 100 and you go to that that so i would run the company with two queues that you know whatever 25 down queue and then you get stuck after that and then the priority queue which is you you pay 100 up front i don't know exactly how they do it.

12:49So I'm looking through their last quarter's earnings because again people were recording this right before the Q3 fiscal 25 numbers but if we look at their deferred revenue which Jason I believe is where they would put prepaid contracts essentially it's not that much money. It's actually at the end of the last quarter just$1.7 billion worth of deferred revenue. So to me that doesn't imply that there's a lot of chicanery going on here and i'll just point out that the investing community court if we could have that uh table pulled up real quick the investing community is not concerned about this as you can see from here nvidia is once again the most valuable company in the world beating apple beating microsoft beating alphabet beating amazon beating aramco beating meta so while you and i because we're nerds for financial documents are a little concerned about possibilities of round or what to do with the VC fund, as you mentioned last time, the street doesn't care.

13:49Great. Awesome. Okay. So we are going to get those numbers, and we'll have a live show tomorrow, Thursday. Because instead of doing a Friday show, I'm going to be taping all in on Friday, so you get your all in on Saturday. But we moved up this week and started up to Thursday, so I don't have to tape two episodes in one day, which is exhausting for me. One a day is great. It's like a workout. Two a day, too much. whenever i do two records in one day i walk into the house afterwards and my wife's like what's wrong and i'm like i had to talk for three hours and she's like oh you poor thing she's like it's very tiring well it's mentally um stimulating uh you and i get to have a conversation here but all in sometimes tips in from uh just a conversation to just outright sparring and a cage match especially if things like ukraine come up or trump or whatever political discussion so for me this is like a delightful conversation that can become a little bit uh yeah spicy let's say and then try on that one i'm the moderator here you get to play a little bit more of the moderation role and i get to kind of shoot a little bit more here to your point guard and we do the pick and roll over there i'm doing a little more point guarding which is also exhausting yes it's much harder people have asked me do you prefer to be a panelist or a moderator and the answer is so obvious being a panelist is great you show up with your shoes untied you sit down someone puts a mic in your ear right you shoot right easy they pass you the ball you shoot yeah man coming down the court having two guys double team you and you're trying to zip around and get somebody open and you have to keep your entire peripheral vision open hey where are the opportunities here for other people to score takes a lot of work all right so that's nvidia yeah let's move on uh anything else we should be looking for there or anything notable or just we'll talk about it tomorrow we'll talk about it tomorrow i think that's enough on that because we'll get the numbers we'll do a better deep dive but that's that's the state of play uh at for 4 p.m today from the last turn okay jason by the way the number one thing i want to know just as a project here is when does nvidia have a competitor this is my big question when do we think there'll be a disruptive competitor and you'll see a leading this is what i'm looking for okay a leading uh company a leading customer one of their lighthouse customers let me say it that way when will one of nvidia's lighthouse customers that's a technical term in our industry for a customer so pronounced that other people are guided to your product because of it like a lighthouse guides people to shore safely having xai or having open ai or having amazon web services as your customer that would guide other people to the safety of an h100 video's term so when does a lighthouse customer flip to another product okay that's what i'm looking for that will be the disruptive moment we should all be looking for with nvidia and it will come first in the in the in the form of an announcement then there'll be a startup um that tries it and gets a lot of attention for doing it and then there'll be a competing cloud computing offering so look for that little cohort that's when you know the nvidia story is going to have complications yeah well one i mean just to pick a twist 500 company etched they're making chips that are literally purpose built for the transformer architecture for llms which is a wager by the way on that maintaining its primacy in how ai models are built but i love it because if they're correct they're going to be a huge company and could to your point jason snag some real market share um i don't think we'll see hyperscalers stop buying nvidia chips altogether but i so i would amend your what to look for by saying when does they when does a lighthouse customer for nvidia start to buy large amounts of a competing chip um and of course amazon has its tranium two chips coming out so there is some other names on the agenda uh jason before we get to a guest though i want to talk about uh ai training and and data because there's a little bit of news here from the twist 500 and it's that i don't think we actually got to this on the show but told it one of two companies that we added that are dealing with building a marketplace between content providers and ai models that want to use that data raised a series a a 24 million dollar series a quite large and they said as part of that that they have customers they have data and they have ai companies on the platform so progress there pretty good and then also uh prorata.ai a new company to me backed by mayfield uh just secured 130 million dollar valuation um because it's doing the same thing over in the uk.ai yes prorata being your share of something and your ability to buy those shares in the future that's the term we use here in the valley so fair compensation and credit for content owners in the age of ai so this is not pro rata as in you get if you own 10 of a startup you get to buy 10 of the next round this is compensation for content owners this is amazing we need to have attribution we need to have citations exactly as i had said on this very program i think two years ago at some point citations will be required and permission will be required citations are in the latest version of chat gpt everywhere perplexity has always had some of them and in the new search product that chat gpt or i'm sorry open ai is doing their search feature they have some citations some of them are buried somewhere so i think this is what we're seeing is the healthy evolution of the ecosystem and what's going to have to happen is the untraining of models so if you put reddit in your model when you build your next version you're going to need to make sure that all that content from reddit is taken out somehow technically that might mean you know yeah i mean how do you do that it's a it's a technical question i'm not sure how much how much of a new version of chat gpt relies on what was index previously and so yeah i don't know the answer to that i know in some models they just start over they have all the data sitting there so then it would just be like it would be the equivalent of having a library and going in and saying okay take all the stephen king books down take all the token ones down we don't have the rights to those take them out of the library now open the library to customers but if all the knowledge was already sucked in and it's got it in there i don't know how you rip out that scaffolding that's a really good question for when we have these companies on the pod one thing i'd like to institute here if somebody is good enough to be on the twist 500 let's have the founder on the pod for a quick guest hit twist 500 is our attempt to identify the top 500 private market companies now an easy way to do that would be to just look at market caps and put in all the unicorns we're not doing there you can sort the twist 500 which is built on coda yes dot io slash twist i think and you get some sort of free deal we didn't pick them because they're a sponsor on this podcast um we did because it's a really great tool for doing stuff like this but it's a database you can go in there how many companies are we at right now we are about 110 and uh due to a snafu i'm re-adding at about another 10 so we'll be about 120 all right going slower than i would like but uh maybe this will be our q4 end of the year project is to is to ramp up here somebody had a baby and i think has been having a little less sleep so we've also been doing a lot of shows i mean that's true we have been hitting four or five shows in a week which i never thought was going to happen um but next year it's going to be three shows a week the sales team hates me because i'm turning down money for that fourth fifth show a week but i just you know i want to do three really high quality shows a week let's get that dialed in yeah and then maybe we can both get some sleep all right let's you know we have a speaking of guests yes uh and you can check out twist 500 twist 500.com go ahead check it out there's a submission form there don't email the sales team and ask them to put you on the twist 500 people selling the ads if you go through them it's probably going to be worse for you that will be like a minus one because we have a chinese wall a firewall between the editorial and the ads you don't get to be on the twist 500 because you advertise okay but there is a submission form and i don't think anybody reads it but there's a submission uh it goes to one of my email addresses i believe so i will see it founders know that every missed call is a missed opportunity customers don't want to wait they will call someone else if you don't pick up but if you use open phone you're never going to miss another customer call and guess what it's super affordable and easy to use people used to spend tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of dollars putting in a corporate phone system and now for just$15 a month open phone will give you a business phone line and complete control of your destiny want to know who's answering customer calls and how they were handled open phone can do incredible things like sync with hubspot and give you ai powered call summaries automated responses to ensure you don't miss a single ring well that's all built into open phone and if you've got an existing phone number they will let you port it over at no extra charge get 20 off your first six months what an amazing offer at openphone.com slash twist that's o-p-e-n-p-h-o-n-e.com slash twist for 20 off for six months let's talk about our our first guest today sure there's a company jason called alan control systems oh yes they caught my eye on reddit because i like things that go boom and then it turned out that they are a venture-backed startup and raise money i believe from craft ventures so i thought hell let's have them on the show david sachs backed this company i remember we had a conversation on all in last year or maybe two years ago we were talking about would you back a company and i remember sachs kind of waffled a little bit at the question at the answer of the question and then i found out he actually had but he hadn't announced it yet and steve uh is here uh welcome to the program steve hey thanks for having me on guys appreciate it all right i think you might remember that moment maybe because yeah i do remember the moment also uh it's good to see you again jason i briefly saw you at the all-in summit i was hanging with mostly jimmy though your guy jimmy oh oh j oh jimmy donahue my my we're gonna golf together we're golf we're about to be really oh yeah jimmy d is the greatest jimmy d and i grew up on the same block in brooklyn we had the same crew he went on uh with my brother to join the nypd the three of us were going to go on at the same time right as i was about to join nypd i got accepted to fordham at the last minute and i went at night and uh there is where like the uh changing cars the the the butterfly effect whatever happened and jimmy's the man jimmy is the guy and he does all my security and is awesome uh so tell us a little bit about your company what are you trying to do here and yeah i mean fundamentally we're trying to change the battlefield economics um so allen control systems we make uh autonomous gun systems and so these are guns that can point and shoot uh on their own so the operator the the soldier only has to give a command of what target they want and then bullfrog as you see here will actually do do the rest it'll it'll slew to the target and then fire the shot wow and it is an actual um assault rifle it looks like oh yeah that's been mounted so you don't make the gun you use an existing gun in the world correct yeah so we're using a standard m240 assault rifle it's a standard it's a standard army uh gun that's in you know most uh units it's a very widely distributed gun yeah got it so you don't have to worry about the maintenance of those guns or building them they exist in the world already is that a 50 caliber on this one i'm seeing that's still the m240 we do have a 50 cal variant coming so what we make is the we make all the steel like we cut all the steel we make all the circuit the motherboard the motor control board all the circuit cards are custom and then the software everything but the gun basically yeah because you know when i did my tours alex stolen valor i uh i used to man the 50 in in my dreams i man the 50 my my my you're like cuba gooding jr in that one movie pearl harbor man in the 50 cal yeah i used to man that 50 i think also blackhawk down there we're young man the 50 and john mckeon my good friend who was a green beret he's the man the 50 caliber um all right so you have this um existing assault rifle you build a container for it and then it has a lot of ai and this is not used to go out and kill humans in the field this is used for defensive purposes today correct yeah so we are starting with the hardest problem which is hitting a fast-moving small drone um obviously it is a it is a gun system so you know the army will use it for multiple mission sets but drone warfare is the primary concern right now i'm really curious about just the sheer volume of these because i've actually shot um machine guns before uh once at west point for example and they are just so indescribably loud.

27:13And so I'm kind of curious, does that at all impact how you design systems to go after drones? Because I presume you want to be stealthy until you pull the trigger, but oh my god, once you do, Stephen, they're just insane. Yeah, that's a good point. So our system is designed to be passive, meaning it's using cameras to find the drones. So instead of a radar detection system, which is very loud, the enemy can see like someone using active radar, and then they can hit an artillery shell to your truck. Our system with just the cameras, you know, before you fire the shot, you can hide. And so the passive nature of it is really good for force protection.

27:45Okay. And then does that mean that it's optical based? And if so, does that mean that you have issues in rain, snow, sleep? Is this a fair weather system? I suppose. Yeah, I know it should work in all weathers and at nighttime. We use EO, electrical, optical, and IR sensors, so infrared. And so we're able to see at night as well. You know, obviously, if it's really rainy out, that can be a problem but that's also a problem for many other weapon systems as well let me ask you a candid question here how long did it take to develop this system just in quarters or months or years well i mean this was a solid 18 months to get it to where it where the government is buying it now i would say it's another 18 months you know till it's like the best gun on the market that you could buy like it's not it's gonna be it's already the most accurate gun in the u.s right now um but it will be incredible you know in another year or two um but yeah like right now 18 months got it so the reason i asked that question is there are bad guys in the world um and if your small team uh at a startup can build this in 18 months is there are there versions of this that have been built with by nefarious players terrorist organizations bad actors in the world that you have become aware of since starting the company?

28:59Not that I'm aware of. This is the, I do survey the market pretty often as the startup CEO. This is the first gun that is putting like a one or two, like a couple of bullets on a drone at any, like two or three football fields away. So there's nothing like this on the market. There will be, I mean, obviously anyone can build anything. This does take a lot of money. You know, obviously I was fortunate enough to sell my last company to DoorDash, which helped fund a lot of the initial company. It was called Bebot. It was an online ordering point of sale company. actually backed by craft ventures so i made them some money when we sold that for a good amount of money so you went from point of sal to pinpoint uh yeah sniping well before before um door that before the restaurant technology i started my career in the u.s need i was i was a u.s naval officer and actually luke allen my co-founder this company's called allen control systems i named it after my my friend um i met him in the name so we were we worked in the nuclear um it's called naval reactors nav c08 so we were the headquarters for the nuclear navy oh wow that's awesome so the uh wait i know submarines are powered by small nuclear reactors yes yeah so we would train all characters as well yeah so we saw we oversee saw from cradle to grave the nuclear reactors on the carriers and the submarines and we trained the fleet on how to operate may i ask a dumb question uh to who steve we have big debates about small modular reactors and safety of them our military uh there are dozens of small nuclear reactors i believe on submarines and aircraft carriers correct today yeah these are these are very powerful you know reactors on the submarine small in the sense of volume they are not the size of the giant you know spherical cones that we see on the landscape these are the size of a conference room or 10 conference rooms how probably like the size of you know like eight conference rooms okay so it's the size of a couple of tractor trailers inside one of these larger things and they are safe has there ever been an instance where one of these dozens of them have had a meltdown and are not safe naval reactors We would say we've had, in our, I guess, 75 years of operation, no reactor accidents.

31:20So when you hear people, you know, hand-wringing, kvetching, whatever, about nuclear reactors, do you just pound your head into your desk? Well, I'm a strong proponent of large-scale commercial reactors. I think those are the best. I think we need more of those. The small modular reactors, you know, while they look promising, there's a lot of startups doing it. it seems safe it's just it's not where i would want to be like if i was investing my money i want to be in the big reactors economies of scale economies of scale is just super efficient they can pump out a lot of power like people are just afraid of them from a it's a public perception thing um public is a little afraid of them but you can put these in faraway places and you know run the power so i'm a big reactor guy uh the small module reactors are still i still think it's to be seen um how they play out uh that's where i'm that's where i stand all right steven I want to get back to drones though because we've been talking about drones.

32:13I can talk about any topic, by the way. We can go, I do my own podcast. Oh, that's why you're a good guest. I got it. Yeah, anything you want. All right, so first of all, opinions on the new Opeth album and do you think they'll return to the real death metal roots of the band or do you think they're going to stay progier and more melodic? All right, you got me. I can't, you got me. You can't comment on death metal? No, you got me. Damn it, Steve Hammond. Well, I mean, everyone should be able to comment. Yeah, I just failed. So that's me. Good job. All right. You want to build products that users love.

32:42And we all know product market fit is how you know you've built something special. And if you're hunting for product market fit, you need to understand your users better, right? How else could you boost engagement and drive more conversions for your product? Well, product analytics alone is not going to get you there. So let me tell you about Sprig. Sprig is a product experience platform that generates AI-powered opportunities to continuously improve your product at scale. Let me explain to you how this works. Sprig captures your product experience in real time, and then they use AI to instantly analyze your product and give you real-time insights.

33:20This is going to let you know how to make your product better. And if you make your product better, it's going to drive revenue, it's going to increase retention, it's going to reduce churn, all of those good things are going to happen. See why top product teams at Notion and figma two of the classic breakout products of the last decade are already using sprigs ai to unlock new opportunities at scale visit sprig.com twist to book a demo and get a 75 gift card how nice sprig s-p-r-i-g.com twist steven um drone swarms so we talked to skydio we've talked to other people that are working on both uh in the air and underwater drones and they're talking all about swarms.

34:01And when I look at your system, super cool, love the technology, seems to be able to hit single targets. Is it applicable to drone swarm defense, or is it more, we're going to get a spare reconnaissance drone that's flying over? This is meant for a drone swarm. So it'll do coordinated fires, so multiple bullfrogs. The bullfrog itself can turn 360 degrees and point straight up in the air. So imagine if the bullfrog's on a Bradley tank. It can do a full protective bubble around the tank. And it shoots very quickly. So, you know, we think we can shoot with one bullfrog up to like 20 drones in under like 15 seconds.

34:41Like it's that fast. Yeah, I know. And so, but it's going to take multiple bullfrogs and swarms could overwhelm it. That is very true. I think that we will see like 10 ,000 drones coming at something. You're going to need a lot of guns and maybe some other layered defense for electronic warfare or something else like that. Well, here's the good news. These things, I'm going to guess. i'm gonna guess the price here five hundred thousand dollars per uh 350 000 okay i'm becoming an expert on this by the way firm fixed price not cost plus not plus exactly so i the reason i'm becoming an expert on this because i have a podcast you understand and we had another company on recently that's making uh out of providence rhode island uh unmanned basically torpedoes um that are only 70 000 compared to like what they would normally cost so you're part of this new generation of instead of doing cost plus hey you make it it's got a good margin in it maybe there's a maintenance contract or a software license to you know keep some reoccurring revenue come in or whatever but they are making by 10 of these and if you lose five who cares yeah they're just disposable at 350 exactly it's a very good price point for them for this kind of exotic technology and yeah we hope to like i said we're trying to bring that cost curve down it's so important yeah i want to go back to the bradley point because bradley's are apcs right versus tanks the bradley's the army tank the big army tank i thought that was the abrams oh uh yeah the abram well the abrams and the bradley i think are both oh anyways i did not mean to drag us down to nbt's versus apcs um but but the point is they're mobile so if i had um an infantry division say and i had several different wield or tracked vehicles i could essentially bring full-on drone defense with me for an entire cohort of troops i presume pretty much any climate so does this negate the the drive we've seen towards more drone-based warfare versus human driven warfare i i think yeah well i think when our product really hits the battlefield which will be soon it's going to uh dramatically change how fpv makers think about their companies um we're about to make them look pretty dumb wait what's an fb fpv drone like a small first person drone like we're gonna oh first person these um actually i have one here this right here oh yeah yeah those are like the standard dgi yeah so like these are like you know companies are trying to strap bombs to these and then fly them at artillery or bradley's yeah bradley is like the smaller like the abrams is the bigger tank you're right but the bradley's like tank-like.

37:13So you send one of these with a grenade on it or something a little bit more, and you drop it, or you kamikaze it in, right? So exactly, and so we're going to be neutralizing that threat, and I think that the drone makers are going to have to respond some way, because it's really hard to, you know, mitigate a bullet hitting this. I was just about to say, you can't put armor on that thing, because one, if you put enough armor on it to negate a 50-cal bullet, it's going to be too heavy to fly, and two, i mean it wouldn't be maneuverable it would be just a brick in the sky so it'd be easier to shoot at that point so is there a way for them to like see incoming bullets and then get out of the way we're gonna give the drone maker so like there's startups like neros doing drone swarms and then there's anduril just released the bolt everyone's using the bolt m it's a no the bolt the bolt is their their um cheap fp by anduril it's actually it's incredible it's an incredible product um i i really like it we're actually doing a test acs versus anduril next year there are bullfrog versus their drone swarms their bolts um nice and so can we pay-per-view this this would be a great this week in startups pay-per-view yeah here's the bolt yeah the bolt is there is it supersonic or no um no it's not supersonic but it's very fast and so this thing is they're going to try to see if they can get through bullfrog and blow up like a cyber truck or something and we'll uh we'll do that competition again i i feel really strongly about how we're going to perform because if you attach any sort of payload to bolt it can't move as fast as it shows in the videos like yeah there's a four kilogram or three kilogram bomb on it like it's a sitting duck for a bullfrog i think well i think what's going to happen in these cases i'm going to take a guess here is it's going to be about kind of like the iron dome in israel is it's just what percentage can you take down with the bullfrog and then how many can they send out once and can some slide through so this is just going to be correct me if i'm wrong how many get through the net how many yeah yeah well there's a couple things we're doing there like um so our company strategy is to make a family of autonomous guns so bullfrog is a small caliber m240 based we're also building an m30 m134 minigun so it's a gatling gun version so the gallon gun can do like 3 000 rounds a minute so imagine coordinated gatling autonomous gatling guns i mean we're cover the sky it is what it is yeah cheap i mean a bullet is cheaper than a drone and a drone's cheaper than most other things in the military world but we're really getting back down to kind of like dollars per kill here yeah and what happened what where we really the insight really from luke my cto the brains behind this is that it's the control systems that's why the company's called allen control systems we just found a way to put a bullet on a small drone at three football fields away yeah and and it was just a very it's a very hard problem that you know we're we're happy We're very excited right now.

40:00You're going to put these on sniper rifles, I take it, at some point to get people further away? So at the longer ranges, what we're doing is a 30-millimeter chain gun. So it's the Bushmaster by Northrop Grumman. My dad actually worked at Northrop Grumman for 33 years, so I grew up around the prime contractor world. How many people in your company right now? So we're 35 people, adding about four engineers a month right now. Yeah, just growing. So what does this say about... our military and our ability to compete in the world when we take capitalism entrepreneurship and unleash it on the military industrial complex what does this mean for our ability to be the most important military in the world yeah i think this is actually a really i think about this a lot this question because if if you didn't have the background me and luke had and then you hadn't sold a company for a lot of money, we wouldn't have been able to get the capital to build this product.

41:03And I think this is a huge problem in the US right now. So there's a lot of smarter people than even me and Loop that are in universities that have great ideas like Bullfrog, but they can't even really get started to help the military with these new innovations because the capital constraints to get in, the amount of capex you need is so high. So I think we're missing out on a lot of new type of weapon systems that we should be building. And the government's not capital allocating into like new innovation like that that much so like without i don't really know what the u.s would have done without like the situation luke and i just found ourselves in to be able to do this we do have uh the venture industrial complex and i think the venture industrial complex combined with entrepreneurs taking on the military industrial complex or at least creating uh a little bit of competition on the margins is going to be transformative and if you look at any top-down government dictatorships i'm referring to they can move quickly because they can enslave a million people put them into factories like the chinese are doing with uyghurs and say hey make a bunch of sneakers or drones or you know landmines they can do whatever they want but that pales in comparison to the innovation and the drive of free men and women and capitalism.

42:21And that's why we are going to win. And I agree 100%. Last thing on that is just that venture capitalists, and this is like one area where they're really bailing out the government, to be honest, like, without the VC community, we would be really far behind our enemies. For the venture capital community, this is exactly who should be doing it. Because it's risk capital designed for rewards and designed to build better products and services than exist. if the government were to award those people at mit or you know whatever engineering school with just a grant they would not move as fast than a company run by you or palmer lucky or elon or you know pick your great entrepreneur because they wouldn't have the drive and the competitive nature and that is what is missing from government allocation and capital allocation is a competitive sport it's one of the great underappreciated things people like david sacks are competing against sequoia competing against y combinator our firm we're all competing to get deals the founders are creating a marketplace for us to compete for deals and pay the highest price you know and to keep the stock price growing all that's part of great american capitalism which at its core is competitive it's very competitive we're i'm a very i'm a big competitor yeah that's why you're able to do this in 18 months if you were working at a school and you had self-selected into a university academia the people giving out grants you would not have the urgency of doing it in 18 months it's the fact that you were going to run out of money in month 24 that made it get delivered in 18 you need the pressure need it i'm curious about the uh the the manufacturing element about this because we're talking a lot about american capital american ingenuity american defense um is the supply chain entirely domestic and is that possible and then also manufacturing how domestic is that yeah we're going to be doing this all in america um it's mostly uh currently in america and the thing is like right now this appropriation so i do a lot of the lobbying i live in dc and i do a lot of besides fundraising i do a lot of the lobbying and hill work so we're working with on congress right now to decide where we're going to put you of some of these buildings i mean this is great by the way alex because you and i talk here all the time on this week in startups about job destruction americans who are out there you were thinking you were going to work in the marketing department or communications or whatever your degree is maybe even a developer you know maybe you need to actually go to a factory and assemble something in the real world and that's going to create so many jobs in america that we're going to look at this anti-immigration kind of moment in time and think we're idiots now nobody wants violent immigrants in the country we need another 150 million people in this country in order to man the factories to staff these factories to make these weapons to make iphones to make cars to make rockets here in america we need to be on an america 500 program 500 million citizens now we want to do that correctly i don't know how you feel about immigration but i do think you're going to have a hard time finding factory workers no yeah it's going to be tough but i think it's a very exciting product and a lot of people want to come work on autonomous robot guns so factory building stuff like this make per hour like i know when they work in like a car factory they make 30 bucks an hour something like that i think yearly salaries are somewhere between like 90 and 125 yeah wow that's a great job that's a great job that's a great job that's a great job job yeah it is a really good job have one parent stay home job and raise kids job like that is back to classic american one parent gets to stay home another makes enough money to pay a two or three thousand dollar a month we're gonna we're gonna re-industrialize let's we're gonna re-industrialize and the vcs are helping make that happen all right let's go let's go i want to squeeze in one more question before we we have to go steven we can keep you on all day but um how soon are you going to put together a go fund me that i can take some of my money to put into so that way we can send these to ukraine that you bring it up is uh i get like all these emails all the time because i went on fox business the other like a couple months ago for this and uh everyone always emails like what's the ticker symbol when can we get in how do we do it yeah yeah i don't know he wants to fund it to to send something to ukraine to stop putin from invading countries what's your decision i want to donate i want to just buy ukraine bullfrogs no you're in so i will let's do that my co-founder will love you for that when the war when putin invaded the first month is actually right when we sold to doordash same month and he donated a bitcoin so that the ukrainians could buy javelins nice so like my you're totally aligned with my cto i'll have to connect you guys awesome do because i'm doing success you're putting you're hiring four engineers uh where can they go what's your email because there's a lot of engineers listening to this yeah working on nonsense at uh facebook trying to get people to you know increase the click-through rate on some scam ad by 0.01 when they could be actually doing something important with their lives like working at your company email steve thanks thanks again email steve at allen control systems.com we'd love to have you we're in austin primarily but you can be remote but most people are most people We're in Austin.

47:55Yeah, we're South Congress, south of the river. Oh, yeah, great. That's where I am. I'm in Driftwood. Yeah. Okay, yeah. I'm down there like twice a month. So you have to come to the range. You should come to the range and see the product. I would like to come to the range and see this. I'll do a live This Week in Startups from there and then we'll get some Terry Black's beef ribs. You can come to Alex. You can't do the drone gun shoot thing. I will buy you a ticket. I'll buy my own ticket. Who cares? I got you. I got you. Let's definitely do it. I think you'll really love to get out there. okay i want to do it all right steve thanks so much for coming on everybody go work for steve or i should say four of you a month go work for steve and protect this country and protect democracy captain america here uh this week in startups podcast he was great i could talk to him for hours let's have steve back on in one year you know we have so many great guests that i was like you know what let's try a twofer on this week in startups so let's do a twofer let's do a two for tuesday coming at you here on z100 the morning show two for tuesday remember that on the radio it's wednesday jason just i know you all know that okay okay two for tuesday in my mind okay well do you remember two for tuesdays on rock radio i do not that might prove for tuesdays were like okay coming at you money for nothing from dire straits on a two for tuesday and uh after that the sultans of swing yeah coming at you so my version of this was mandatory metallica on the local radio station they would play three metallica songs in a row at like 9 p.m or something i met the um i met the lead guitarist from incubus uh recently yeah yeah nice guy um just friend of a friend okay and uh we talked about parenting and um he um he's a cool dude um like uh mike einzinger i met mike einzinger okay e-i-n-z-i-g-e-r and uh we just went back and forth talking about rock and roll uh with our kids and like what bands we were um introducing them to so shout out to mike einzinger this might be a new um celebrity um bromance i'm having you know i have a celebrity bromance once in a while where i meet a celebrity and then i um bro out with them and then you make them come to your poker games then you take all the money hang no not money but you know more like just a hang but yeah it's a little bit of that um but interviews jason let's have our next guest on because this is uh this is one that's actually very exciting from the launch perspective we're going to talk to rami abhi habib the ceo and co-founder of a company called querio hey there he is hey rami how are you sir i'm good thank you for pronouncing my name right um very excited to talk about the second half of american dynamism b2b sass it's very exciting no pressure rami what are you doing in the world what did you get done this week are you protecting democracy and humanity in my own way in my own way i am producing jobs and i am protecting democracy all right absolutely well welcome to the program tell us a little bit about what you're working on and maybe even show us a little bit about what you're working yeah sure so great to talk i'm Rami, we're building Quirio.

51:05Quirio is the best way for teams to work with data. We really try to make sure that everyone can work with data in a way that matches their technical level. I think over the last couple of decades, we've generally perceived data as a very transactional relationship. You have someone else bring you what you need. Most people can't access themselves. Data literacy is quite low. And year by year, data just becomes more important, right? One of the only jobs that are still higher in demand than supply are data jobs, data scientists, data analysts, etc. so how do you make the new generation tool where those technical people feel like their needs are met and the business people feel like their needs are met without compromise um i think is the biggest thing so can you show us like maybe take the screen over here and show us the product uh full disclosure you uh went to our accelerator i'm unsure if you went to founder university before i did i did you made me quit my job and then after that i built the company and then got into the accelerator and now we're here okay so maybe before we even go into your product let's explain that journey for a second because you know uh for people who don't know uh i found myself as an early stage investor when sequoia capital asked me to be their first scout along with a gentleman named sam altman he did stripe i did uber and uh that got me started as an investor and one of the things i found over the years alex was i got up to four or five thousand applications for funding a year all in broke out become became a public phenomenon crossed over into you know public mindshare and i went from five thousand applications a year to twenty thousand coming into our database but the problem was a lot of those companies alex here's a lot to go through so now i have seven full-time researchers and analysts going through those putting them in a database well they're already in a database but you know sorting through them and meeting with the top four or five thousand of the top twenty thousand but what we found when we looked at the data alex was half the companies were incredible teams that hadn't incorporated yet but they had a killer idea and they had two or three co-founders who were technical product managers just awesome we had no way to engage them we'd say oh like let us know when you raise money i guess and then i was like you know what i'm going to come up with a solution i came up with founder university a 12-week course people come to it they don't need to be incorporated we invite 250 teams and then we'll just invest in whichever 10 to 20 25 to 50 companies we'll give them 25k or 125k as their first investor because i would like to be the first investor in another unicorn so that people could stop saying i was the third or fourth investor in uber and i can just have and i think you're a company remember we have that anyway long story short this has helped us engage with another thousand companies a year and invest in another hundred companies a year because we have a pre-accelerator that's the the setting here so how did you find out about founder university yeah so funny enough i found about it on x um through you actions i was following and i and i saw about founder university and so i applied um at the time i was working at amazon i had a great idea i was kind of like the personification of curio as a as a person and i worked in a lot of technical and business roles and uh me and my co-founder who i met at ut austin actually and lived in austin for for a few years and i think salt lake and wimberley is better than terry blacks but i'll leave that for other people to judge the salt link frequency it's about 10 minutes from here yeah nice yeah um and uh yeah applied for the university and got in and uh ended up you know we had built an mvp it worked really well uh got a lot of good value out of the program and then we ended up getting investment from the pre-accelerator and that was really kind of like that big push that made us incorporate we both committed to career full-time quit our jobs my co-founder he had worked an operator at a couple of exited startups and it really just lined everything up for us and really gave us that initial push that we needed to keep going so just to be clear my thesis was hey if i'd build this thing found a university i might get people to quit their jobs at amazon or uber or wherever they are and start their company and that first 25 or 125k check could be the thing that just you know helps them make the jump and in this case that was in fact what happened yes yes the plan worked surprisingly yes literally warms my heart that we made a plan we executed on it and it happened which is very rare that is really rare for a plan to work out but yes i love it when a plan comes together if you're a child of the 80s you remember the 18 i love it when a plan comes together i gotta i gotta get my cigar out so show us the product here enough with the uh we we've done the self-congratulatory uh victory lap here an idea worked but let's see what your idea is let's make this about absolutely i will show you the current version of curio and maybe we can talk about how it's going to be changing um but yeah so first and foremost curio is a bi tool business intelligence um platform it's to help businesses analyze their data and query their data um so today we're going to be looking at some data for dunder mifflin um for those not familiar that is a very famous tv show um called the office so i can ask you you know who am i and it should tell me who i am of course i'm going to be the best character on the show which is obviously michael scott um he is hilarious so yes we are michael scott regional manager of scranton pa that's fantastic um pretty much like other classical bi tools uh you have things like you know dashboards where you can track things that you're creating that refresh automatically that you can filter classic bi actually what would the top two or three people would recognize as business intelligence tool uh looker tableau um maybe sap if you're in a very old organization um those are kind of like the more larger ones and you have some new age ones like ThoughtSpot potentially, depending on how modern your organization is.

56:56But I think Tableau and Looker would make most people's brain kind of light up. Business intelligence started in 2000 or so, 2000 to 2010. Those companies started to emerge because of big data. Yeah, 2005, SAP. Yeah. So it was like SAP really started the whole, you know, online chart creation where a data team was making these charts that they could send to their business counterparts for them to track things. That was really like the first big one. Second big wave came with Tableau. They let you actually filter them. Looker lets you look at the tables underneath them. You know, every five years you got a bit more control on the business side and this is where an entire career um emerged for people who would be in big data what are the job titles that were created because of this over the last two decades it started off with like business analysts who would just analyze business data data analysts would be a little more technical you have the the engineers would actually move all the data around the data engineers and then you have the data scientists who forecast do deeper analysis that became more of machine learning when that came out um and then some ad hoc ones you have like developer analytics and then some random kind of more niche ones but uh yeah okay so that's great so this entire industry has boomed over the last 20 years alex to give context that 10 years before that we saw things like databases and storage and the internet kind of get was the setup to all of this right rami like the fact that people had cheap storage the internet there was a lot more data recorded and then people said well what's in this data and a classic example that would be somebody like amazon who has sales data they have a lot of data too much 1998 till today there are so many databases at amazon it is crazy yeah yeah you know you can't fit things in an excel right you have over a million rows you're getting hundreds of millions of new rows like every hour every day um you need to of the setup is all this data exists you have to go to somebody like a developer get them off of building a product ask them questions and wait a week or two then you forgot that you put the request in and then they come back to say hey i did about five days of work here's your data yeah only for them to not actually be in your day-to-day not understand the nuance of your question and you have to tell them okay that's that didn't pass a sniff check i think you looked at this wrong can you pull it this way instead okay so that's our setup for your average ticket success time at amazon fun fact was about five weeks for a general data request yeah that's like two years five weeks yeah that's an insane amount of time it's insane it's ridiculous rami if i understand that the point of querio is that it brings in a lot of traditional bi tooling charts dashboards and so forth but it also lets me query it in plain english so that way i don't have to go to a data analyst or data scientist i myself the person in the business role can do it myself yeah so that's one part of it i think you know i think it's really great that companies are trying to be more data literate i think it's great that we're now buying data products for companies but you know you look at tableau i think something like 95 of the licenses they sell are just for viewers you can't even make anything you can't even drag and drop columns to make charts wow um and so it's great that we have all these tools we agree everyone should have access to them but most people can't actually use them they can just kind of open them and look at something um and so you know we're trying to build that bi tool we are building it where how do you make the data people's lives better you know not only are you going to save them time how do you make their workflows actually better because you want to convince them with more than just you'll have a few less questions and then how do we make those business people kind of flip that on the head and instead of having only a transaction relationship waiting that you get to do some more work yourself um and uh yeah so i mean we can jump into a couple of questions see how query would answer them but okay yeah so we we have this we have some data here in querio it's querio.ai just if you want to go look at the website and uh this is year one of your company basically yes and you've built your what was an mvp when we met now it's a it's an actual product that people can buy and customers hands and people have bots yes yes wow amazing that's great to see that all happen within yeah under 18 months so what can people do with it because this is so you don't have to wait five weeks right is that was when you originally talked to me about it was like hey there's no reason for you know a hundred percent of people in an organization should be able to make these queries of the data sets and and we want to make a tool that takes out that telephone game yeah yeah we want to take a tool that takes a telephone game that's exactly it and also a tool that will serve what the current needs are but even better so let's start with the one we're generally talking about which is you don't need to have this telephone game going back and forth in someone technical and getting the contacts in the business team so yeah we have some data we have some account data orders data dunder mifflin sells paper products to a bunch of different companies so we can ask a question like you know let's list the top 10 products by revenue and give us their quantity sold pretty basic question is we can ask it query you can look through the database understand how it all joins understand how it works it'll tell you what it's going to do in english write the code for you right after that's just a sequel query and you You can see it if you're technical, you know, just so you can be sure that it's right.

1:02:05And then just like that, you get your answer really quick. You have some classics up, whether you can sort the data, whatever it is, which is really nice. But you can do more than that, right? This is a querying question, like just asking, show me the X of these. It's kind of like clicking through some Excel sheets, but through a database that you can't see. What if we had a question like, you know, are there any salespeople that have to offer some discounts to close a deal? You know, which account managers are offering the most discounts? Yeah, I'd like to know that myself. Yeah, my bet is Michael Scott probably.

1:02:33He seems like the kind of guy who would offer a lot of discounts. So yeah, it's going to join the orders and account table, for instance, on account ID. So it has an idea of how all the tables relate, which is a really complex thing that a lot of data teams struggle with sometimes. And then it's going to calculate the average discount percentage. So just like that, we have a list of all of our account managers, the average discount percentage. It looks like Aaron Handen is actually number one and Michael Scott is third. So, or actually he's tied for a second. Ryan at the bottom because Ryan just holds the line.

1:03:02Ryan really does hold the line. We don't discount. That's it. No discounts. We charge a fair price. He holds the line. Yeah. And yeah, and I guess what's really cool with these kind of products, like you could think of AI as the best data scientist that ever existed, but it's the first day at your company. And so the biggest thing we have to solve is how do you get this digital kind of context understanding of how your company and your data works so that it can write the correct queries, right? It's not looking at the rows of data. it's actually just writing the code instructions to pull data from a database um and we do that through something called our knowledge base and it's basically where and here it is it's where we kind of capture all the details of every column how all the tables join um usually column names aren't very descriptive of what's actually in them um and i think maybe about like 15 percent of my time at amazon when i was working with data was just trying to find it um and so this is great on that end so rami on that point though how hard is it to onboard a new customer into this uh into aquario do they have to change how they upload data into the service or can it parse a variety of different i don't know inbound sources from different companies that might have different approaches to storing their information um so to start off how hard it is it's funny it's actually the the more mature the company is the easier it is so they don't have a data team they're maybe only running with the cto maybe some engineers like flexing doing two roles and they don't really have the time to set it up that's where we can you know have a bit more of a manual approach you know on scalable things when you're starting off but data teams are quite used to building things called data models and data catalogs where they actually kind of document what's in the data to make sure that it works and we have our own system how we define things so that they maximize efficiency for the data teams and also the automated like ai process there's nothing they need to change at all so it's something they just you know like fill out in their own way you can also already have kind of schemas of how the data works now they already joined that pre-exist and we have an agent system that can also fill out to do a first pass where they can check um and we can go into more details but yeah it's inversely correlated with the maturity of the of the company no i appreciate that and does that actually help your uh early customer acquisition are you dealing mostly with larger more legacy clients that are therefore easier to onboard or are you selling more to startups today that have more of an issue getting set up that's a great question yeah so you know the whole thing we're trying to build here which is meeting everyone at the technical level you can see everything i demoed today is really really good for those people that aren't technical and need to ask open-ended and so that process is working really well but it's a it's a it's a you know cash money too since we are built for those non-technical people they're also the hardest to onboard um and so the next phase of the company over the next six months is we're building out a lot more of these features that those data teams are going to love and then that'll you know increase our acvs and then also lower onboarding times and our sales cycles which will be great is the way to go to market here i always like to think about go to market strategies in year one of a company you know as you get into year two you got to really be thoughtful about who is your ideal customer profile and i wonder if you've given thought to hey i use tools like looker i use tableau and so i'm going to add this to my utility belts and put it into the mix or do you think hey our ideal customer is somebody who tableau and looker are too complicated for and they don't have it yet but they do have underlying data in other words they're kind of a cleaner they're not like data blind where they don't care about data they're just running some small business they're not data driven organizations but they're like that sort of middle mid-sized company how do you think about which one to go after that's a weird question um well i think i'll start off by saying that any company that needs the internet to run is probably going to need to analyze data okay you know outside of like maybe like some niche e-commerce stores for the most part it's it's a fundamental part of most businesses and they can't avoid it at some point um i think we've had customers already leave products like looker and metabase and kibana for us which mainly means that we are taking the market share we don't think we're directly competitive um but the idea is not to be part of the belt it's to give them a solution that actually fits their needs a lot better um which those tools just don't so it's more the second one which is to replace those tools and give them functionality and actually consolidate it two or three tools um instead of just replace one see i think this is like a very interesting exercise alex it's one i like to do with founders is just have this dialogue so what you're seeing here when i when i ask uh rami a question like this is i i have my own thoughts on it i like to hear the founders thoughts on it and then i can ask another probing question and this is what eventually results in a board of directors creating a plan and then that plan is for the next year and you execute against it and then you put priorities and resources against a plan and as doug leone told me hope is not a plan plan is a plan make a plan and so now when i look at these things i have a really um interesting humble approach i just listen to founders and when i hear you talk or i mean it was just like a bunch of things burned in my head i realize there's some brilliance to the simplicity of your product that even people who could figure out a complex legacy product and a legacy product tends to be any product over 10 20 years any product that's over 10 years is now a legacy product because interfaces change ai changes there's so many points to do it and it reminded me of a discussion i was having with a friend of mine when you get to a certain scale house alex and you've experienced this i think with your in-laws and some other folks uh you mentioned um you uh will be told you have to install a home automation system like questron or savant these things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement but on a 10 million dollar home you're like well it's one or two percent of the cost of home i need something to manage this home nobody ever uses them they're always broke and they require somebody for two or $300 an hour to come in and reprogram everything.

1:09:18And you get to have this moment where you have a weird remote control. People come stay at your house. They can't turn on the news or watch the next game or put on music. Every time I buy a new home, I rip the shit right out, Alex. And you know what I do? Sonos and Apple TV. Yeah. We're done. That rumor that Apple's releasing a, like a control center for homes. I predicted this two years ago. We did something. What should Apple do next? if they're not going to do project tight in the car i said the number one thing they should do is home automation because i use apple home it's garbage i use google home it's okay um i love google's drop cams which became nest they screwed that whole thing up um but i just go with sonos because it's elegantly simple and it's beautiful and i go with apple tv because again everybody knows how to use it and so i think there's something to simplicity and ux and design that you may have hit on that would even make the person who wants to put in the 250 000 savant system uh or control four falls in this bucket where you're not allowed to make changes to it you need a technical person blah blah blah ah screw it like go with that go with elegantly simple there's something to it i mean you're looking at one of our first customers they were paying 60k a year for looker and only the cto was second goal enough to use it oof from a seam of 20 and it's ridiculous and not just that they paid for a separate tool they were also paying for Hex because Looker doesn't support Python so we haven't actually gotten into the non-AI part that we're improving there are some BI tools like Mode Analytics they got bought by ThoughtSpot but the legacy tools don't even support Python natively which is not an AI thing they just only do SQL and data teams are now having to buy a Python tool like a Jupyter Notebook host and a SQL tool that lets them host dashboards like on Looker and it's ridiculous and they're paying six figures at sometimes seed, definitely at series A, for like three people to have some good data.

1:11:17How much cheaper can you go compared to those kind of legacy price points? I'm curious how much of a price we might see as you guys take on these incumbents. I think the tools are decently complex to make where there's not going to be like a flood of these really kind of consolidating Python with like good AI agents with good SQL IDs. So right now, our average ACV is about 8k 8 to 10k um our two newest customers were at the 15k ideally next year we can start reliably closing those 20 25ks um i would be 50 off as a baseline i think is which is great pricing yeah with yeah and and it's great because if we can get up to their current acvs but offer you know you can also get rid of this other tool that has nothing to do with looker yeah now you're 90 great value prop and we're going to get more value out of your business team they're going to be able to self-serve more, you know, you data team or CTO, you're going to have a lot more time on your hands and the other Python works going to be quicker.

1:12:13There's just a lot of value to claim from so many different ends, which is really nice. All right, Rami, this has been great. I want to let people know three things. If you, like Rami, are working at a company and you have a great idea, I'm waiting for you, founder.university. Number two, if you have a MVP, you got a couple of beta customers, I'm waiting for you. Launch Accelerator, launch.co slash apply. number three once in a while if i have a great company um we will share that company with other angel investors and help them get in early and that's done through something called the syndicate i was able to get the ip around the syndicate after i left angel list so i have the syndicate dot com 11 000 angel investors i think 4 000 have actually done a deal with us we've done 300 of these deals so go to the syndicate dot com and you might see companies uh that come out of our programs who are raising small amounts of money at reasonable valuations to kind of get to the next step if you're a high risk accredited investor you can join the syndicate uh there's a waiting period like 30 days and then you have to be accredited right now maybe in the future that changes the syndicate.com go apply now and you in worst case scenario alex you read the deal memos and you say no to everything but you get smarter robin thank you so much uh for uh including us in your journey.

1:13:32I appreciate it. And I'm looking forward to great things to come. Thank you. It was great talking to guys again. And for everyone listening, I highly recommend all the different programs Jason has. I've done pretty much all of them. I am the spokesperson. You've checked off, I think, three or four boxes so far. Maybe you'll check off the fourth at some point soon. All right. Well done, Rami. And it's querio.ai spelt. Q-U-E-R-I-O similar to query.ai. queryo.ai all right we'll see you soon take care ramen thanks guys bye alex i think we've done enough show for today we have we're going to be back tomorrow with a lot of interesting topics we're going to talk a little bit about exits and ipos i saw an incredible stat and i have some great charts uh that my friend fawd was sharing with me on whatsapp so we got some great stats and charts for you tomorrow we'll have the nvidia earnings tomorrow uh anything else on the docket tomorrow that that we should tease right now wouldn't people hate to go over surface um service titans s1 filing oh there's a new microsoft ai deal with harper collins that's pretty interesting i'm a harper collins author for this book right here angel and uh i want to know about that deal because i haven't gotten a call from uh hollis yet i don't know if the dollar amount will actually be very interesting to you but the pitch is and um there's just there's a bunch to get to tomorrow guys so if you do love twist we are live tomorrow at uh 12 central yeah yeah 1 p.m eastern 10 a.m uh pacific west coast or as we would say in new york the left coast he's at alex on twitter if you know who the main character is or a deep cut of an interesting story you can always dm him i assume dms are open my dms are open and man are they messy or you just mention both of us at alex and at jason we'll see you all tomorrow on this week in startups.

1:15:24Bye-bye. Bye.