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

All right, everybody, welcome back to this weekend start of some Jason Kellecanis, 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 Wilham. How are you, sir? I am fantastic. We have an amazing rundown today. Yes. 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, a 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. So 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.

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Let's just get into it. They're expected to report $33 billion in revenue. If you put that number times four, you get to $130 billion a year.

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 GPU's graphical processing units and started using them for cryptocurrency. So then they had two line items and cryptocurrency, I think, for a time 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 they 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. 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, OK, the taxi market is X dollars. Uber will get 30% of it. So its revenue ceiling is $Y. 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. And I got that term from induced traffic. I remember when I lived in Los Angeles, they would always be adding a lane to a highway.

Yeah, you know what the four or five is getting a little congested here at the four or five and the ten 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 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 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 to enough to 80 and that would make the traffic flow because you could get more cars off quicker into that queue to get on to Santa Marco Boulevard. You know what? Yeah.

People started to realize, hey, trapped on the four or five, it's 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 Clover City. Yeah, I'll zip across and 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 Leena Khan said, no M&A. That means all those cash builds up. Nobody's buying Whole Foods. Nobody's buying, you know, what's that? So what are you going to do with the money? You might as well build some servers. You might as well stand up a server farm. It's a good use for it. Maybe a stock buyback and that's when

29 of the $33,000,000 that NVIDIA has 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 product or a business line, which was not really on the top of people's minds, but five to 10 years ago, correct? Oh, absolutely. And, Corey, can we get that table back up on the screen for a second? Because I want to 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, OK, 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, the second quarter of the fiscal 24. People will not watch in the video. 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 going to be 33. That is still accelerating, Jason. It's still getting much bigger very quickly.

And that's why I think this earnings import matters so much. There's a lot of enthusiasm right now in the market in a post Trump context. The Lena Contenier 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 and other ones. Yeah. And I think that an individual either maintain that or really hurt it. So give me the case for her date, the vibes. What could cause, 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 overhyped 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 again. 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. In videos, 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.

So 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.

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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 first? 2025. Yeah. So this is where they're next fiscal year, a bit like Microsoft. They're off set by a couple quarters. Got it. Okay. So this is going to be really interesting. We've never seen a company grow large amounts of revenue in this way. The last quarter was 30.

Billy, I'll give you some saying that. 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 of 32, so it's going to just under double.

This 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 retransactions. They invest in a company, that company buys servers with

Nvidia's money but those numbers were kind of small then there's a counting 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 dot ai you long x company they bought a lot of h one hundreds 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 approaches, we just take your order and we fulfill orders 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. If you want to be in the VIP queue, you put out a full deposit, 100%, and you go to 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 pay 100% upfront. I don't know exactly how they do it.

So 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 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 shipping or what to do with the VC fund, as you mentioned last time, the street doesn't care.

Great. 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 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 very tired.

Well, it's mentally stimulating. You and I get to have a conversation here, but all in, sometimes it tips in from just a conversation to just outright sparring in 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

Yeah, spicy, let's say. And then try it on that one. I'm the moderator here. You get to play a little bit more of the moderation role. Yeah. 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 on tag, 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.

Let's move on. 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 the state of play at 4pm today from the legend. 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. 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 as a technical term in our industry or customers so pronounced that other people are guided to your product because of it, like a lighthouse guides people to sure safely having X AI or having open AI or having Amazon web services as your customer that would guide other people to the safety of an H 100 in the video stream. So when does a lighthouse customer

flip to another problem. 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 form of an announcement. Then there'll be a startup that tries it and gets a lot of attention for doing it. And then there'll be a computing 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, I've under-company etched. They're making ships 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.

I don't think we'll see hyperscalers stop buying invidious ships 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 ship. And of course Amazon has its training to chips coming out. So there is some other names on the agenda.

Jason, before we get to a guess though, I want to talk about AI training 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 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.

progress there, pretty good. And then also prorata.ai, a new company to me backed by Mayfield just secured $130 million valuation because it's doing the same thing in the UK.

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. Fair compensation and credit for content owners in the age of AI. This is not prorata as in you get 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. Proplexity has always had some of them and in the new search product that chat GPT or I'm sorry, open eyes doing their search feature. They have some citations, some of them are buried somewhere.

I think this is what we're seeing is the healthy evolution of the ecosystem and what's gonna have to happen is the untraining of model so if you put read it 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 indexed 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,

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 that. You can sort the Twist 500, which is built on CODA, CODA.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.

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. Due to a snafu, I'm re-adding in about another 10, so it will be about 120. Going slower than I would like, but maybe this will be our cue for entity. Your project is to ramp up here. Somebody had a baby and I think has been having a little less sleep.

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. But next year, it's going to be three shows a week 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.

Then maybe we can both get some sleep. We have a speaking of guests. You can check out Twist500. There's a submission form there. Don't email the sales team. It has them to put you on the Twist500. 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 Twist500 because you advertise.

But there is a submission form and I don't think anybody reads it, but there's a submission. Oh, he goes to one of my email addresses, I believe. So I will see it.

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They will let you port it over at no extra charge. Get 20% off your first six months. What an amazing offer at open phone dot com slash twist. That's O P E and P H O N E dot com slash twist for 20% off for six months. Let's talk about our first guest today. Sure. There's a company Jason called Allen 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 back startup and raise money. I believe from craft ventures. So I thought, how, what's happening? My best day, David Sacks back 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 Sacks kind of waffled a little bit at the, at the answer of the question. And then I found out he actually had, but he hadn't announced it yet. And Steve is here. Uh, welcome to the program.

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, it's good to see you again, Jason. I briefly saw you at the All-In Summit. I was thinking of mostly Jimmy, though. You're a guy Jimmy.

Oh, Jamie. Oh, Jimmy Donahue, my, my, we're going to go off together. We're about to be done. Are you really? 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 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 there is where like the changing cars, the butterfly effect, whatever happened. And Jimmy is the man. Jimmy is the guy and he does all my security and is awesome.

So tell us a little bit about your company. What are you trying to do here? Fundamentally, we're trying to change the battlefield economics. So out on control systems, we make autonomous gun systems. And so these are guns that can point and shoot on their own. So the operator, the soldier only has to give a command of what target they want. And then bullfrog, as you see here, will actually do the rest. It'll slew to the target and then fire the shot.

Wow. And it is an actual assault rifle it looks like. 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 the standard M240 assault rifle. So standard, it's a standard army gun that's in most 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 used to man the 50 in in my dreams. I man the 50 my my my my friend. You're a good engineer in that one movie Pearl Harbor man in the 50 cow. Yeah, I used to be in that 50. I think also black walk down there. We like man the 50 and John McEwen. My good friend who was a green barre. I used to man the 50 caliber.

All right, so you have this 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. Obviously, it is a gun system, so 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 machine guns before once at West Point, for example, and they are just so indescribably loud. And so I'm kind of curious, does that at all impact how you design systems go after drones? Because I presume you want to be stealthy until you pull the trigger. But oh my God, once you do, Steven, 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.

Okay. 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 weapons 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 just going to be it's already the most accurate gun in the US right now. But it will be incredible, you know, in another year or two. But yeah, like right now, 18 months,

Got it. So the reason I asked that question is there are bad guys in the world. And if you're a small team at a startup can build this in 18 months is there are there versions of this that have been built with the by nefarious players terrorist organizations bad actors in the world that you have become aware of since starting the company.

Not 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 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. Obviously, I was fortunate enough to sell my last company to DoorDash, which helped fund a lot of the initial. What was your last company?

It was called B-Bot. It was an online ordering point of sale company, actually backed by craft ventures, so it made them some money when we sold that for a good amount of money. So you went from point of sale to pinpoint a sniping? Well, before the restaurant technology, I started my career in the US Navy.

I was a U.S. Naval officer and actually Luke Allen, my co-founder. It's companies called Allen Control Systems. I named it after my friend. I met him in the Navy. So we worked in the nuclear, it's called Naval Reactors, NAVCO8. So we were the headquarters for the nuclear Navy.

Oh, wow. That's awesome. So the... I know submarines are powered by small nuclear reactors. Yes. So we would train all... Are the aircraft characters as well? Yeah. So we 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 to Steve? We have big debates about small modular reactors and safety of them.

Our military, there are dozens of small nuclear reactors, I believe, on submarines and aircraft carriers, correct? Yes. So these are very powerful 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. 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, I guess, 75 years of operation, no reactor accidents. So when you hear people, you know, hand-wringing, covetching, 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, while they look promising, there's a lot of startups doing it. It seems safe. It's not where I would want to be if I was investing my money. I want to be in the big reactors.

Why so? It's 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 it, but you can put these in far away places and, you know, run the power. So I'm, I'm a big reactor guy. Uh, the small module actors are still, I still think it's to be seen, um, how they play out. Uh, that's where I, that's where I stand.

All right, Steven, I want to get back to drones, though, because we've been talking about. I could talk about any topic, by the way. We can go. I do my contact. You're a good guest. I got it. All right. So first of all, opinions on the new Opath 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 Prague here and more melodic? Oh, you got me. I can't comment on death metal. No, you got me. Everyone should be able to come. I did. So that's me. Good job.

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Steven, drone swarms. So we talked to Skydio, we've talked to other people that are working on both in the air and underwater drones, and they're talking about swarms. And 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 spare reconnaissance drone that's flying over and not that. Yeah, this is, 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 is on a Bradley tank, they can do a full protective bubble around the tank. And it shoots very quickly. So we think we can shoot with one bullfrog up to like 20 drones in under like 15 seconds. Like 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 going to guess the price here. $500,000 per.

Uh, 350,000. Okay. I'm becoming an expert on this. By the way, firm fixed price, not cost plus. No plus. Exactly. So I, the reason I'm becoming an expert on this is 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 that are only 70,000 compared to 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 software license to keep some reoccurring revenue come in or whatever.

But the army could buy 10 of these. And if you lose five, who cares? Yeah, we're trying to be 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 would have liked 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. Yeah, the Abrams, well, the Abrams and the Bradley, I think, are both

Anyways, I did not mean to drag us down to MBTs versus APCs, but the point is they're mobile. So if I had an infantry division saying I had several different wielder-tracked vehicles, I could essentially bring full-on drone defense with me for an entire cohort of troops, presuming from 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 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 drawing? Like a small first person drone. Like we're going to first person is actually, I have one here. This right here.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Those are like the standard DJI. 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 light. So you sell one of these with a grenade on it or something a little bit more. Yeah. You drop it or you come and cosy 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 mitigate a bullet hitting us. I was just about to say, you can't put armor on that thing because one, you put enough armor on to negate a 50 caliber 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 go. I mean, we're going to give the drone maker. So like, there's startups like Nero's doing drone swarms and then there's Andoril just released the bolts. Have you seen the bolt? Yeah. It's a bolt. The bolt is their, their cheap FP by Andoril. It's actually, it's incredible. It's an incredible product. I really like it. We're actually doing a test in ACS versus Andoril next year. There are bullfrog versus their drone swarms, their bolts.

Um, heiss. And so can we pay per view? This is a great life. We can start up pay per view. Yeah. Here's the vault. Yeah. The vault is there. Is it super sonic or no?

No, it's not super sonic, 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 do that competition. Again, I feel really strongly about how we're going to perform because if you attach any sort of payload to bolts, it can't move as fast as it shows in the videos. Like if there's a four kilogram or three kilogram bomb on it, like it's 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 of things we're doing there. 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 M-130, M-134 minigun, so it's a Gatling gun version. So the Gatling gun can do like 3000 rounds a minute. So imagine coordinated Gatling, autonomous Gatling guns. I mean, we're going to put a lot of lead in the air. It will cover the sky.

It is what it is. Cheap. I mean, a bullet is cheaper than a drone and a drone is 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 we really, the insight really from Luke, my CTO, the brains behind this is that it's the control system. 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 it was just a very, it's a very hard problem that, you know, we're happy. We're very excited right now.

You can set these on sniper rifles. I take it at some point to get people further away. So at the longer range is where we're doing is a 30 millimeter chain gun. So it's like a, it's the Bushmaster by Northrop Grumman. My dad actually worked at Northrop Grumman for 33 years. So I grew up around this in the prime contract. How many people in your company right now? So we're 35 people adding about four engineers a month right now. Yeah, just grown.

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 really good. I think about this a lot, this question, because 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. And I think there's a huge problem in the US right now. So there's a lot of smarter people than even me and Luke 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 cap X you need is so high.

Um, so it kind of, 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 US would have done without like the situation. Luke and I just found ourselves in to 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 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 Uighurs and say, hey, make a bunch of sneakers or drones or

you know, land mines, they can do whatever they want. But that pales in comparison to the innovation and the drive of free men and women and capitalism. And that's why we are going to win. And I agree. 100% last thing on that is just that venture capitalists in this. 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 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 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 under-appreciated things. People like David Sachs are competing against Sequoia, competing against Y Combinator, are firm. We're all competing to get deals. The founders are grading a marketplace for us to compete for deals and pay the highest price, and to keep the stock price growing. All that's part of great American capitalism, which at its core is competitive.

Very competitive. 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 he'll work. So we're working with on Congress right now to decide where we're going to put, you know, 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 and startups about job destruction. Americans who are out there, you would think and you were going to work in the marketing department or communications or whatever your degree is, maybe even a developer. 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 step these factories, to make these weapons, to make iPhones, to make cars, to make rockets here in America. We need to be on

uh, 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, it's going to be tough. I think it's a very exciting product and a lot of people want to come work on autonomous robot guns. So we'll see how I do a 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 own a home 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 $3,000 a month. We're going to read. Let's we're going to 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 have to go, Stephen. We can keep you on all day, but how soon are you going to put together a GoFundMe that I can take some of my money to put into? Oh my God, that's actually hilarious. That you bring it up is I get all these emails all the time because I went on Fox Business the other couple of months ago for this and everyone always emails like, what's the ticker symbol? When can we get in? How do we do it? Yeah.

He wants to fund it to send some to Ukraine to stop Putin from invading countries. I want to donate. I want to just buy Ukraine bullfrogs. Let's do that. My co-founder will love you for that. When Putin invaded, the first month is actually right when we sold to Dordash, same month. He donated a Bitcoin so that the Ukrainians could buy javelins.

Nice. So you're totally aligned with my CTO. I'll have to connect you guys. Awesome. Because as a continuous success, you're putting your hiring four engineers. Where can they go? What's your email? Because there's a lot of engineers listening to this. Working on nonsense at Facebook, trying to get people to

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. I've got to get them. Email Steve. Thanks again. Email Steve at allencontrolsystems.com. We'd love to have you. We're in Austin primarily, but you can be remote, but most people aren't. I'm in Austin. Most people aren't Austin. Yeah, we're South Congress, South of the river.

Oh, yeah, great. That's where I'm in driftwood. Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm down there like twice a month. So off that 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 and start up from there. And then we'll get some Terry Black's beef ribs. You can come to Alex. You can't do the drug. I will. I will. I will take it. Who cares? I got you. I got you.

Let's definitely do it. I think you'll really love to get out there. 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.

I can't get an American here. This is where you can start. I guess 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. We can start up. So let's do a twofer. Let's do a twofer Tuesday coming at you here on Z100 of the morning show two for Tuesday. Remember that on the radio? It's Wednesday, Jason. Just I know. Okay. Okay. Two for Tuesday in my mind.

Okay, well, remember two for Tuesday on rock radio? I do not. That might prove that Tuesdays were like, okay, coming at you money for nothing from dire straits on a two for Tuesday. And 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 place three Metallica songs in a row at like nine p.m. or something. I met the lead guitarist from Incubus.

Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, nice guy. Just friend of a friend. Okay. And we talked about parenting. And he's a cool dude, like Mike Einsinger.

I met Mike Einsinger, E-I-N-Z-I-G-E-R, and we just went back and forth talking about rock and roll with our kids, and like what bands we were introducing them to. So shout out to Mike Einsinger. This might be a new celebrity

Bromance, I'm having you have a celebrity bromance once in a while where I meet a celebrity and then I grow out with them. And then you make them come to your poker games, then you take all the money. No, not money, but you know, more like just a hang, but yeah, it's a little bit of that. But interviews, Jason, let's have our next guest on because this is a, this is one that's actually very exciting from the launch perspective. We're going to talk to Rami Abi Habib, the CEO and co-founder of a company called Queria. Hey, there he is.

Hey, Rami, how are you, sir? I'm good. Thank you for bouncing my name right. I'm 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 projecting democracy and humanity? In my own way, in my own way, I am producing jobs and I am protecting democracy. Yes, 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 we just talk. I'm ramen. We're building Creo. Creo is the best way for teams to work with data. We really try to make sure that everyone can work with data out of 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. They literally see us quite low.

And year by year, data becomes more important, right? One of the only jobs that are still higher in demand and supply or data jobs, data scientists, data analysts, et cetera. So how do you make that 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, I think is the biggest thing.

So can you show us like maybe take the screen over here and show us the product full disclosure. You 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 a 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, for people who don't know, 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 strike. I did Uber.

And 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 5,000 applications for funding a year. All in broke out, became a public phenomenon, crossed over into public mind share. And I went from 5,000 applications a year to 20,000 coming into our database. But the problem was,

A lot of those companies, Alex, has a lot to go through. So now I have seven full-time researchers and analysts going through those, putting them in a database where they're already in a database, but sorting through them and meeting with the top four or 5,000 of the top 20,000. 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, 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 Foundry 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. I think you're a company. 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 setting here. How did you find out about Founder University?

Yeah. So funny. No, if I found about it on X, um, through you actions, I was falling and I, and I saw about family diversity. 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 Korea was a, as a person and I worked in a lot of technical and business roles. And, um, me and my co-founder, who I met at UT Austin actually, I lived in Austin for, for a few years. And I think Salt Lake and Wimberley is better than Terri Black's, but I'll leave that for other people to judge. I go to the Salt Lake frequency. It's about 10 minutes from here. Yeah. Nice.

Yeah. And yeah, I applied for university and got in and ended up, you know, we had built an MVP. It worked really well, got a lot of good value out of the, you know, 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 exit 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 junk. And in this case, that was in fact what happened.

Yes. Yes. The plan worked surprisingly. Yes. It literally warms my heart that we made a plan. We executed on it and it happened. It was just very rare. That is really rare for a plan to work out, but yes. I love it when a plan comes together. If you are a child of the 80s, you remember the 18. I love it when a plan comes together. I got to get my cigar out.

So show us the product here. We've done the self-congratulatory victory lap here. An idea worked. But let's see what your idea is. Let's make this about you now. Absolutely. I will show you the current version of Creole. Maybe we can talk about how it's going to be changing.

Um, but yeah, so first and foremost, Korea was a BI tool, business intelligence, um, platform and to help businesses analyze your 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 Korea, 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. He is hilarious. So yes, we are a Michael Scott, regional manager of Scranton PA. That's fantastic. Pretty much like other classical BI tools, you have things like dashboards where you can track things that you're creating that refresh automatically that you can filter. Well, the classic BI tools, what were the top two or three people would recognize as business intelligence tool?

Looker, Tableau, maybe SAP, if you're in a very old organization. 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. But I think Tableau and Looker would make most people's brain kind of what you like. Business intelligence started in 2000 or so, 2000 to 2010. Those companies started to emerge because of big data.

Yeah, yeah. So it's 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. Look, or let 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 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 a deeper analysis that became more of machine learning when that came out. Um, and then some ad hoc ones, you have like develop 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 of that would be somebody like Amazon who has sales data,

They have a website data, actually. In 1998, till today, there are so many databases at Amazon. It is crazy. Yeah. You know, you can't fit things in Excelsiorite. You have over a million rows. You're getting hundreds of millions of new rows, like every hour, every day. So part 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 then you have to tell them, okay, that's, that didn't pass a stiff check. I think you looked at this wrong. Can you pull it this way instead? Okay. So that's our set for your average ticket success time at Amazon. Fun fact was about five weeks for a general day to work. Yeah. That's like two years. Five weeks. Yeah. That's insane amount of time. It's insane. It's ridiculous.

Ramy, if I understand that the point of query 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. 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. 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 transactional relationship waiting that you get to do some more work yourself?

I mean, we can jump into a couple of questions to see how Korea would answer them. Okay. Yeah. So we have this, we have some data here in Quirio. It's Quirio.ai. Just if you want to go look at the website. And 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? That was when you originally talked to me about it was like, hey, there's no reason for 100% of people in an organization should be able to make these queries of the data sets. And we want to make a tool that takes out that telephone game. Yeah.

Yeah, we want to take a tool that takes that out of my 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 and somewhat technical and getting the context from 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 our quantity sold.

Pretty basic question is we can ask it where 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. It's just a SQL query and you can see if you're technical, you know, just so you can be sure that it's right. And then just like that, you get your answer.

really quick. You have some classic software that you can sort the data, whatever it is, which is really nice. But you can do more than that, right? This is a query in question, like just asking, show me the X of these is 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 matters are offering the most discounts? Yeah, I'd like to know that myself. Yeah. So that's it. My bet is Michael Scott, probably he seems that 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 team struggle with sometimes. And then it's going to calculate the average this percentage.

So just like that, we have a list of all of our account managers that have a discount percentage. It looks like Aaron Hanlon is actually number one and Michael Scott is third. So, or actually he's like Ryan at the bottom because Ryan just holds the line. We don't discount. That's it. No discount. We charge a fair price. He holds the line. Yeah. Um, and yeah, and I guess what's really cool with these kinds of products, like you could think of AI as

The best data sign is 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 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. And we do that through something called our knowledge base. And it's basically where, and here it is, is where we kind of capture all the details of every column, how all the tables join. Usually column names aren't very descriptive of what's actually in them.

Um, and I think maybe about like 15% of my time at Amazon when I was working with data was just trying to find it. Um, and so this is great in that end. So Rami, on that point though, how hard is it to onboard a new customer into this, uh, in, into query? Do they have to change how they upload data into the service or can it parse a variety of different, uh, 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's funny. It's actually the, the more mature the company is, the easier it is. So if they don't have a data team, there may be only running with the CTO, maybe some engineers like flexing, doing two roles and then 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 and 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 and how they already joined that pre-exist. And we have an agent system that can also fill out, do a first pass where they can check. And we can go into more details, but yeah, it's inversely correlated with the maturity of the company.

No, I appreciate that. Does that actually help your 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 demo 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, you know, cache 22. Since we are built for those non-technical people, they're also the hardest to onboard.

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 in 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 look 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 real question. Well, I think I'll start off by saying that any company that needs the internet to run is probably going to analyze data. Outside of some niche e-commerce stores, for the most part, it's a fundamental part of most businesses and they can't avoid it at some point. I think we've had customers ready to leave products like Looker and Metabasing Cabana for us, which

mainly means that we are taking the market share. We don't think we're directly competitive, but the idea is not to be part of the belt. It's to give them a solution that actually fits or needs a lot better, which those tools just don't. So it's more of the second one, which is to replace those tools and give them functionality and actually consolidate two or three tools instead of just replace one.

See, I think this is 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 ask Rami a question like this is, 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 the 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

Interesting humble approach. I just listen to founders and when I hear you talk from me, 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 is over 10 years is now a legacy product because

Interfaces change, AI changes, there's so many points to do it. 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 phones, you mentioned you.

Will be told you have to install a home automation system like question or savant. These things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to implement, but at 10 million dollar home, you're like, well, it's one or two percent of the class of home. I need something to manage this home. Nobody ever uses them. They're always broken. They require somebody for two or three hundred dollars an hour to come in and reprogram everything. And 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 this shit right out. And you know what I do? Sonos and Apple TV. Yeah. We're doing that rumor that Apple's releasing a like a control center for us. I predicted this two years ago, we did something. What should Apple do next? If they're not going to do Project Titan, 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. I love Google's drop cams, which became Nest. They screwed that whole thing up.

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 Cevon system 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.

Oh, screw it. Like, go with that. Go with elegantly simple. There's something to it. When 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 scene of 20 and it's ridiculous. And I'll not notice that. They paid for a separate tool. They were also paying for hacks 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, which is not an AI thing. They just only do SQL and data teams are not having to buy a Python tool like a Jupyter notebook, like host, and a SQL tool that has let some hosts dashboards like onlooker. And then 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. How much cheaper can you go compared to those kind of legacy price points? I'm curious how much of a price war 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. Our two newest customers were at the 15K. Ideally, next year, we can start reliably closing those 20, 25Ks. I would be... 50% off as a baseline, I think, is the price. Yeah, and it's great because if we can get up to their current ACVs, but offer, you can also get rid of this other tool that has nothing to do with Looker. Yeah, 90% is great.

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. Um, there's just a lot of value to claim from so many different ends, which is really nice. All right, Rami. Uh, 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've 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, 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 Angelisk.

So I have the syndicate.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.com and you might see companies 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. 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 goal apply now. And in worst case scenario, Alex, you read the deal memos and you say no to everything, but you get smarter. Rob, I mean, thank you so much for including us in your journey. I 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 check off the fourth at some point soon. All right. Well done, Rami. And it's queryo.ai. Spelt. JU-U-E-R-I-O, similar query. Got it. Queryo.ai. All right. We'll see you soon. Take care. Thanks guys. Bye.

Alex, I think we've done enough show for today. 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 have some great charts about my friend, Paul, I was sharing with me on WhatsApp. So we got some great stats and charts for you tomorrow. We'll have the NVIDIA earnings tomorrow.

Anything else on the docket tomorrow that we should tease right now? Wouldn't people hate to go over service service titans s1 filing. Oh, there's a new Microsoft AI deal with Harper Collins is pretty interesting. I'm a copper Collins author for this book right here, Angel. And I want to know about that deal because I haven't gotten a call from Hollis yet.

I don't know if the dollar amount will actually be very interesting to you, but the pitch is, and there's just, there's a bunch to get to tomorrow guys. So if you do love twist, we are live tomorrow at 12 central. Yeah. Yeah. 1 p.m. Eastern 10 a.m. 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 can just at mention both of us at Alex and at Jason. We'll see you all tomorrow on this week and startups. Bye. Bye.