From Sidewalks to Scale: What It Actually Takes to Build Real-World Robotics | The Pair Program Ep96

Speaker A: Welcome to the PEAR program from Hatchpad, the podcast that gives you a front row seat to candid conversations with tech leaders from the startup world. I'm your host, Tim Winkler, the creator of Hatchpad. Join us each episode as we bring together two guests to dissect topics at the intersection of technology, startups and career growth. Welcome back to the PEAR program. I'm, um, your host, Tim Winkler, joined by my co host, Sean Leahy. Uh, Sean, I got a scenario for you.

Speaker B: All right, I want you to build

Speaker A: your ideal delivery stack. So you got three options. You've got an Uber driver, you've got drone delivery, and you got a sidewalk robot. Uh, who are you going to use for speed, reliability and uh, a late night, we'll call it, you know, maybe a little drunk munchies order.

Speaker B: Interesting. All right, so speed, reliability and then we'll say, um, reprovisioning

Speaker A: for the kids out. Ah, there.

Speaker B: Yeah. For our sober minded listeners, I'm definitely not going with Uber for reliability. Um, for reliability I might actually be tempted and I'm not just plugging our guest here, but to use one of COCO Robotics, uh, robotics units. Uh, um, because it's got that advanced, ah, computer vision on it. It's good, yeah. For speed, uh, you can't go wrong with an uh, MQ9, some of America's finest drones. Or, uh, I should have mentioned Andreal. Oh, well. But yeah, I'll put the drone for reliability, for speed. Sorry. And then for reprovisioning, that's when you get into an Uber and you make some friends too, right? If you just, you hop in there when they show up 25 minutes late, but you're going to McDonald's anyways, so, you know, whatever, it's a little adventure. But that's. I know. Tim, what do you think? What's your, what's your forecast if you're going to invest in the Sean delivery stack? Do you think this is going to be a viable enterprise?

Speaker A: I mean, I, I dig. I think you had valid, you know, points for each, uh, kind of platform. It's tricky for me. Um, I think a lot of this is location based. Right. You know, I'm out a little bit further out in the burbs. Um, I don't know how far the, the sidewalk robot's gonna realistically travel to, to get me that, that bag of spicy sweet chili Doritos, which is the, the elite flavor. So I think for my current situation I might, I might lean Uber driver. Um, but if I'm, you know, putting myself in more of like a dense city, let's call it like it's morning rush hour and I need that breakfast burrito. I'm thinking, I'm thinking I'm leaning robot, uh, on that one. Not really trusting like an Uber to drive, you know, through traffic, get there on time. And then a drone just feels like it's going to get pretty, pretty messy with a burrito traveling at high speeds in one piece. So, um, you know, I, I, I think, uh, I think again, you know, it's a little bit location based and, but I get why people are starting to lean into the robot side for delivery and, and that's where things I think get interesting. Um, we keep hearing about, you know, drone delivery and autonomous systems for years, uh, but it feels like few of these technologies actually show up consistently in the real world. And uh, that's really what today's conversation's about. You know, it's not about just building robots, it's about getting them to actually do like that work in messy, unpredictable real world environments and doing it in a way that scales. That's the hardest part, in my opinion. It's not just the tech, it's, it's everything that happens kind of like, you know, once you leave the lab and get into those, uh, real world settings. And so, sure, we're going to be unpacking that today, you know, what it takes to not just build robotic systems that operate, you know, in the real world, but turning that into a business that's actually scalable and defensible. And so we've got a couple of great guests joining us to unpack this. Uh, first up is Zach Rash, uh, co founder and CEO of Coco Robotics. Uh, Zach and his team are building one of the largest autonomous on demand delivery fleets operating in real cities today, uh, powering hundreds of thousands of zero emission deliveries across the U.S. and Europe. Uh, Zach, thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Yes, sir. And then alongside Zach, we've got Paige Craig, managing partner at Outlander vc. Uh, Paige was one of the earlier investors in Coco, uh, and he's going to bring a, a very unique lens around what actually makes companies in robotics, uh, and more broadly. Broadly, I'd say like physical AI, you know, uh, what makes them defensible. Uh, and so that's what I love about the pair program format. We've got two perspectives kind of tackling the same problem here. One from the operator and building side and then one from the investor side thinking about, you know, call it like these long term moats. Uh, in execution, uh, for. For robotics and delivery. So thank you guys both for spending the time with us. Uh, we're excited to, to dive into this. Uh, but before we do, we always kick things off with a quick warm up. We call it pair me up. We'll go around the room, we'll rattle off a couple of things that go well together. Sean, uh, m. Why don't you lead us off?

Speaker B: Sure. So, Tim, today my pair is spring and spring cleaning. Right. So we're, we're finally at that, that stage of Virginia weather where it's probably not going to get down to freezing again. Uh, so I'm going through all my stuff and finding things I can throw out. And I, I think I'm at that age now where I just want to get rid of most of my stuff. Right. You spend a lot of time accumulating and then you realize you have too much. And so now I'm like filling up my F150 week after week with things to take to the dump. So, uh, for everyone out there who has too much stuff in your house for spring cleaning or, uh, to manage spring cleaning is a good thing to pair maybe with that bag of chili lime. What was it? Chili? Sriracha? Doritos?

Speaker A: Yeah. Sweet chili.

Speaker B: Sweet chili.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah, man. I think it's, ah, obviously super relatable. Um, spring cleaning is kind of one of the, the things that I love and dread at the same time. I know it's going to be a, a heavy lift. Uh, but then when you get it done, you kind of just feel lighter. You feel good about getting, uh, rid of the stuff that you've accumulated over the winter. You know, a lot of the stuff from the holidays. Um, we're, we're actually getting into it this week. So, um, this weekend. So I'm. We'll make sure my wife knows that. You mentioned that, Sean. We'll put it off on a, on a good side note, I don't think

Speaker C: we've ever actually done any spring cleaning before, now that I think of it. You tell this to my girlfriend. I probably do for some of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll have her listen to the episode, get her excited for it. All right, cool, man. I'll jump in. Um, I'm going to go with, uh, newborns and nurseries. Uh, so I'll go ahead and make the formal announcement here on the podcast. My wife and I are expecting our second child.

Speaker D: Congrats.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Outstanding. Best news in the world.

Speaker A: We've got a baby boy coming this summer. Uh, we've got a three year old daughter, Alice, uh, already and so we're excited to give her a baby brother. And with that comes a bit of the reshuffling at home. Uh, so dad's getting kicked out of this beautiful home office I'm sitting in. Uh, most of our listeners have probably gotten used to seeing this on our, on our YouTube, but I'll be relocating down to the basement. Um, well we've, we'll convert this to this to the nursery. Um, and there's a real chance that you know, come June or July I'm gonna be running episodes with very little sleep and, and maybe feeding uh, you know, the baby in between segments. Uh, and, and might find me in this backdrop turned uh, into a full jungle theme at, at that point. So I'm lean newborns and nurseries. That's uh, that's my pairing for uh, for this one.

Speaker B: Well, Tim M. Definitely want to give a hearty congratulations to you. Like I said, best news in the world. And it uh, sounds like we'll have uh, another pair in the Winkler family for the PEAR program.

Speaker A: That's right, little baby hatchling. We're, we're excited for it. Um, cool. Uh, let's pass it around. Zach, how about yourself? Uh, quick intro and your pairing? Um, let's see.

Speaker C: Um, well I spent a lot of time thinking about um, uh, uh, dining out versus delivery. Um, and I think uh, it's interesting to see how the world's going to change over the next few years if we make the cost of delivery much uh, more affordable. I think the way we lay out our cities changes a lot. And right now I think a lot of businesses operate in this hybrid of uh, every restaurant is kind of a mini fulfillment center and factory. And at the same time it's also trying to create an experience for you. And managing those together is really difficult, but they're both very valuable. Um, and so um, I think you're going to get these things uh, diverge more and more in the future of how people think about hospitality and how they think about the brands. Um, whether it's, whether it's really for dying in and for people joining them and having an experience versus maximum efficiency for ah, delivery. So we spent a lot of our time thinking about um, how to position the world to get really good on the delivery side so that we can have more great experiences, uh, to go dine in rather than sitting in the middle of a delivery factory.

Speaker A: Yeah man, it's, it's a great like pairing because you don't Think about it, you know, when you're going out to eat in a restaurant that there's a whole operation happening, you know, on the back end side of the business that's handling all carry out delivery orders and stuff like that. As a uh, a restaurant, uh, veteran, uh, who's worked at Chili's for six years, uh, through high school, uh, the carry out line was always popping off. Obviously this was back when, you know, nobody, no robots were coming to pick up delivery, uh, orders. But it's fascinating to see how, you know, with more technology implemented, you know, how, how much that side of the business scales and having to juggle those two pieces of business. It's a really great point that you brought that up and those would be some things I'm excited to tap into. And then, yeah, quick intro I guess, uh, you know your role uh, over at Coco.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I started, started COCO Robotics about six years ago with my co founder Brad. We were at UCLA doing robotics research. So we've been uh, trying to make these robots do useful autonomous things for about a decade now. Um, and uh, the world's changing very quickly. Um, our kind of thesis back in the day was we were very involved in the technical side trying to um, do AI, um, uh, research on different navigation algorithms for robots. Um, and we kind of came away with this conclusion like the technology is going to get a lot better. Um, but to make this useful and integrated into the world there are so many things we have to solve and we have to find a way of collecting a ton of data. Um, and I think a lot of robotics companies were very hobbyist, super expensive devices that didn't do anything useful. But one day the technology is going to work and people are going to use them. Um, we took the opposite approach. I mean, you know, the first day of business, you know, we're sitting in a restaurant figuring out how to make this robot like actually useful to a restaurant worker that does not care about your fancy robot technology. You know, they have a tough job and they want their life to be easier. Um, so uh, we um, yeah we, we said okay, well I think starting with delivery last mile delivery in our cities is going to create uh, a really valuable service. I think we can build something that's useful and can, can uh, be useful to like you know, retail businesses on, on day one. Um, and uh, we've been scaling it up from there.

Speaker A: Awesome dude. Yeah, it's an awesome problem set and it's um, obviously something that we've got a lot to unpack and dive Deeper into, um, real quick question, I guess, how many co founders do you have? Just one, Brad. Just you and Brad. Nice. Nice man. Well, excited to hear more about that journey, uh, and the problems that you're solving. And we'll do a quick intro, uh, and pairing for you, Paige, and then we'll jump into it.

Speaker D: Awesome, man. So, quick intro. Uh, I'm a Marine. I went and built a private military in the first Iraq war. Had a blast. Uh, every VC in the world turned me down. So I bootstrapped my company. So I have a lot of compassion for founders and what it takes to win. I literally built my startup driving into Warzone. That worked out really well. These days I run a large early stage fund, Outlander. I've got six partners and dozens of amazing founders including Zach here. And we are the folks that come in and write a first check. When there's zero proof anything's working, we come in and we invest in people with monumental ideas and all the characteristics to go in. Um, that's for me. So I focus my time on working with amazing folks like Zach and many others around the country. My pairing is going to go back to experiences and probably ties into your kids here. So my pairing are kids and Dave and Busters. And I grew up with a dad that took me to the arcade and there is nothing cooler than taking. I have a 4 year old son than taking that dude, we did it just two days ago. And taking him to an arcade with the lamest games, the newest. It doesn't matter what the games are. We're sitting and he rushes in and we go in there and we're playing Ghostbusters and we're. And he doesn't care that he sucks right now at the Ghostbusters. But then we move to Halo and this dude is full on reloading. He's annihilating like his what? His mom will not approve of this, but he's annihilating. He's going full auto on these. These aliens are dropping in. And then he wants to go to House of the Dead. I'm like, we're not going to play House of the Dead. We're going to skip that one. You're four. And then we go to full T. Rex mode and we're at Jurassic park and we're annihilating this triceratops. And like it is so much fun taking a 4 year old to Dave and Buster's or any arcade for that matter.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's the beauty of Dave and Busters. You could be any age Kids, adults, you're all going to have a good time there. Man, that's, that's fantastic.

Speaker D: Kids in video games are epic.

Speaker A: That is a good one.

Speaker C: Paige.

Speaker A: And Paige, honestly man, like uh, Sean and I were doing, you know, some due diligence on your background and you know, we could talk for hours about your journey. Uh, we might have to do a follow up episode just highlighting Paige Craig's journey because it's, it's a super fascinating one. And I think this is what's going to make this such a great episode, is that perspective that you've learned from not just navigating your own businesses, um, but the amount of founders that you've invested in over the years that the countless number of founders is going to bring an awesome light into. You know, really what, what, what was ticking for you with Zach and Coco specifically and what you look for in like that founder market fit. So let's jump into it. Cause I want to make the most of our time. Um, I want to start with you, Paige. So you see a lot of robotics and physical AI companies. From your perspective, what's the difference between something that demos well and something that actually works in the real world?

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, there's a big, and there's a very important difference here. There's a lot of founders out there who, I wouldn't say they're fake, but like they just, they spend all their time on the storytelling and the big visioneering and you need that. Zach's really good at telling the story about why we need to go there. But what most impressed me by Zach and Brad is they were doers right when we met. And I went like, do you remember that car garage? They have this little garage in East Santa Monica and they're in there with mechanics and they're sawing metal and they're hacking together little robots. And you realize these guys are turning the bolts on robots. They're making it work in the real world. And you gotta get gritty, you gotta get dirty, you gotta be on the streets. There's a lot of robotics companies that choose to build in fancy land. They build in a nice controlled like college, uh, park or they build in a nice factory. And Zach was like, I'm going full real world. He battle tested his robots with fraternities at ucla. He was driving that robot. He'd show me videos of, ah, frack dudes just like beating the crap out of these robots, hijacking them. And this is the thing, like your robot has to work in the real world. It doesn't matter if you're building autonomy for water, for moving hamburgers between places, you got to do it in the real world. And so I really look for people who are deep thinkers but paired, tied by pairing but paired with action oriented. Think big and execute small is one of those things I look for in founders and Zach and team had that and a lot of companies out there don't have that. But that's one of the recipes. Think big, execute small, get dirty with your robots in the real world.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. I'd love to hear the fraternity, um, kind of industrial strength testing there because

Speaker D: we need so many videos.

Speaker C: Yeah, we need to learn about that page.

Speaker A: If we can release the videos. It seems like that would be uh, quite entertaining. But uh, yeah, I want to pass the question over to you Zach. Let's do the same for Coco. Why don't you first maybe give the listeners just a quick overview of what you're building and then more importantly the problem that you're solving. And while you're doing that, I'm going to try to tee up also a little video in the background that shows a little bit of what's going on with these uh, robots.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker C: So we've built the lowest cost last mile logistics network, ah, ever. Um, and we're operating live across cities in the US and Europe. Um, and it's live today delivering everything from food to groceries to packages, uh, medicine. Uh, we move anything and everything around a city and we're able to do this at a much, much lower cost, um, than human drivers. Um, there are tens of millions of last mile delivery drivers in the world and we don't have anywhere near enough of them. Um, and so there's this um, amazing uh, increase in commerce and increasing convenience you get if you make the cost of delivery 10 times cheaper than it is today. People would stop ordering groceries for multiple weeks at a time. They could order every single day. People would get same day delivery for a lot of their goods and that fundamentally is going to change the way that the city actually is shaped and the layout of the city. Um, going back to kind of the experiences versus delivery. Um, so um, that's going to be a multi hundred billion dollar business that's going to be powering tens of trillions of dollars of global gdp. And we really want to be the company that powers all of that. Um, we zoomed in and started very specifically of I want to deliver food for doordash and Uber in California because it was the fastest path to making a very an actually Useful, productive, uh, robot, um, and getting it into the world. And there's so much to figure out to actually execute this right. You need to get the regulatory side figured out. You need to figure out how to operationalize the fleet. How do you do fleet maintenance, how do you design the hardware, how do you actually integrate it with a super busy restaurant that looks different from, you know, we work with Taco Bell, but we also work with, um, super busy mom and pops that the owners are cooking, managing tables and then managing the delivery drivers. How do I make a great frictionless product for them that makes their life easier, creates a great experience for their guests and for their customers, um, using like a totally different brand new form of technology. So the only way to do that is to, is to like find the fastest path to getting this into the world and figuring out what you need to build. And that's created a cold trip. This company where we, you know, we had this thing at the beginning. We refused to hire any robotics engineers because robotics was so hobbyist and they just want to over engineer everything. And we were so operational and so literal. Like, let's build the simplest thing possible, let's have it get, let's have it break, let's have all these things fail. Um, and then we can figure out exactly what we need to build to have the most useful product. And that's like very core in our DNA. Some of our first people at the company are all like restaurant general managers.

Speaker A: Uh, oh, cool.

Speaker C: You know, the guy that actually runs all of Citi operations for us globally now was, um, one of our first customers. He, uh, was a general manager at a restaurant and he just quit one day and he's like, I'm working, I'm working with you guys now. I was like, we're not, we're not hiring. And he's like, well, I don't have a job. And I was like, we need to get this sale done first. And he's like, don't worry about that. We still have never sold that restaurant to this date because he left. Uh, but you know, he knows what it takes to transition to that robot world. I don't care that he didn't have any robot experience. That guy knows how to manage your inputs every single day on a 247 business. Um, in kind of the real world chaos in a service industry. So he's a prime example of a cultural pillar at this company where I want that guy to hire who's running the local market in Chicago. I want him to pick who's going to run Miami for us because, um, he knows what it takes to be successful in this sort of business. And I think that's a very different mentality than most, Most robot companies would have, I would imagine.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's a good point. Like that, uh, like that operator mindset, right? Yeah. Being in the. In the true seat of, uh, of the user, um, and applying it in that sense, uh, from the robotic perspective. Uh, I wanted to kind of quickly touch on something that I think makes this story really fascinating with, uh, kind of like, you know, picking this very specific lane. And one of those things that Paige, uh, you talk a lot about, and we kind of kicked around a little bit in our discovery call is like this operational moat and defensibility. Um, can you talk to us a little bit more about what this means in practice? Specifically in robotics, this operational moat?

Speaker D: It depends on the specific business you're talking about, but let's take Coco. So if you build a delivery network, and there was a time a few years ago when dozens of these existed, there's a couple ways to take this. You can take the safe route of let my robot work in a easy environment. Let's just do it in an enterprise, let's just do it within colleges, let's do it in a limited environment. Or you can go out there and do it in the real world. And that's the part where Zach was like, we are going to make these things work in the real world. In the bike lanes, on the sidewalks, in the streets. We're going to take on this monumental task. And you look at how they have to deliver a robot, pick it up, fix it. I mean, these guys work next to the engineers who actually build and fix the robots. And for the first years, it was a noisy environment. And Zach can tell you it's hard. But you have your really smart, brilliant engineers who are coding up all this AI working next to the guy who's turned in the wrench on the broken wheel and the broken antenna next to the 3D printers. And understanding how all the parts come together is really hard for most founders to understand. You are building a business in the physical world, and you can't just code your way out of every problem. You have to understand the physical environment. You have to understand how you create people and process and how you collect all this data. And when we're dissecting problems, it isn't just, well, let's recode something. It's like, how do we have to change how the team's organized? How do we change our process? How much of this change comes from what are we going to change in the next version of the robot or what are we going to code differently to work around that problem or how are we going to use humans to work around that problem? So it is probably the hardest thing in the world is to build a business that spans AI robots and humans who have to make those things all work. And in the early days you're using humans to be the glue between stuff that doesn't work. Right. Like you can't build every piece of hardware you want. So you're going to build humans who are literally going to be the glue that make things work before the hardware software can get there. Um, and the other thing is, and this is tough for many founders, hardware, especially robotics, you have to have the patience to be great. There are the quick wins of you can choose the easy path and use someone else's autonomy stack and you can take the safe approach. But like Zach went in and took the hard approach.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: And you have to have the patience to be great. You have to be willing to go out there, operate in the real world, take all that training data necessary to build a moat and yeah, uh, so those are some of the lessons I've seen from the great companies doing this. We have companies doing this in laser weapons, in unmanned ground like weapons, uh, autonomous navies and spacecraft. But uh, Zach is the epitome of what it takes to win.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: Yeah, pulling on that, on that term uh, that you just used there Paige, autonomy stack. Um, this is actually a question for Zach, but I wanted to read first from um, a blog post from Coco on their autonomy stack because I think it's um, worth spelling out here. But you guys, right, our focus is on turning massive diverse data sets into end to end navigation policies and simulation systems that learn directly from data. Data. That's a pretty bold statement, right? I think that um, when people first hear about Cocoa and the problems that you're solving today, they're not thinking about what sounds almost like a digital twin or a world model, um, that you're using to build what you call policies and large scale high fidelity simulation systems. Um, can you talk to me about how you, I ah, kind of want to. Going back to what Paige said earlier, Zach, can you talk to me about how you combine that larger longer term vision for this really deep autonomy stack with the day to day requirements of making sure your deliveries get there and making sure your robots are operating and performing?

Speaker C: Yeah, it's interesting because uh, uh, the robots are these pink things called Cocoa. Because at the end of the day we're like a consumer company that has to operate in the real world and we have to, you know, the community needs to want us there, the city needs to like us. Like we need permission from the world to actually exist. Um, uh, like people need to find value in these things and people do need to um, want to kind of coexist with them in the cities and they need to understand the value. So um, a lot of our branding, a lot of our messaging, um, has deliberately been um, you know, like Coco was literally named as a list of cute dog names. Um, number one name on a list of cute dog names is Coco. Like a two minute naming exercise. We're like done calling Coco. Um, and uh, you know, and so a lot of the branding is around that. But um, behind the scenes you need to be thinking about like okay, that's really important today to make sure we can do our go to market. Well, we can get adoption, we can get to a lot of the regulatory creation, um, and the frameworks for this. Um, but then what is like our accumulating advantage over time and we're in the logistics space. Well what matters in logistics is speed and cost. Like those are two very important variables. How fast and how reliably can something get to you? Um, and can you do that at a price point people can afford and does that drive kind of more commerce and more convenience for people? Um, and so underpinning, uh, that is a lot of, it's three things you have to be operationally excellent, which is kind of going back to hiring people from restaurants, hiring people from hospitality. I have people who know how to get their hands dirty and like, and just work really hard every day. Um, uh, you know this, this isn't a demo. If a robot's down for a few hours at 7pm, like that is brutal for your economics. You need that robot available. Our partners are not happy, you know, if the robots are down at 7pm so um, you need a team, uh, uh, across operations that's just never has a bad day and can have a super reliable system. Uh, then you need really reliable hardware. Um, and so you need to build, uh, and there's just nothing that exists that you can buy. So we've had to go really deep um, on the hardware stack to make super reliable power electronics plus all the connectivity, um, we connect to multiple cell carriers simultaneously. Um, we have to be able to operate in the snow in Chicago and Finland. We have to be able to operate in heavy rain in Miami where the Robots are literally underwater for large periods of time. And so it's not just like you got to waterproof it, but you also have to heat the cameras. You have to be able to blast snow and rain off the cameras. You need to be able to be submerged in salty water for long periods of time. These are unusual requirements that I did not think about five years ago. You think, yeah, it's got to handle some la rain whenever we get that. But, um, to be reliable for our partners in the conditions where humans fail, um, especially. Right, uh, winter storm in Chicago. Well, everyone wants delivery, but nobody wants to get on their bike and shuttle food around the city. So being reliable in those times is really important. Again, there's the operations part, but then there's like extremely good hardware, which has taken us years to get to this point where we have this kind of reliability. Um, and then the third part, um, is how you train these AI systems to navigate in a city. Right. We've had a lot of breakthroughs in robotics and autonomy on the roads. You have structured road environments. You're traveling at higher speeds. This is like Waymo or Tesla, um, that's had these huge breakthroughs recently. Um, and then you have, um, some autonomy on a factory floor, uh, manufacturing facility. Um, sometimes these campus environments are like a room service type robot, uh, but having a high degree of autonomy in the most chaotic, dynamic, uh, social parts of the world, which is like our city streets, city sidewalks. Um, uh, that data really doesn't exist. And that requires to run a high speed, reliable service there. That requires, um, a tremendous amount of data to understand the rhythm m of the city and how to actually operate and navigate within that city. And that's just a problem that no one saw before. And there wasn't a data set. And so our fleet has been able to create a lot of this data to both train the models on how to navigate and how to interact in those environments. Um, use any of our human operations team to do all the fine tuning and kind of guide the behaviors we want from the fleet, which can be different in different markets. Right. Miami, no one stops for stop signs. Uh, everyone guns it through the intersections. In Helsinki, people are incredibly yielding. The traffic fine system in Finland scales proportional to your income. So people are very cautious drivers. Um, so, um, you want different behaviors in those markets, and you need to learn all those nuances to be able to run a great service.

Speaker A: Quick shout out to our sponsor, Defense Unicorns. This one's for the problem solvers out there. They're hosting Warhacker A, uh, first of its kind hackathon built for the defense community. No buzzwords, no slide decks, just hands on keyboards. Solving real mission problems with real code. You'll be side by side with developers, engineers and innovators from across government, industry, nonprofits and academia, all hacking for the warfighter. It's happening June 16th through the 19th in San Diego. Got a real world problem to solve or want to join a team that does? Learn more@defenseunicorns.com Hatchit I wanted to, you kind of touched on some of these, these things, uh, with that, that last kind of, you know, few points that you were answering with Sean. But uh, you know we hear about this all the time. Yeah, A lot. Tied to Amazon, of course. Like what with, with this last mile delivery. Like what is the most challenging piece of this? What's fundamentally broken? What are these biggest pitfalls of last mile delivery? Because I don't think people really get granular about it. But I'd love to hear like your, you know, get real specific on it, Zach, for a minute.

Speaker C: There's a few things happening uh, simultaneously. And the reason we started with um, like on demand, um, right. As we kind of expand into the broader last mile category, um, on demand food and grocery is where we started because it's perishable. And so you're doing point to point trips. Uh, you know, you have to pick up an arbitrary point A and go to an arbitrary point B in the city. Um, a lot of the orders happen around the same time, around meal times. Um, and you have, with hot food you have 20 minutes and uh, with grocery you have an hour uh, to deliver it. And so point to point and highly perishable makes it really hard to run a high quality service that customers love. And it makes it really hard to do that at a price point they can afford. So we wanted to start there. And fundamentally our business is a fixed cost business. So the idea was if I can get really good utilization at uh, a, ah, relatively higher price point doing food and groceries, um, that will allow me to then expand that fleet to more and more use cases which further improves utilization and further reduces our price and lets us now compete on a package delivery that might be 10 times cheaper than hamburger, um, delivery, um, uh, today with humans. So within the food side you have the fundamental nature of it being point to point and perishable makes it expensive and hard. But um, it's been getting a lot worse. So in California and New York, ah, we have legislation that has kind of added um, benefits, uh, and some Overhead to how you pay drivers. Um, some driver pay minimums. This not only increases the cost of human delivery drivers, it also reduces the flexibility for the platforms. Um, and a lot of the platform's uh, efficiency comes from, you know, the fact that people want to work for three hours a week. So if you start mandating minimums, um, Spain, Netherlands, the Netherlands, um, Germany, ah, ah, a lot of countries in Europe are now mandating that they be full time employees of the company rather than gig economy drivers. Right. So that makes it go from three hours a week to 40 hours a week or 20 or 30 hours a week even if it's, if it's part time. Uh, it just takes a lot of flexibility out of system. So this both restricts supply. So you have not enough drivers. We already are supply constrained in delivery. Um, that is the number one bottleneck to growth is there are not enough drivers. But then you add this legislation on top of it, you are now restricting supply even more and you're increasing the cost of the supply. Um, and so this is reaching a breaking point. Delivery is already really expensive. If you want to order food delivery, you're already paying a 60% premium versus walking to the restaurant. And so if we can make it way more affordable, increase the global driver supply dramatically, people are going to order a lot more. Um, people are going to be able to get things delivered a lot more. They're going to be able to get more types of things delivered and their amount of use case for on demand delivery is going to go way up. Um, and then over time as we get a lot of efficiencies to that fleet, um, uh, we can do everything from your mail packages, uh, returns, B2B logistics, um, and that's all generating uh, more revenue and more productivity through the same fixed cost fleet. And that's how this just becomes an extremely low cost business. Um, uh, to operate.

Speaker A: Yeah, real quick, follow up on that too just to make sure uh, our listeners understand how your partnerships are structured. So are you partnering with platforms like uber eats and DoorDash or becoming like a new layer of infrastructure within them?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we have a, we, every robot that we make um, has an API where people can request it to pick up and drop off things. We have a wide range of businesses using that from grocery, retail, um, like local restaurants, um, but then we have uh, large great uh, partnerships with both uber eats and DoorDash, um, and then some of the apps in Europe as well where they could tap into our fleet as drivers as well.

Speaker A: Okay, cool. That's Helpful.

Speaker B: Paige, I got a question for you. Now that Zach's, um, previous comment kind of made me think about from a sort of a broader scale perspective. What kind of unlocks do you see occurring in similar autonomy sectors or industries? Not just this last mile for customer delivery, but you had mentioned before some of your defense work and other, uh, industries like that. But if Zach kind of nails this autonomy stack with the computer vision outputs, the data product outputs, what excites you, looking further abreast to some of those other industries you're involved in?

Speaker D: Yeah, great question. The cool thing is like the if has gone away. I'll let Zach do his own announcement when he's ready. But they have solved the autonomy problem, which has, ah, been a monumental five year journey to build technology that will, and it's going to blow people away. Um, Zach was also the first company we did. They had this model of what he really liked was using humans to train the AI. So there were other approaches of like, let's go raise $1 billion and build the genius secret supercomputer highway vehicle that will do everything, or the aircraft that will do it all. But Zach's approach was like, we got humans right now we can give them an Xbox controller, they can drive a robot, and that driver has a copilot which is the AI, and that AI is watching the human and learning. So, so he was the first company that made me open my eyes, be like, oh, wow, we could do this for anything. This could be ship. So we funded a company, uh, a couple years later called Havok, which has become the largest autonomous naval business in the world. Right. And it's also now expanded to air. And it's also recently expanded into construction vehicles. We have fully autonomous dozers, front loaders, like construction equipment doing this and the unlock is that a few things. One, there's a ton of jobs out there that really suck for humans. And it's not just about like teleoperation. You know, just putting a guy in Nevada to fly a drone and drop a bomb in Iran, or putting a dude in a seat and let him run a bucket loader in Alaska. That's not good enough. What's good enough is building the autonomy so that the, the robots can do the, the, the deliveries, right? Or the, the robots can move the goods across the ocean, or the robots can do the digging and let humans do the next order of things. I think autonomy is going to let humanity do even deeper exploration of arts and sciences because the mundane work is going away. Right. Hundreds of years ago Our forefathers had to go out there and cut down trees and mill wood. Right. You didn't sit down and design a beautiful house. You had to sit there and literally mill wood for years to build your home. So Zach really opened my eyes to the potential for autonomy, to transform mankind by taking away relatively crappy work and letting robots do that. It also leads to these efficiencies. The unlock, uh, with Coco is if you think about the world as a network, Zach is delivering a cheaper, faster, better way to move things from A to B. And, uh, what does that mean? Well, that means that the medicine that gets to you in Kenya might be 80% cheaper. Or all the people that run small businesses delivering food. I mean, what happens to the retail market or the food market when deliveries cost under a dollar? Cause even I sit down sometimes to be like, do I want to pay $15 to have a $15 sandwich delivered to me in New York City late? Right. But, like, what happens when the cost is minimal, when anyone just is waking up? Like, think of what happens to commerce for small businesses when delivery costs are so small. So it's this massive leverage that cocoa is going to give on the world. It really blew me away.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And shout out to Havoc. They're, uh, an alumni from the podcast we had Paul on. He's a fantastic entrepreneur, uh, and just really cool stuff they're doing to support some big mission. So, Zach, something that, um, that you were referenced, uh, in a previous interview, and I was doing some, some research I thought was interesting, was talking about going from, you know, 98% to 99%. Reliability is the, the difference between losing money and making. Can, can you unpack that? Because it seems so fractional, but I'm really intrigued with that percent.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, classic in logistics. You're, you're typically moving goods that are a lot more expensive than what you're making to deliver them. Right? And so you're, you're kind of underwriting, uh, you know, the insurance policy for whatever you're carrying. Um, and so with, uh, food in particular, you have a very small window to be successful, right? Like if you have, if you have like a system outage at 7:00pm, like, that is a lot of that is going to erase the profits of that fleet for a long time, you know, um, because that's, you know, yet 30, $40 of goods in each of these orders. And so, um, reliability, uh, is really important from an economics perspective, but also, like, a huge part of why we're doing this is not just to drive the cost down, make it more affordable, but like delivery should be a lot better. Um, you can improve the consistency and reliability of this a lot. And I think that's a huge issue with these perishable items where you have to get it delivered in a certain window or you can't consume the food. Um, and I think what Paige was talking about is felt across all income levels. If you look at the delivery apps at checkout and you just have this value mismatch of what it costs to how you know it's going to be like the experience you're about to have. It just makes you feel bad. Uh, right. And so you're like, man, I'm going to pay twice what it would cost for me to walk down the street or get in my car. Um, and, and it's going to be cold and soggy and it's probably going to be missing an item like that that is, ah, that it just has this value mismatch for people. And so um, it's just a hard problem.

Speaker D: Right?

Speaker C: You have a driver that's got to go get on a bike and pick some, pick up three people's orders and then try to like make the economics work by doing three drop offs at once. And you get introduced a lot of human error to the system. And so robots can be a huge help at not just making it a lot more affordable, um, but just making it dramatically better for the customer. Lower, uh, error rates, less batching, more consistent, um, on time rates. It's one of the promises of a robotic system is we can eliminate a lot of the human error. Um, and this is particularly intense, um, in extreme weather as I was talking about earlier.

Speaker D: It is.

Speaker C: Paige Page we know in New York, when it's cold in New York, I mean it takes three hours to get your food. Uh, it's just like you're just miserable. I mean it just doesn't work. There's not enough drivers who are willing to do that job because it's a miserable job, um, especially in those sort of conditions. And so a robotic fleet, a robotic system operating in Manhattan would be a game changer during uh, these kind of uh, really low temperatures or winter storms. From a uh, reliability perspective, we'll keep the economy moving when nobody wants to get on the road and be moving stuff around.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's really interesting when you think about it in that sense of like, it's like reliability is the, the product uh, that you guys are, are delivering in a lot of ways. Um, Paige, I Want to, you know, start to close things down and, and make sure that we, we hit on something around founder, market fit, you know, obviously something that you're very big on as an investor. Uh, talk to us a little bit about Zach for a minute. You know, you, you um, you talk about market, founder, market fit and execution. What, what was it, uh, that you did see early in Zach that you know, really, really inspired you to back them?

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, it's a, it's a lot to unpack there. We, we look for 38 things in founders, so we learn we have 38 things we look for. Not that people have all of it, but we rate people across all 38. But a couple things that really stood out for me is that Zach and Brad, Brad's not here, but have just the most amazing relationship. And these guys met in school, did the robot lab together and I realized they're like this magic duo. They're both technical geniuses. Brad's extremely good at focusing in and working with a small team to solve the most monumental problems. And Zach fully sees and understands what needs to be built. But he has the ability to sit at that hundred thousand foot level and see the big system and build the people and process to support what needs to be built on the technology. And they're both great at what they do from the tech perspective, but they were just so complimentary and every time I pushed and asked how things were like they were like somehow seamlessly like working together. And that was probably that product of having just been like instant buddies in college and building things in school together. And they're that perfect union of co founder that you would want in life. Like I couldn't imagine a better duo working daily. So that really struck me. And a lot of founder failure comes down to this really just dumb but really important thing which is how good of a partnership do you have? That's really, really important. Um, and then we've been through hardship too. But before the hardship stuff, I'll just talk about the things I saw. So they had an amazing partnership that was going to be unbeatable. I know I'm someone who meets literally tens of thousands of founders now 16 years into doing this, I have funded over 150 companies at the time I met Zach and they had that um, second, it was um, very practical. Like brilliant people that really could think around the sciences and hardware and software, but just practical. And this is what you miss with a lot of founders. They think about schoolhouses in theory and they just don't put their self out in the real world. And so I look for that person who is action oriented versus thinking oriented. Right. Like, you need to think a little bit. But there's that old proverb of, you know, like, if you, if you think too much, you're just a daydreamer. Right, Right. You just, you gotta have these very practical people. Uh, and then the brainstorming. Like, I remember Zach and I would have just, I met him through another founder, James Jalecki, who I've backed, uh, four of his companies now. But James knew what I was looking for. James introduced us. And ever since I met Zach and Brad, uh, I have to hold myself back because I could just spend hours talking to them. And Zach is the definition of obsession. I don't really reveal the characteristics we look for, but one of them is obsession. And Zach, even with a girlfriend, an amazing lady, his whole life, I will say it revolves around this business and he does take the time for his family. But there is no. And like James has even told me, James is this amazing dude who is always building things. But Zach is just the most obsessive about his company. Whether it's six in the morning, midnight weekend, probably, I don't know, Christmas, New Year's, but he's probably dreaming about his company and solving problems. And you need a founder who has that good relationship at home, has a good partnership with their wife or girlfriend or safety another, but who is just crazy obsessed with a life mission thing that they're going to solve. And Zach has that, um. Yeah, I just, I saw with them, like, he had that like ultimate obsession with making this thing work.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. It's a theme. We see it. A lot of the guests that we have on the show is this obsession, you know, folks that are, you know, working their first shift, which is, you know, call it, you know, eight to six, going to the gym and then working their second shift, uh, you know, for another six hours and then catching a few hours of sleep. But, um, very exciting to hear that. And, uh, yeah, we'll have to have you back on to try to just pull a couple more traits out of you. I know you keep it too close to your chest, but I like you revealing just one or two there. All right, well, we're coming up on the hour, so I want to just kind of close with one, you know, kind of, you know, outlook question for you, Zach, you know, just a forward looking note, um, you know, talk to us a little bit about what needs to go right, you know, for this, you Know this business to scale successfully over the next, you know, five to ten years.

Speaker C: Yeah. And, and I'll also say um, you know what, I, when I met, when I met Paige, Paige uh, is like, you know, because a lot of investors aren't very operationally savvy. Um, right. They're, they're, they invest in, they invest in technology companies. They might understand the, the technology or some of these pieces. Like Paige is one of the rare people that actually understands all of the different aspects that we needed to be successful. Like Paige was my first call when we're, you know, hey, we, how do we, how do we solve the regulatory, you know, the regulatory issues. I met, I met our head of government relations through, through Page. He was always like, he's always been the first call on like really complicated issues in our, all of our issues span hardware, software, people, operations, government relations. Right. It's always a combination of these things. Um, and uh, given Paige's background, he's like the most operational, uh, hands on value add, um, investor, uh, um so we're super lucky to be working with them. And Paige has been super helpful at getting Covid where it is today.

Speaker A: Awesome.

Speaker C: Going forward, um, what we've been really focused on the last few years is getting all these things dialed so that we can actually offer a really low cost and make money doing it. Um, uh, that's been a combination of getting the hardware to be incredibly reliable, getting integrated with all these massive platforms and big enterprise customers, um, uh, getting the fleet reliability and the dispatch software good enough and then solving all the fully autonomous driving. We've been doing that. It was mostly across la. We've now doing that across seven cities in the US and Europe. And um, now we're going into mass expansion mode. So we're ramping up manufacturing, we're bringing cocoa to more and more cities and really focusing on uh, how do we build out this infrastructure in the most important cities in the world. So this is across the us, Europe, Asia, Australia. Um, so we have a rapid expansion roadmap that's underway right now um, to just start integrating cocoa into the kind of the most important local economies uh on the planet. And um, that's starting with uh, on demand movement, uh, of good in the US That's a lot of food grocery, um in Europe and Asia that's going to be a lot of packages. Immediately we have huge supply, hugely supply constrained in lots of parts of Asia and Europe. They're ah, not enough, not enough drivers. So we're already starting to go to these Markets and do deals where we'll deliver anything and everything and, uh, and become that, like, reliable, uh, infrastructure for the city. And, um, I think in the next few years, I think we'll be in the most, like, all of the biggest cities in the world. Um, and then, uh, and keep building, Keep building up from there.

Speaker A: Very cool.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Excited to keep tracking the story. Um, man, I wish we had more time. We got so many more questions. But we're gonna, we're gonna put a bow on the main discussion and we'll, we'll, we'll close with our final segment here. It's called the five second scramble. So we're gonna just pitch, uh, some, some questions your all's way. Give us, ah, your best answer, you know, within under five seconds. Uh, Sean, why don't you start with Paige and then I'll close with, with Zach.

Speaker B: Happy to. All right, Paige, you ready?

Speaker D: Yep. Shoot.

Speaker B: All right, number one, what was your most unexpected. I really enjoyed that moment in your career?

Speaker D: Uh, my first trip into Iraq a year later, going to the Sheraton Hotel and having a cold beer and taking a dump when no one was trying to kill me.

Speaker B: All right, I have to pause on. That's one of the most Marine answers I've ever got.

Speaker D: It sounds dumb, but it is one of the. Like, I remember sitting in my room being like, I will remember this day for the rest of my life. I'm in a clean bed with a cold beer, in a robe on a clean toilet, and no one's trying to kill me for 48 hours. I was like, it was amazing.

Speaker B: That's. That's perfect. I'm not sure if I have any more questions after that. Uh, that's gonna be.

Speaker A: That's actually gonna be the teaser opener for the episode. That's the teaser opener for the episode. That was fantastic.

Speaker B: Well, all right, so second question then. Um, what's a lesson from the Marines that you still rely on every day?

Speaker D: It's all about people. It doesn't matter what technology you got. It's all about people.

Speaker B: Great. Uh, what's a really good decision that you've made under serious, ah, time pressure?

Speaker D: Uh, marrying my wife.

Speaker B: Oh, that's a. All right, interesting. What's a book, a movie, a magazine, some piece of media that you really enjoy but would never actually recommend to somebody else?

Speaker D: Oh, my God, I love Red dawn, but it's such a bag of shit movie. I just love it.

Speaker B: Excellent. Um, what's something random that you're surprisingly good at that has nothing to do with uh, work with investing or technology or anything.

Speaker D: I am actually an extraordinary painter and sculptor.

Speaker B: This is interesting. We've had some interesting recent conversations with investors, specifically with some creative, uh, talents. I think, uh, the PEAR program may be establishing a new paradigm here. Uh, uh, if you need.

Speaker D: I got wildly into metal sculpture because I, originally, in life, thought I was going to be an artist. I love art, and my wife and I, we travel the world and we go and buy art together, but I actually make my own art, too. So my house has, uh, a lot of my paintings and stuff in it.

Speaker A: Very cool.

Speaker B: Yeah, the Page Craig saga only gets deeper the more we learn.

Speaker C: It's a lot of lawyer uncovering here, guys.

Speaker B: Um, just a few more. Paige, you're crushing it so far. Uh, what's your favorite everyday piece of technology that isn't a smartphone or a laptop? Something like that?

Speaker D: It is my AirPods. I live in AirPods. I carry two because I burn them out, and I walk about 15, 20 miles a day with my AirPods on.

Speaker C: That's true.

Speaker B: You'll take full calls just walking around with your AirPods.

Speaker D: I interview founders, I do meetings, I do board meetings. I would do this podcast mobile if it wouldn't mess everything up. But I literally, anyone who knows me has received money from me, has probably done long walks with me for hours.

Speaker B: It's true. I got head nods from Zach.

Speaker C: It's true. Very long, very long walks.

Speaker B: Final question for you, Paige. Um, our traditional question here on the PARAP program. What is a corporate philanthropy or a charity charitable effort that's near and dear to you that you want our listeners to know about?

Speaker D: Man, there's an amazing one which I can't talk about because of the unit that we support, but, uh, US Vets is also an extraordinary group that spends almost all this money housing veterans across America. I was lucky enough to serve on the board for a long time, and they're based out in la. Incredible group.

Speaker B: Awesome, Paige. Thanks so much. Over to Tim. Ah. And Zach.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Good stuff, Zach. You ready?

Speaker D: I'm ready.

Speaker A: All right. Uh, if Coco Robotics were a restaurant, what would be its signature dish?

Speaker C: Oh, man. Um, street tacos.

Speaker A: Hell, yeah. Well said.

Speaker B: Nice last.

Speaker A: Good in delivery, too, don't they? That's right.

Speaker B: It just.

Speaker C: You can't beat street tacos. The. The company was created by eating street tacos right out front of our office.

Speaker D: Okay.

Speaker C: We have that every single meal.

Speaker A: Uh, what are a few key roles that you guys are hiring for over the next three to six months?

Speaker C: Lots of engineering hardware. Uh, engineering Software engineering. Anyone that's got really good product, product mind and operations systems mind, uh, across operations software, hardware engineering. Um, I'm uh, you know, please, uh, please reach out.

Speaker A: Is a lot of that out in LA or. Whereabouts are you guys hiring?

Speaker C: La. We have an office in the Bay Area and we're um, have a team we're building out in New York.

Speaker A: Very cool. What's one thing about the culture at Coco that you would say surprise a candidate?

Speaker C: Um, probably how like incredibly hands on every single person that the company is. I mean if there's an outage, everyone's getting in their car and they're going to go deliver food, which has happened before, uh, the whole company has to stop and go make sure the food gets delivered on time. Sometimes people think they're going to a robotics company and it's going to be a fancy AI lab. But no, the real world is not that neat.

Speaker A: That's so gritty. I love that answer. What's been the hardest real world lesson that you've learned? Kind of building this business.

Speaker C: Oh man. Definitely Miami. Um, that place, I love Miami, but that place is brutal. Uh, the, the, the way people drive. I mean there's just the way people drive. The, the, the amount of rain and, and the saltiness of the rain. Like we thought Chicago was going to be hard, uh, and it was, but Miami, getting Miami reliable was next level, uh, next level difficult.

Speaker A: What's uh, what's one metric that you watch most closely that tells you the businesses is working?

Speaker C: Um, the highly, the most important number is probably like our high quality delivery rate. So we, that's a ton of different factors of how we measure quality. But that needs to be above kind of human courier baseline. And, and all our new markets need to be operating at our baseline. Then we move that baseline up every, every month.

Speaker A: Very cool. What was your very first job?

Speaker C: Um, you know, it was actually um, uh, I was a tutor for pre calculus. Uh, which is, and this is, I grew up in, I grew up in Menlo M Park in the Bay Area. So this is like the most berry thing ever. But um, uh, there was a startup founded by a bunch of high schoolers and we were making online tutoring videos and somehow I got assigned pre calculus, which is the worst math subject. It is like a random collection of like all of the things you need to know in math before you go into calculus. And it is, it is the biggest textbook, it is the most miserable course to teach. Um, and so a whole summer I had like, ah, you know, some sort of tablet. And I'm writing out like the entire textbook of pre calculus, which was terrible and traumatizing. But, uh, it was, it was a fun. It was a. We were in this, like, little house in Palo Alto and it was a bunch of kids trying to build an Internet education site. So that was a lot of fun.

Speaker A: That's crazy. I just had an episode yesterday with the founder of a. It's a. An AICRM M startup in the Bay Area. And his first job was pre calc tutoring. And he was just basically undercutting the market of like, anybody that they're doing like 14 an hour. He was like, I got you for 12. So ironic. Uh, I wonder if you know this guy. Um, all right, so, uh, you spent, you know, years kind of thinking about autonomy. What's one everyday task that you wish you could, you know, have fully automated in your own life?

Speaker C: Oh, man.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker C: I'll say besides delivery, because I order a lot of delivery and I, uh, guess I've already had that one automated, huh. Which is nice. Um, my girlfriend's a great cook and so she cooks. Um, but of course then I have to clean. And she's Italian, so the way she cooks is by, like, spewing ingredients all over the place. Um, it's part of the process. You know, you can't mess with the process. And then her dad comes over. I've literally held a bowl before for him while he's cooking, and he has tossed olive oil into the bowl from across the room. Um, so. So probably, uh, probably, uh, I'm very excited to have a humanoid that can properly clean the house after, ah, after an Italian meal.

Speaker A: Uh, preach, man. Yeah, Automated dishes. That's. That's a home run answer. Uh, what's the weirdest real world edge case that your robots have ever had to handle?

Speaker C: Where do I start?

Speaker B: Um, it's all edge cases, man.

Speaker C: One of the first things where we're like, okay, this is something we're going to have to get really good at. M this is in 2020 and 2021. We were delivering a lot of Chick fil A sandwiches in Hollywood. And there was these. All these homeless encampments in Hollywood. And every morning they would move and you didn't know where it was going to be. But they take the whole street, and it was always a different street. And this is like, you know, the most important customer. We're like, in Chick fil A, like, you got to deliver on time or you're fired. So they take quality super seriously. And we would Never want to, uh, you know, ruin one of those sandwiches. And so we basically had to have, like, a scouting robot that would go out at the beginning of every morning just to figure out, like, where the. Where that homeless encampment was that morning, because the city kept moving it. And so it would pick up and go somewhere else. And, uh, it would cause us to have to reroute because we couldn't drive through it. And that reroute would add a few minutes, and that few minutes we could not tolerate. So we had to build a whole real time system for, like, homeless encampment tracking in the city. And, uh, uh, that turned out to not be a corner case. That is, uh, pretty common. Uh, but, uh, yeah, there's a lot of things like that. Active crime zones. Um, uh, we've had a robot gotten run over by a car from somebody doing a smash and grab into a restaurant, right? And went through the robot. There was another robot behind the robot that got hit just like watching his brother get run over. Uh, and then the people ran in. You can watch them all just run out with a bunch of stuff. Uh, we see a lot of crazy stuff.

Speaker A: My gosh. Uh, that's amazing. We got to do a full robot episode.

Speaker C: Uh, the robots have been shot before. We have found a bullet inside the robot. Um, it was delivering by usc and we just caught a stray bullet.

Speaker D: Uh, driver.

Speaker C: Yeah, driver page. It did deliveries for, like, multiple days and it came back in for service. And we're like, all these USC kids are just like, ah, yeah, it's fine. No one reported it to us.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh. Oh, man.

Speaker D: The Cocos that you sent to war, we didn't send.

Speaker C: We did send robots into, uh, into Ukraine. Uh, uh, I don't know where they went, but, uh, we put a. We put a red cross on them and sent them in and haven't heard back.

Speaker A: Trade them in la. Trade them in la, then send them to war zone.

Speaker C: Yeah, hopefully.

Speaker D: Hopefully they.

Speaker C: They provided some. Some supply drops before. Before they. Before they got blown up.

Speaker A: It's cool, man. So many, like, business ideas within the business. It's really interesting. Um, all right, we'll close with the last one. A. Ah, charity or philanthropy that's near and dear to you?

Speaker C: Um, we do, um. We've actually been doing. As funny as Paige brought this up, we've actually been doing, uh, we deliver around the, uh, the VA hospital, uh, here in la, and actually, um, we had to deliver just to the gate. Um, and we've actually built a relationship with them of how we can do a lot of useful services within the va um, and, uh, that's actually turned out to be a, uh, really cool partnership, or we couldn't go in. And now it's like, well, they actually need to get a lot of goods into the facility and they need a lot of, um, uh, goods to move within the facility. Um, so we've actually come up with a really cool partnership with them of how they can use the robots. And that just happened organically from the fleet driving around. So, um, that's been a really cool project.

Speaker A: Very cool. Yeah, we'll give both of those a shout, uh, when the episode goes live. But Zach, Paige, just wanted to thank you all for spending the time with us. This was awesome. This was probably one of the more fun episodes I think we've hosted in a long time. So thank you guys for bringing the energy, um, and explaining a little bit more about the future, uh, of autonomy and on demand delivery and scaling in this space. Really, really fascinating conversation. Thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker D: Thanks, guys.

Speaker C: Yeah, thank you, guys.