Robotic Delivery Tunnels with Garrett Scott of Pipedream Labs
Pipedream is no pipe dream. And Garrett Scott is here to tell us why.
Garrett is the CEO of Pipedream Labs. They have a radical vision for the future of logistics and delivery. Think robots running around in underground utility tunnels bringing cans of pears right to your kitchen. Pipedream is here to bring the world mini hyperloops for delivery.
During the episode, Garrett takes us through the conception of Pipedream. He talks us through the challenges of building underground infrastructure. And he shares his vision for the future development of hyperlogistics.
Links to Platforms:
Here’s what I learned from the episode:
The company is trying to figure out how to move goods so cheaply and easily that it's like how data moves on the internet. The main focus is creating a utility layer for moving goods in and out of buildings, between cities, and handling the handoff to customers.
40% of the cost of your goods is just for last-mile logistics.
A lot of existing infrastructure and supply chain of today’s utilities can be converted for Pipedream’s use.
Cities have gotten really good at putting in underground infrastructure.
There’s magic in making things simple and easy.
Pipedream is using a lot of pre-existing technologies. But they are putting them together in a new, revolutionary way.
If you think about it, it’s crazy how good our poop un-distribution system is.
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Learn more about Garrett Scott:
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Scaling Nuclear Energy, Saving The World – Bret Kugelmass of Last Energy
Episode Transcript:
Garrett Scott: Logistics is that people want things cheaper and faster. They always will. No matter what they say, even a small increment of a little easier, little cheaper, little faster goes such a long way. And that's just always going to be true. So it's easy to like, okay, I'm going to go in, I'm going to build in this space, and as long as we can make logistics a little cheaper, a little easier, a little faster, who knows how big it will be, but we’ll win a little bit.
Eric Jorgenson: Hello again, and welcome. I’m Eric Jorgenson. And I don’t know much, but I have some very smart friends. And if you listen to this podcast, then no matter who, where, or when you are, you do too. Together, we'll explore how technology, capitalism, and friendship create a brighter, more abundant future. Today, our friend Garrett Scott is here, the CEO of Pipedream Labs. Pipedream has a radical vision for the future of logistics and delivery, just robots running through underground utility tunnels. It's like a mini hyperloop for Uber Eats, Instacart, and everything else you might need. In this episode, we talk about how this pipe dream called Pipedream came about and the process of arriving at this specific problem and the solution. We talk about the technical and distribution challenges of startups building underground infrastructure, which I was unfamiliar with, and at the end, get into Garrett's vision for what our lives could look like after 50 years of hyper logistics development. I'm honored that over 50 listeners like you now invest alongside me into early stage tech startups. If you want to put your money to work alongside ours, you can learn more at rolling.fun, which is linked in the show notes below. Accredited investors can invest with us through AngelList today. And with a rolling fund, the sooner you invest, the more deals you get to participate in. To learn more or meet with me about this, please reach out through Twitter or email. Now relax and enjoy Smart Friends, your favorite podcast, arriving at your ears in three, two, one.
I'm overly excited to meet you. I've been following Pipedream and you and some of the dudes on your team for a long time, and it's just like a very fun roller coaster ride.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, that’s a good way to describe it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is like, I don't know, I think there's something to, especially on Twitter, tech being like a spectator sport, and this is a very fun company to watch and to root for, so I'm excited to kind of get a chance to get deeper into it with you.
Garrett Scott: Oh, I appreciate it, man. Yeah, I've never heard anyone, like we talk about that all the time, it's like sometimes I feel like, and we are so guilty of that in the last six months, it's like, man, let me in on the inside. I want to see more highlights, more action, more clips. Like it's our spectator sport. We love it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and you've got a great pinned thread that kind of takes you through what's going on at the company. And it is a really fun thing, especially for something like Pipedream, which is so complex. Like there's just so many moving parts, and it's a lot more tangible than just a software company. So maybe you can give us like, for people who are unfamiliar and haven't been following along but should be, give us a high level, like what's Pipedream, what's your hope for it, and how can we picture it?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, totally. So, at a high level, we see the world of autonomous logistics going kind of one step farther to this next level that we call hyper logistics. It's just essentially like how do you make goods move so easy and cheaply that it moves like data does on the internet. And the part that we saw that was missing to get there was kind of this utility layer for moving goods around, something that can handle going in and out of buildings, both on the supply side and the residential side. Then also going those longer distances in cities and between cities. And then managing the handoff in between, logistics today is multimodal. It goes into a lot of different people's hands and different vehicles. And in time, logistics is the same thing, handoff to drones, receive from drones, handoff to self-driving cars, receive from self-driving cars. So that was the layer that we saw was missing. And so, at Pipedream, we build infrastructure to solve that. And a lot of it runs like utilities run today, which is through underground pipes. So hence the name.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that is so- A really counterintuitive thing to me is how much more expensive it is to go that last, we hear about last mile logistics, but people don't realize that's 80%, 90%, I don't know, you probably have a much more accurate figure.
Garrett Scott: 40. Which is still like nuts, because you're talking about pears grown in Argentina, shipped to China to can, shipped to America, shipped to your city, in a grocery store, and then after all of that, 40% of the cost is just to go like half a mile down the road to your house.
Eric Jorgenson: That's wild. Yeah. Okay. So, if I'm interpreting correctly, the vision for Pipedeam or the purview may even be bigger than I was expecting based on what you just said there. So, it sounds like you think of yourself as that, I don't know, in the fullness of time, at least, a full suite of that last mile logistics and trying to make all of that autonomous. Is that right?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, I think it's maybe close to, I think last mile logistics is just so complicated. I mean, logistics as a whole is complicated. So, I think trying to eat the whole apple is a pipe dream for lack of a better word. But what is certain is that that was a gap. And I think who knows how much of last mile logistics that kind of infrastructure will makeup and how many other companies will be doing that. We think it's a big part. So, yeah, I'm not sure how much that will constitute into the day or if any, but we think it's big enough to go for. I don't think it'll be the whole thing. Kind of like a- it's just like a really important API. Or maybe like cloud computing is maybe the better thing, like this base level infrastructure. A lot of things go in and out of it. A lot of different companies do it, but each one of them makes up this massive part of the market.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so let's do the English version, or I'll give it a shot, and you correct me. So there's going to be robots in tunnels, in utility tunnels that take this can of pears from my grocery store to my house?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, totally. With some, if you think about it, kind of like, I think if we were to look into the future 10 years from now, that can of pears will sit outside the city, and then at some point, you'll have this local distribution center, whether it's like a grocery store or some small distribution center a half mile from your house, and there will be five cans of pears held there. Two people order some, those go out, and then to resupply that small set of cans of pears near your house, two more get pulled in from outside the city in the bigger distribution center. Then from there, when you order the can of pears, then a drone or self-driving car or whatever autonomous modality works in that area, will come up to that really small what will essentially be like a vending machine, like a store-sized vending machine. It'll deploy that can of pears to that vehicle, go to your house, drop it in your house. Our vision for that is that kind of like computers have a USB port, there needs to be that kind of same infrastructure for interfacing with autonomous modalities. So instead of that can of pears just getting dropped off in your backyard, it's better if it's dropped into something like an internal mailbox. So, then you just open your drawer, a can of pears is there. You grab them and use them. And I think that's kind of where you don't know, like maybe there is like a bigger, broader underground network. And it's a little bit cheaper to do that than the other robotic modalities. And it's just all pipes. I think those cases will be rare, but who knows?
Eric Jorgenson: Interesting. I mean, this is some Jetson shit that I can really get into, like stuff just flying around in pipes. That's what it's all about. That's what the future is supposed to look like. I mean, I live in an apartment building right now. There's already a package locker. I don't think it's a huge stretch. And mailboxes. It's not a huge stretch that that becomes a little bit of a portal for a tunnel to a distribution center. It is probably way cheaper and simpler to do it underground. So, a thing I'm curious about is actually, what is the existing infrastructure for this? I mean, do you have to like go down and bore your own tunnels? Or are there existing utility tunnels that you can use? How does that part of it work?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, it's a good question. When we first started the company, that was kind of you have two paths that’s like, okay, you can go down the hard path or the easy path. There probably is a lot of infrastructure that we can convert. The question is nobody knows how much. That isn't like public data. It's not like on the GIS portal. There's no way to know how much. We’ve kind of got to go city by city and find the person to know and figure it out. So, our thought was, let's let that be the icing on the cake. Let's work and make sure that the business model works on new infrastructure. Because if it doesn't work on new infrastructure, then we're never going to get the big enough network to be interesting at all. It'd just be like super happenstantial pipe that happened to be there, and we'll convert it, and that's not- you can't grow a network that way. So we decided just to ignore that for now. Let's focus the whole thing on building them ourselves. But the good news is cities have gotten really good at putting this underground infrastructure in. It's one of those things where 15 years ago, I think we all saw a lot of the streets being torn up to put underground infrastructure in. And just so much improvement in putting this type of pipe in the ground has happened, so that we kind of don't even see it being put in. But cities are putting in miles and miles and miles of exactly this type of pipe every year. Once you know what the machines look like that put it in, you kind of start seeing it all over the place. But yeah, they've gotten really good. So we realized pretty quick that as long as we kept it really close to the way that cities already put in underground pipes and keep the infrastructure the same, construction methods, even down to the actual pipes that are the most common, then everything gets a lot easier.
Eric Jorgenson: So, are they putting it down like for you? Do you have to pay them to do it? How does it work?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, so it works, if you imagine kind of like how electricity went in, we really see ourselves as, in that analogy, like the wire makers, like we're making the wire. And then the way that it goes in is kind of, it's different depending on the city and the property. So, if we're looking at a grocery store, we're just going to sell that infrastructure to the grocery store. If they want to automate their pickup, we're just going to sell that to them and then manage the maintenance and upgrades for them. In cities, the current thought process is to go the way of fiber or railroads, where you allow people to invest in putting in the infrastructure and sharing the profits long term. And there's just so many infrastructure groups and financing companies that are set up to manage that infrastructure and finance it and sit on it for a long time. So, we really don't want to reinvent the wheel there. So, we have some interesting ideas long term on how to maybe tweak the way that railroads and fiber financialize themselves. It's really interesting. Like going back and reading newspaper articles about railroads and there's all these articles about how railroad’s a bubble, it's never going to be useful. It's just like, you could just swap railroad for NFT. It'd be like a great NFT bubble article. We don't want to get there, but I think we can borrow from some of the ways that railroad and fiber incentivize people to bootstrap the network. And so that's the goal. There's some things we need to tweak and prove out, but we really kind of want to sit at the bottom of that, build all the pieces to make it work, make it easy to put in, and then make sure we have really attractive rev share models. Kind of so that like an Amazon or someone of that size, if they're looking at doing it themselves and fighting the regulatory battle, or just going with us, let us shoulder the regulatory responsibility, but then they get this great rev share, it's a no brainer just to go that way.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a fascinating- I mean, I love companies like this that are just such audacious undertakings, but man, yeah, you find yourself in the middle of a lot of moving pieces of like, oh, who's going to pay for this part? Who's going to pay for this part? What are the regulatory things? And how are they different in each city? So how are you approaching that on the rollout side of things? Are you just getting into...
Garrett Scott: On the regulatory?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, like finding one sort of geographic location or one partner who's like all in on this and psyched about it, and that's kind of where you get to prove things out. I guess I don't know who's the most instrumental, like who's the hardest to get on board of all the different stakeholders.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, it's a great question. I don't think- there's not one that's hard. It's more about timing. It's timing everything at the right time and making sure that the, something we think a lot about is called minimum viable network. So in the middle mile piece of our business, when we're actually putting it in cities, sizing the network such that it is super useful, has like an under five year payback, and every node you add to that network makes it incrementally, hopefully exponentially more valuable. That's how we would determine a minimum viable network, but trying to make that as small as possible, so it's easy to put in and quick to put in. That's kind of the hardest piece. The regulatory piece is difficult, but because we've kept it really close to the way that sewage and water lines are already regulated, it's a lot easier than people think. So that, at the end of the day, is not the hardest part of doing this. It's probably up there. It's probably top 10, but it's not like the big red flag people think it is.
Eric Jorgenson: That's really interesting. I think there's a few- Bret Kugelmass is working in the nuclear space and he had a similar insight. It's just like, if you can really work to minimize the number of new things that you're doing, especially when you rely on either a big supply chain or big partners or anything like that, man, does it make your life much easier, unless it's like the thing that you need to unblock. So, what is- I know- well, we haven't yet painted really a picture of what's happening in the tunnels, which I think is important to do. So, we've got a tunnel established, we got a can of pears established, we got grocery stores’ distribution centers, and like the magic portal drawer in your house. But what's happening inside that?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, so as little as humanly possible. Like you were saying, there's magic in making things simple and easy and old. And so, on the regulatory side for us, that's like let's use literally the same pipe and construction methods and junctions and manholes that they use for any other utility, make it super easy, nothing new. It just makes that regulatory process much easier. And the same thing on the engineering side. We have like one of our first prototypes, I think is- it looked great, so we put it on Twitter a lot. I have the cargo module right here. It's been- the guys have taken so many parts off of it, but I pulled it up here to try to save as much as I could of what’s left.
Eric Jorgenson: So, if you're just listening, it's like bigger than a bread box. It looks like a duffel bag size, like a weekender duffel bag with like roller blade wheels on the bottom of it, basically.
Garrett Scott: That's exactly what it is. Yeah. But there's so many cool little things there. Like there's all these different little pieces that are just so dope. And I can talk about it forever. And Canon, our CTO, is just so good at hating complexity and making things simple, which is a really, really tough skill to be good at. But I mean, if me and him are fighting, that's probably what we're fighting about because he is just so good at sticking to that. So, he's pulled so much complexity out. So, it's like everything now is really simple. So, you have the distribution centers, you have your can of pears, you have your home. And the goal was how do you make a utility layer that uses the fewest amount of parts that can be reassembled no matter where it's at. So, the thing that's going up and down in your house to either accept something from the roof or pull something from out of the ground and then display it in the drawer, can we make that component the same thing that's storing things in a grocery store and deploying that underground and deploying that to the roof? And that is a singular modular vertical lift module, is what it's called. It's like an elevator. And how do you put the most amount of flexibility into that? Well, keeping it as simple as possible. So, you have that piece, that is the up and down, and then you have the robot, which is what I just showed for people listening, but that's what does the horizontal. And then you have the rail, which it kind of takes away the pipe. I mean, you saw in this cargo module that I just showed, I had the roller blade wheels that were going and pushing, it goes into the pipe and there's three wheels and it sits on the pipe, which seems like the best thing to do. And really early on, we were really sold on it because it was like, oh, no infrastructure in the pipe, we're good to go. You just put that baby in and it's rolling. But you lose the ability to transfer into a junction, to go above ground or for that system to work in the ceiling of a store or in the ceiling of an apartment building or the utility layer of an apartment building. You lose all this flexibility because it always has to be in a pipe. So, we took that requirement, Canan took that requirement out, which he's so good at, and instead made a little rail. And the rail is just so simple, it hurts. It's not affixed to anything. It just slides in. They're made in little links that are extruded and you put them together, and they can kind of wiggle and snake between each other. But that's what the robot actually rides on. So as long as that rail exists, then the robot can travel. So that is what handles the horizontal. So, between those things, between the vertical lift mechanism and the robot, it can move these totes around. And so, the tote is, if if you think about global shipping and how global shipping got so efficient is ship containers. You put whatever weird objects you want to ship or whatever, if it's a ton of cans of pears, doesn't matter, it’s going to be lifted and manipulated and stacked about exactly the same because it has this base unit shipping container like the Lego box of freight. So, for us, we use just the tote system. Grocery stores, warehouses all use about the same tote. And a lot of them use exactly the same tote. So, we just use that same tote as our little tiny shipping container. And then the elevator and the robot handle that little tiny shipping container and move it all around.
Eric Jorgenson: That's so cool. I would have bet a thousand bucks that the shipping container analogy was going to come up at some point.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, yeah. It's kind of like we didn't mean to. This was never- maybe we even kind of meant not to early on. But the whole system mirrors a port accidentally. It's kind of frustrating because it's not- It's just interesting how sometimes when you take all this complexity out, these systems just kind of trend to look exactly like each other. But we have the vertical lift module, which is like the crane, the tote which is like a shipping container, and then you have your 18-wheeler, the train, which is the robot. The system kind of works exactly like that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which it seems like it makes perfect sense. If you have the macro system for the shipping container scale thing that gets it between continents or over any like double-digit number of miles, and then you have this micro-scale atomized version for totes that takes place within any given city, within a single-digit number of miles or just feet. And it's interesting to think how many things would get re-architected. If this is a given, if you're building a city from scratch, of course, you would want to include this thing. A mental exercise I love is just walking around a modern city and being like, what are all the things that are happening in parallel in this one kind of 2D plane of street? Like even in New York where you’ve got subways, you’ve got basements, you've got deliveries and bikes and people and as many things as you can sort of abstract a layer up or a layer down, that really expands the, increases the quality of life, but also increases the density at which city living is comfortable. And it's just so cool. I mean, nobody was like stoked to see an 18-wheeler truck trundle down their residential street or idling outside their grocery store or anything. So just, yeah, packing that away, putting it all underground, presumably making it much more cheap to transport for each individual item, I would think. I don't know. Is it too soon to know what some of the economic outcomes of this are? I'm also picturing this all as like electric, but tell me if I'm wrong.
Eric Jorgenson: No, no, 100%. Yeah, I think, and I'll kind of talk about this in kind of the terms of like, I think something that's guaranteed that I don't think people are treating as a guarantee is autonomous logistics. Like, forget us. We could fail. It's going to happen. There’re so many people working on it. It's so close. It will come. The year it comes is the thing that I think throttles up and down, but it's going to happen. At some point past that, we'll get to this state of logistics that we call hyper logistics just because there wasn't a word for it. But if you have that receiving point in your home, and you have that drawer, and you get your can of pears, and you also get like a shirt. Well, you can just as easily send from that drawer. So that shirt that you wore, you don't necessarily need to keep it in the laundry and then wash it and then fold it and put it back in your drawer to wear again. You can just send it back to wherever you got that shirt from. You spent like 10 cents on a shirt rental. The transportation was basically free. So, the company just let you use their shirt for a day and made eight cents. They do that every day for a whole year. They've made more on that shirt than they would just selling it once off. So, the quality of shirts pushes higher and the amount of shirts that you use and don't use enough and just the amount of shirts the world needs goes way down. I think that's the most interesting ramification. If we can get to autonomous logistics and then push towards people really easily being able to send back, which that's what we call hyper logistics. Just the access people have to higher quality things, the amount that- because right now, our consumerism is so tied to resource depletion. Like if I buy a screwdriver, I'm using that screwdriver maybe like 20 times in my life. It will be in a drawer somewhere. I'll have like five screwdrivers because I can't always find the screwdriver in the drawer. But I need a screwdriver on hand. But eventually that screwdriver just like gets thrown away. So, if I could really easily, if I knew that I could always get a screwdriver in under 10 minutes for essentially free, use it, and then when I was done with it, just send it back, I wouldn't own a screwdriver. And that screwdriver would be used by hundreds of other people. And so instead of having a few thousand screwdrivers distributed among all of us, we just all share this one really high quality screwdriver. I think that's the most interesting one where consumerism and environmentalism aren't in conflict. You don't have to choose between them. You can consume as much as you want without having this burden of, okay, now I'm filling the landfill with all this stuff that maybe I don't need. So, I think it's a really interesting one. That's kind of what gets us going every day is like, okay, how do we make that happen as soon as possible? And then, I think there's similar to Amazon and Walmart and other logistics inventions that really change the lives that we don't really think about. Just having access to things really cheap just really changes how you live. I mean, we center our lives around Amazon now. And it's crazy at the time, people were saying like, who needs two day shipping? Come on, like you’re just going to the store and buy it. It's like right down there. Why are they going to like- is that really something people need? Does it need to go that fast? And now we're like, one day.
Eric Jorgenson: I can't get my [inaudible 25:04] delivered until 6.30 PM. How am I supposed to cook dinner?
Garrett Scott: Exactly. And there's like business models that’ll exist in that world that we can't even think of that like our grandkids will just be like, oOh my gosh, you lived like that? That's crazy. Yeah, but it's fun. I hope we get to live in that world and see what it changes.
Eric Jorgenson: It is so cool. I mean, it is the- I don't know if it's an order of magnitude- it’s somewhere between 5 and 10x better than a thought experiment that I've been running for a few years, which is like what- I do a lot of long road trips. And so, I'm like driving there, looking at all of these big ass trucks with drivers behind them, with like regulations about they have to stop every four hours and sleep every eight hours and all the costs associated with this. And I'm imagining like the Tesla Skate, a big 18-wheeler version that can drive autonomously, that's got a huge battery, that can hold a shipping container, that can drive 24 hours a day at extremely minimal cost. And you think about everything around you, everything that you eat, everything that you drink, everything that you can see has been trucked over and over and over again and weighed and like it's slept overnight. The cost of just getting the shit to you is so high. And imagine that falling by, I think the napkin math is like the transportation should fall by at least a third, maybe more. And that as a percentage of the cost of everything that you consume and the speed at which you can get it here just triples. So something that takes $10,000 and three days to cross the country for you, in even a world with just electric autonomous trucking, let alone the hyper logistics of the last mile, which as you said, is 40% of the cost, people really underestimate the value and the cost savings and the quality of life increase that's going to come from these totally invisible to them for the most part technological improvements.
Garrett Scott: Totally. If you think about it too, if you look at the food supply chain, that 40% last mile cost isn't just about making pears from Argentina cheaper. That is the reason it's hard to get local produce. So, if you can bring that down to zero, then the incremental cost between Argentinean pears- I honestly don't know if you can grow pears in the US. Pears may be a bad example. I'm not a pear expert. But other produce you can grow, and so you can get it from a local farmer for way cheaper. Because by that point, getting it from a grocery store or getting it from a farmer is about the same cost and time to get it to you. You've taken that huge incremental cost away and the whole local economy is able to work better instead of having to ship all these things from outside the city into the city to make it cheaper. So, I think that'd be really interesting, just like flourishing local economies, kind of like Shopify did for your friend being able to sell stuff online. It just gave them a distribution point that was so much easier. And now I buy way more stuff from friends than I did before that. Doing the same thing, making that local economy, my friend who makes salsa, I'm just going to buy the salsa from my friend. It's like, just ship it to me. It's at your house, like ship it to me. You take that whole distribution layer that's so hard to- I mean, it's crazy that we all drink the same flavor soda because distribution's so hard. It's like Coke is just like, all right, you’ve got five flavors. Like, good luck.
Eric Jorgenson: We're everywhere. Yeah. I think that the combination of this trend with the trend of this kind of long tail e-commerce where we don't have the- we're not all watching the same TV commercials anymore. Now we've all got different ads in our Instagram feed or whatever. And I'm like, oh no, I care a lot more about, I'd much rather eat masa chips than Doritos because they use beef tal or coconut oil or whatever. I am a health-oriented buyer of food and they are a health-oriented brand and that's great. And the logistics are like, I don't have to worry about whether it's stocked in the store because this network is taking care of it for me. And actually, as we like talk through this, I'm picturing it, I'm like, man, how much time, effort, and space do we waste merchandising things? I probably order Instacart two or three times for every time I go to the grocery store. I don't give a shit that somebody arranges the lettuce in an attractive way or like puts the cans of pears so that the labels are out. Like just pluck it from the distribution center, put it in the pipe, send it to my house. I know I'm going to buy the same, 80% of my grocery bill is going to be the same things that happens every time. Yeah, it is a really- there's a lot of cost savings that go into these invisible improvements.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, it is interesting. Like our kids are- we're going to tell our kids about a grocery store and they're going to be like, oh my gosh, they made you do the pick and packing yourself at the warehouse? You're like, yeah, I mean, kind of, we didn't see it that way, but yeah, I guess we were like working the warehouse.
Eric Jorgenson: They’re like, so you did like Ikea for food because Ikea will still be around for sure.
Garrett Scott: Oh yeah, of course. Swedish Meatball moat isn't going anywhere.
Eric Jorgenson: No. We'll do anything for those. So, tell me, like now that we've got a picture of this thing, what are the toughest technical problems?
Garrett Scott: I think some of the hardest things, the things we think a lot about is if you think about building an infrastructure layer of anything, you need this thing to work both from being able to be retrofit, being able to make sense on ROI. So, the cost has to be low. It's got to be reliable enough to last a couple decades. Otherwise, your ROI goes out the window. So, it's keeping everything really simple, keeping the modular pieces really small, that way we're not taking care of this huge suite of all these different pieces needed for all these different little applications. Sewage does this really well. You have like the basic toilet architecture that couples to this basic coupling that goes into- you get like that cobalt p-trap to handle solids. There's all these little things that are just so standardized. And it just works. It's crazy. If you think about it, we have a really good poop distribution system. In every city, you can send that poop like really to just one place, but it'll go there. That's crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: Very reliably.
Garrett Scott: Insanely reliably, we think, I guess, I don't know.
Eric Jorgenson: And the benefits, that's another, as we think about the invisible benefits, it is very easy to take for granted how incredibly flawless and how important that sewage system is. Like, that is one of the fundamental things that allows us all to like stay healthy and grow civilizations, like water, plumbing, even probably more fundamental than electricity. Amazing.
Garrett Scott: It is crazy. I heard someone say the other day, if the electrical grid went out, they were estimating the amount of deaths. And at first, I was like, okay, that's a little overdramatic. I don't think- I think it was like an eighth of the people in a city would die if the electricity was completely off. And I was like that's dramatic. That's not a real stat. But then they're going through, and I was like, oh my gosh, we rely on electricity so much. If we do lose the electrical grid, that is- every single piece of our lives is based on that grid working. It is just crazy how quickly, like that's a relatively new thing, and now our entire life is based on that thing working. It's just wild.
Eric Jorgenson: And increasingly, the internet is the same, like we rely on software, which relies on the internet, which relies on electricity and the level of dependencies, I mean, the uptime and the engineering that goes into that, to your point, is like so important and so incredible, and we're so grateful for it. But we have to be mindful that entropy is coming for us. If we don't continue to like maintain these things and improve them, continue to make our infrastructure better, the downsides can appear and can appear quickly. It's like that meme of like one COBOL program holding up the entire modern economy or some duct tape thing. But I appreciate that you're bringing like the simplicity and engineering piece to it.
Garrett Scott: I just want to say, that is all Canon. And just we have a great engineering team who thinks really, really critically about that, which is such a blessing. There's usually like a tension between biz dev and engineering where engineering wants to do cool things and biz dev wants to do cheap and like efficient things, and Canon's a great CEO. He understands the business side, he understands the engineering side. He does all that internal conflict management himself, which is so helpful. So that is all from them. I’m just blessed to have them.
Eric Jorgenson: That is an underrated skill and mental model, actually. So I'm working on this book on Elon, like a compilation of, just like the Almanac of Naval. And one of the things, talking about that, people are always like, what's unique about him? I don't know if this is well known or appreciated or a thing that people gloss over, but he's an incredible engineer, but he is as much of like an economics and finance brain as he is an engineer. And he's like, every other company on earth, there's a finance guy and there's an engineer and they have to discuss everything to come to an agreement. And they're always making trade-offs that both of them are angry about. He's like, I have all the variables of every trade-off in one head and I can make decisions faster and I can make the right trade-offs within a big picture. And there's no off compromises in there. So, it just shows the importance of having all the mental models in your head and having people who really deeply appreciate the disciplines, all of the disciplines and making synthesis across all of them to make a system like this work.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, a hundred percent. I think, it is interesting. I think sometimes we get a little too- I mean, having this like iconic founder of these hard tech companies I think is a little bit just like the front man is the rock star in a band. And it's a little annoying and it's because I think a lot of it comes down to like how media distribution used to work and you only had space for one person to get all the recognition. But I think it's also, to your point, it's because you need- it's so hard to communicate a lot of that tension. And so, one person who can balance all those different pieces of the business and have those internal conflicts themselves makes everything run more efficiently. I think for a variety of reasons, we've kind of taken the approach that the future of companies is run from a group of five of those people rather than a single person. I think you've seen this, and kind of like Open AI is a good example. But I think the future of companies is, for a couple of reasons, one, easier for all of them to get media recognition just with social media. Like we have more room for more people to be known from a company. But yeah, I think also the ability for just like- I think something that founders in our generation maybe are better at than others is just like that they don't need to be the front man. They're able to work together a lot easier. I don't know. I've just seen a lot of companies that work better that way than kind of the single dictator.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And sometimes that's the reality even if you don't see it. It's more Rolling Stones than Cher or something. So it sounds like... I love the analogy to the plumbing and sewer system because at one point, that was all technology. But as you talked me through it, I'm picturing it, I'm like, yeah, there's a lot of really simple just like physics machines. The water goes in, the water comes out. It happens 1,000 times out of 1,000. And it's very mechanical and very simple. And as I'm picturing what you're doing here, you have to build a new form factor and you have some tough interchanges and stuff to do, but you're not, and maybe in some areas you are, and I would love to hear about them, but there's not unsolved technical problems in here. There's not a ton of things where there's not some prior engineering solution. It's just a challenge of building the simplest, most reliable, cheapest, most like rugged, bulletproof version of this system. And the tough part it sounds like is the actual implementation and the distribution and the partnerships.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, that's like frustrating as an engineer. It was like so much more fun to be like, and it's so much more comforting to be on the cutting edge. You're like, okay, there's this thing that's never been made before. And no one's going to care if I don't make it. Like, I'm going to try my hardest. And then if we do it, it's like, oh my gosh, we discovered this new thing. I think what we're doing is more like Lego blocks. Like all the Lego blocks are there. You just got to put it- there's a few combinations where they work. We’ve got to find one of those combinations where we put the right Lego blocks together and then this thing works and goes.
Eric Jorgenson: This is a pattern I think, a lot of people- and your company to me feels very much like a deep tech company. Like you have a bold vision of the future. You're not technically maybe like doing a thing, any individual engineering piece that's never been done before, but you are definitely building a system that's never been done before. And that actually characterizes a lot of super high-tech cutting-edge companies like Atom Limbs and General Fabrication. There's a lot of technology fragments out there that are either cutting-edge or are actually 20 years old, but no one's just ever packaged it with the right stuff and commercialized it and done the hard work to go to market, get the partners aligned, get governments involved, and get the thing out there. And that's where the world really changes and where the value is really created. So, I'm psyched to see you guys doing this. So let's talk about the- if the hardest part is the distribution and the wedges and the alignment, let's talk through that. What's the maze like on that side of things?
Garrett Scott: It's changing all the time. That is the thing that we have a monthly meeting every month. We've now kicked it to quarterly. I'm hoping that is because we figured more of the maze out, but it was like to step back and be like, okay, are we going down? Cause you kind of get one or two shots at it. So, we're always trying to make sure we're going down the right path. I think right now, where we are, what we think is the right stair step is to go after this market called instant pickup. That's what we call it internally. But it's automating people's pickup product. So pickup is this like, it's kind of like this new USB hub for stores and restaurants where this is how people are interacting. Starbucks is a great example. They have the massive pickup product. It's also how delivery drivers interact with restaurants. That's like so much of the store used to be dine in and drive through. And now it's mostly drive through and pickup. But pickup remains the thing that is really expensive. It's not a great experience. It's usually slower than drive through. It's more energy than drive through. But you've already ordered the thing. It's like done, whether that's you’re at a grocery store, and it's already picked and packed, or where the food's already made or your coffee's already made. It really should be the fastest, best experience. So, because we've put so much work into decreasing the cost and decreasing the implementation of all these components, we can build a really cheap automated system for doing that. So, the goal is to, whether it's a grocery store or a restaurant, make that pickup time under 30 seconds. So, you come in, don't have to get out of your car when you're at a restaurant, pick up your item and keep going. And that's something we tested.
Eric Jorgenson: What does that interaction look like?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, I don't know if we're talking about that.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm always asking for trade secrets. That's going to happen.
Garrett Scott: I don't think it's a big trade secret. We just have a- it's really similar to, have you ever been at a pharmacy? Like a CVS pharmacy, not the outside lane where you're picking up from the pneumatic tube, which is great, but you’ve got to like really reach out there. Pharmacy has this great drawer that comes up right against your car and you're just like, boop. It's basically that. That but automated is probably the closest way.
Eric Jorgenson: Very cool. Okay. So what are the wedges in that market? Like who are the people who are doing the most of those that you can go work with?
Garrett Scott: That is- that right there is the biggest reason we have not been able to talk about stuff lately, which is so annoying because I love, like I used to fight with our IP lawyers, and they're like, you can't show this, or you've lost your IP rights, and it's like, fuck. Like, I'm not- I'm not going to like not show what we're doing because I don't want someone to strap on skateboard wheels onto a metal fixture. Like it's fine, we'll lose that IP. But when you're working with like we've gotten lucky enough to work with partners and kind of co-developing with them, and that has been- I have not figured out how to be transparent and talk about what we're doing a lot while also balancing working with partners that haven't been announced yet. That's been like a real tension.
Eric Jorgenson: Did you guys have a thing with Wendy's announced?
Garrett Scott: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They really pushed to, they were the one that like pushed to like, hey, we're just going to announce this. And so like, yeah, it was great. It's very helpful.
Eric Jorgenson: How did that come about? I mean, that feels like a huge, like a dream partnership for a young Pipedream.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, totally. So, I don't know if I ever talked about it. It was just a cold email.
Eric Jorgenson: Cold email for life.
Garrett Scott: 100 percent. We've gotten some, I mean, hopefully these come out in the next like six months, but we've got some crazy things from cold emails. Wendy's is a good example, but yeah, it's crazy what you can do with cold email.
Eric Jorgenson: As we're picturing, you're trying to build this whole giant internet of hyper logistics, and it sounds like the first link in the chain, the first router, I don't know what the right analogy is there, is this instant pickup thing.
Garrett Scott: Yeah, you nailed it. That's the way we think about it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's just instant pickup.
Garrett Scott: So, we think about, Canon has a great analogy where like any big protocol that comes up, the people who win it are the ones who capture the, there's like an equation of the amount of volume that passes through you. So, when we're thinking about, we think about building a network based on nodes. So, you want to pick nodes that have the highest amount of volume flowing through them. So right now, that's not middle mile, which is like connecting in between different places. That's like there's a lot of volume going through cities but not through that modality, but there is a lot of volume going through pickup and delivery in store so that those are great nodes to capture. And then once you build up that base of nodes, then being able to extend it from there, you have a lot of options. So, we really think about it as like this is an inevitable network that is going to exist sometime in the next five to ten years. And what can we do to both make it happen sooner and capture the biggest piece of it as it grows? So instant pickups is this great thing that people want now, it's profitable per unit, people really want it. And also, it's a good business and also it's a wedge to build a better business.
Eric Jorgenson: This is something that I think you guys are being really smart about that also a lot of even really ambitious deep tech founders underestimate the importance of sequencing, like finding a plateau. You can like scrabble up to this plateau of economic stability and then establish it and expand it and then scrabble up another, like take the technical risks one at a time instead of like we're going to network a whole city, it's going to cost $200 million, and then like maybe it'll work. So I think this is really smart.
Garrett Scott: Tough though, man. It's tough. It's tough to see because you can also sequence too small. We spent a lot of time- I've never heard anyone talk about this. I've always been inspired by Walt Disney's flywheel. I don't even know if he actually made it. But that thing rocked.
Eric Jorgenson: We love a flywheel.
Garrett Scott: God, so great. But it is like we... So, we saw that one day and just like, I don't know, I saw it. It was just like it clicked. And so, our monthly meeting that we modeled, it was super early on, it was maybe like the first one or two months. So, there wasn't much of a flywheel, but it was like, okay, we exist as this unit to build something and make money. We need people to know about it. So, we need like social media distribution. From there, we'll build social trust. That social trust will convert into intros to VCs. And then the VC money goes back into the company. The company kicks out engineering. The engineering creates content. The content… And it's like, okay, there really is a flywheel here. And it really helps you model, okay, inputs and outputs, what actually matters to spinning this thing. So, we've kind of kept that tradition. Now it's like this big, massive flywheel that's so helpful in like understanding what inputs and outputs are in the company.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Step four, go on Eric's podcast. Dude, the flywheels are so- it's so helpful to identify when you're putting something- when you're wasting effort, when you're doing something that just kind of like spins off and doesn't add momentum to the core system of the business. Okay. I think given all of this context, I'm now very curious, who do you have to be for this to become the company that you start? Like, how did you become the person that is doing this?
Garrett Scott: Oh man, I have no idea. I'm going to phone my therapist in real quick.
Eric Jorgenson: That's for the biographers to answer, right?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, yeah, totally. I have no idea. I think if I was to like backtrack, it was, I grew up in the South, pretty religious, grew up homeschooled, like super sheltered. But I loved like making things. I think you're the same way. It's like making something and then someone giving you money for it is like this holy, religious transaction. It's like someone liked your thing more than they liked their money, there's no better thought that you made this thing. So it's like that thing was just the coolest. And I was like, okay, well, if I want to do that, I should make like the coolest things ever. I'm going to go be an engineer. And then the money takes care of itself. And then realized as I went to college and halfway through college was like, oh, I've got this backwards. The real key is putting the business model around innovation. That's actually how you win. So, I am in the wrong place. And so, when I left college, I decided, okay, I'm not going to get an engineering job. That feels like a dead end and the wrong type of flywheel. Like people really get stuck there. And so, I came to one of my professors like, is there such thing as a part-time engineering job? At the time, they're like, no, what are you talking about? So, I was like, okay, well, I guess I'll just not get a job and make money through business. It's kind of like pushing a baby bird out of a nest and it will fly before it hits the ground. I will make money from a business before my rent's due at the end of the month, or I hope so. And so, I did that and then eventually found a part-time engineering job at a prosthetic startup. But I was just like cranking stuff out and really learning how to- like what matters and how to see PMF versus not PMF and scale sales. And kind of like that's where I learned cold emailing, just like a ton of cold emailing. But I had all these little like I learned to code and built these SaaS businesses. I was a big bubbler before Bubble was cool. I love Bubble so much. That's like this no-code platform that just like, it rocks. It's, to this day, I think, the best way to build software. I'll die on that hill. But I made like all these apps and they did fine. It wasn't a blockbuster, but I made my rent. And so that's where I really like learned and got into the Paul Graham essays. And that was, I went down that rabbit hole and realized like, oh, this is a whole asset class for like early ventures. So just learned a lot. And I was like, okay, I want to take one big swing. And I think I learned really early on, you can make something, and then like 30 days after you make something, if it's lucky enough to be successful, you don't own that thing anymore, it owns you. And you're just kind of like keeping the wheels on the wagon, but it's going down the hill. So, it's like, if I'm going to spend the next 10 years of my life doing something, I want to pick something that's going to be something I love owning me. Like I am so fine being subservient to this thing. And I'm okay with 10 years of failure just because I love this thing so much. So, I decided to take two years off. The company I was doing part-time engineering for asked me to come on full-time to run biz dev. So, I thought, okay, great, two years, I'll learn to scale a startup at that startup. And I'll also shut down everything else I'm doing and just use that two years to find the best tenure opportunity. And it was just during that that last mile logistics just felt like that thing that by 2030, I'd look back and be like, oh, thank goodness I was working in that industry at that time. It was like no one was working in it. And it was like an obvious thing that by 2030, it would be taking off at least some. And Jeff Bezos has this great quote that always stuck with me. He says it's so much better, but it's like some version of, you want to be in industries where you know where the puck is going. So, logistics is that. People want things cheaper and faster. They always will. No matter what they say, even a small increment of a little easier, little cheaper, little faster goes such a long way and that's just always going to be true. So, it's easy to like, okay, I'm going to go in, I'm going to build in this space, and as long as we can make logistics a little cheaper, a little easier, a little faster, who knows how big it will be, but we'll win a little bit. I think we're like six months in when I was like, okay, that's what I'm going to do. Then the next year and a half was like, okay, but what do we build? And it was like eventually we got to what Pipedream is now.
Eric Jorgenson: What was that year and a half of like, we think we want to tackle this problem, improvements are a no-brainer, which I love as a place to start, to, okay, here's the huge, this whole space of things that we could tackle to try to improve this? How did you narrow that down to what you eventually started building?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, I got super lucky. The two years was I really wanted to learn to scale a startup. There wasn't as much forethought in, but I see it now, where it's so good to not build. Like I am just such a builder. I want to go after things. Like I have an idea. I'm just going to build it. I'm going to test it. I love that. It's just so fun. But if we had done that, we'd have a drone company, 100%. Because I love drones so much, I'm blinded by it. I think drones are just the coolest, man. And so, we thought, okay, last mile logistics is where we need to be. We're like, bang, drone company time. We've done drone projects before, and they're just so fun and just the best. But we realized, okay, there's so many people doing drones. In a drone world, what else is going to be needed? That's really what we should look at. Let's assume that they will happen soon and the people who are leading them are going to win. And then it's some version of, there's not a huge space, I don't know if this is true, our theory was that there's a small window where drones are lucrative before they push commodity right after regulations lift, right before. I think you kind of see this in weapons is like you used to have these super high tech drones. But then once you started to figure this out and then everything just pushes so cheap and the software is off the shelf, then the whole thing becomes pretty commodified. I don't know if that's where it'll go, but we felt like we weren't as clear on that as we should be if we're going to start something for the next 10 years. So then we went back to, okay, what are the other pieces of this network that's going to be needed and a high volume, high speed, high uptime kind of mainline pipe. And then also being able to go in and out of buildings was something that a lot of customers and cities told us as we're talking to people. And just like banged our heads on the wall, looking at bike lane robots and sidewalk robots, self-driving car robots, low altitude drones. Oh, the coolest one, Canon had this concept for an electrical wire cable robot, riding electrical wires. I think that's our Midwest roots coming out, where like electrical wires everywhere, might as well use them. But yeah, eventually we were like, okay, if cities have already said, best way to do mass distribution is underground pipes, and anything that's above ground eventually needs to go underground because it's the most efficient, safest, reliable, maybe that's where the secret is. If it was like, if we didn't have two years, we would have never diligenced it. Because it was just like that's the dumbest thing we've ever heard of. Like what a regulatory nightmare. It's going to be so cost prohibitive. Like if fiber is taking this long, something bigger is going to take even longer. But let's go diligence that. Let's ask cities what they think. Let's ask people who put in infrastructure what they think. And everyone had an answer similar to, well, that thing I'm an expert in is actually pretty easy. It happens all the time. No problem. That person's thing is going to suck, though. It's like, okay, everyone- it's just a bunch of stigmas all coupled together. This is actually pretty easy, relatively. And so yeah, that's when we're like, okay, let's just go for it.
Eric Jorgenson: I fucking love that. I love that you did the work to go tackle every individual assumption and not just let them get tangled up together and be like, ah, that's a messy knot. And I'm sure to some extent, embraced the fact that like it'll be tough and probably slow, but also that's a moat. And that is just more proof that this thing needs to be done and that somebody with broad shoulders and a thick head needs to go after it and get it done. I love that. And I hope more people follow that example and are encouraged by you breaking through this wall. That's amazing. I would love to, as we wind down here, I'd like to ask the 50-year question. So, you're a few years in. You've spent a lot of time thinking about what this could look like. And we are very consistently terrible under estimators of what can happen over like even 20 years. So, 50 should really stretch us. But most of us will live to see that. So, what do you think hyper logistics looks like in 50 years?
Garrett Scott: Yeah, great question. I think automated production gets so good, and I think we've always had this idea of this everything machine existing in our homes, like desktop 3D printers were supposed to be that and like desktop 3D printers are like early versions of VR or like maybe super early versions of AI. We don't even use the same methodology or materials or anything, like it's all so different. But the idea that a machine can make any shape or almost any shape is just so magical. It's like, yeah, that thing is going to exist somewhere. But I think, if you look at even like computing, everything pushes to really co-located high power, always on machines that then get distributed nearby. Like your water, sewage, electrical, like we don't produce that thing in our homes. We produce it nearby and it gets piped in. Same thing with computers. It's like the compute me and you are using is like 10 percent on our computer and 90 percent- I have no idea if that's true. Some version of that, like our computers are a thing client for the compute that's happening nearby. And I think something really similar happens where a lot of what comes into a city comes into the warehouse area and then it’s all co-located and we're just piping in raw materials. So where we're getting the plastics, the seedlings, the very base layer things. And then we have really efficient automated farming, we have really efficient clothes production, we have really efficient like these machines that can just build anything. Then you order it, and it gets sent to you. And then when you're done with it, you send it back. I think like that at some point exists and it's kind of, it's gnarly. I think it's so cool. Like you'll have a shirt spun up for you and then we'll be so good at disassembling that shirt, it'll be made to be disassembled. So that yarn is in some crazy configuration for you, something that no one else is probably going to want, but it's never made since the manufacturer because you have to manufacture so many of them. And then if you don't use it, it just gets thrown in the landfill. We'll be so good at assembling and then disassembling, you can just have anything you want sent to you for basically free. I think between that and AI, the amount of human effort you need to put in to accumulating the things that you need to survive, that ratio, just goes all the way down. And the amount of human effort you need to put in to get the clothes and the food and the medicine and all the stuff you need is so little. I think there's a real chance to get there in the next 50 years.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. I mean, I think about the nanotech and the molecular recycling stuff, but you're right, it's probably unlikely to happen in our house. And so, the combination of hyper logistics and either city or neighborhood or something, like, yeah, reconfiguration of physical materials could be really, really cool. That's fascinating.
Garrett Scott: And then if you're relying on that, there's other things that need to happen, but I think we'll be a lot less tied to a single location. I think like if you have, if all your stuff is in the cloud, just like all your data is in the cloud, like this laptop used to be this sacred thing. It's like, oh my gosh, all my stuff is there. I can't lose that laptop. Now, if I lost my laptop, I'd be like bummed because I have to get a new laptop and I don't have laptop money sitting around. But all my stuff is just in the cloud. Like, I don't care. I'm not sentimental to that thing. I think the ability to like, even a family, like with kids, being able to just have all their stuff all the time, being able to get to you really easily means you could just like hop around and live in different places. That one may not be true, but I think it's a possibility. I think our kids will be tied to their location less and maybe they will want to live by their friends in another city for a couple months and then come back to another city with some other friends for a couple months.
Eric Jorgenson: Very cool. Okay, who are like dream partners, dream opportunities, and in general, how can all of us who are sort of like listening, watching, and supporting you be useful to the mission?
Garrett Scott: Oh, yeah. Our biggest problem is always finding great people. And we have just like- I don't know how I'm so lucky to work with the people I get to work with, but if you want to work with just people that you're in awe of every day, about how their brain works and how good they are and have that rub off on you, and you're one of those people that is just like, people would say like, oh man, they're just good at whatever they do. They're just like, I don't know what it is. If you want to be somewhere where that is rewarded, highlighted, and then external people will know about it, we want to work with you so bad. Or if you know someone like that, let me know. That is our biggest, that's always our biggest problem. So that would be the most helpful. And right now, if you can tell, I'm a little tired, we need some more people. So I’d appreciate it. My wife would appreciate it. The team would appreciate it. I got to get a little more sleep. I got my blanket and pillow in the background there. But yeah, that would be so wonderful.
Eric Jorgenson: If you want to go somewhere where great co-workers will rub off on you, DM Garrett.
Garrett Scott: I heard it. I heard it when I said it. I was like all right. That's going to get edited out.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, I'm not editing that out at all. In your dreams. That's a closer. It doesn't get any better than that.
Garrett Scott: The title of the podcast.
Eric Jorgenson: Seriously, thank you. Thank you so much for biting off an incredible challenge, for doing the hard work, for sleeping in your office. I salute anybody with a pillow and blanket in there. You guys are building awesome stuff. I hope everybody follows along, supports. I can't wait to see one of these things in action. And it is yet another seedling in the forest of amazing visions of the future that we're all growing here. So it's very cool.
Garrett Scott: I appreciate it. This was such a great time. This is such a great podcast. I forgot that we were even recording it.
Eric Jorgenson: That's how we like to be.
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