Rolling Fun #10: Capitalism is Hard, Natural Gas From Sunshine, and "Blimps" (That Work This Time)
We reflect on the emotional aftermath of a high-stakes deal that didn’t land, and how to keep building when the shot doesn’t fall. We talk about navigating failure, maintaining conviction, and showing up for each other through chaos.
We also share updates on some of the most fascinating companies we’ve backed recently: from genetic engineering to airships (Airship) and renewable energy (Terraform Industries), and reflect on what it means to operate businesses while making bold bets on the future.
Links to Platforms:
We discuss:
Why personal networks matter most when raising money quickly for big deals
New investments in companies building genetically engineered animals, advanced airships, and solar-powered synthetic natural gas
How real operational experience shapes the way we invest and support founders
The balance of optimism and realism required to keep taking shots in business
Real talk on navigating hard decisions, betting on sci-fi ideas, and deciding where to spend our time.
Quotes from Al:
“Just keep taking the shots. A shooter’s gotta shoot.”
“Sometimes you take the shot, do everything right, and the ball still doesn’t go in.”
“There’s no classy way to advertise, ‘Hey, your favorite store died—but we’re a good rebound.’”
“Capitalism is an unforgiving mistress.”
“Personal relationships were the most valuable asset I had in that deal.”
“Sometimes I think, ‘I should be inventing Facebook 2,’ but here I am—investing in fabric.”
“I’ve never worked on a deal that hard. It should have gone my way… and didn’t.”
“You wake up the next morning and it didn’t happen, but I still have a great family, and my business is still running.”
“It's hard until it isn’t—and even when it isn’t, it’s still freaking hard.”
Quotes from Bo:
“We’re actual operators—curious about what’s possible with technology—and that makes us better investors.”
“On a Thursday, ‘This deal is happening.’ Then Tuesday? ‘It’s over. We lost.’”
“We have a unique amount of empathy for founders—because we know how hard this shit is.”
“If you can pull it off, it’s transformational. And that’s awesome.” (on Airship)
“A blimp is not a quadcopter to carry Al’s big ass—it’s an elegant, slow-moving blimp.”
“There’s a lot of industries still doing 90/10 in-store sales. That blew my mind.”
“It’s a real ‘software is eating the world’ moment—but finally arriving at the mining industry.”
“When you’re building something that matters, you’re playing the long game—even if the outcome is uncertain.”
“The people who make glow-in-the-dark fish… now they’re building unicorns. And yeah, it’s gonna happen.”
Want to invest in early-stage startups together?
When new technologies meet the market, the world changes for the better. That's why we invest in obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies.
We write small checks to 15-20 very different startups each year. Previous investments include Aalo Atomics, Atom Limbs, Ouros Energy, Stell Engineering Airship, Terraform Industries, Longshot, Dirac, Occam (stealth), Atomic Industries. and more.
Our Website has background on the fund, our past deals, and more.
*Startup investing is risky, illiquid, and not for the faint-of-heart. Be warned.
Accredited Investors: reply to this email, and we'll get you into our deals starting this quarter.
Learn more about Al Doan, Bo Fishback, and Rolling Fun:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Episode transcript:
Bo Fishback: Peanut butter M&Ms are amazing. One of the great candies you can buy.
Al Doan: The crunch of peanuts.
Bo Fishback: Those peanut butter M&Ms are, it's basically Reese's cups and peanut M&Ms in one.
Eric Jorgenson: It's like peanut butter cups, but you can get more of them in your mouth at once.
Al Doan: Have you guys tried, and this is not being pandering, but the Feastables peanut butter cups?
Bo Fishback: No, but this is just you selling us on some Jimmy shit, isn't it?
Al Doan: No, it's like legit great. It's like a thicker chocolate. And so, you have like a hard chocolate shell around your peanut butter... So go to Target or something and grab them.
Bo Fishback: My son is the target demographic for your boy, Mr. Beast. And he's like, oh, Feastables, we got to get them. And then this other dude makes some candy that's like low sugar or whatever, who's another YouTube guy, Ryan Trahan. Do you guys know him? He's like another big YouTube guy. These guys all figured out, like when you get a bunch of adolescents, you can sell them candy. That's a working recipe just to be clear.
Al Doan: I guess his first chocolate, he like focus grouped normal grownups. And like they chose not the creamy sweet chocolate. And so when they put it in front of 14 year olds, they're like, this sucks. And they like went way back the other way. They're like, this is the best chocolate.
Eric Jorgenson: Actually, they want sweet milk.
Al Doan: No, but the peanut butter cups are fantastic.
Bo Fishback: Okay, I'll try them. I like it.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm dialed in.
Bo Fishback: Let's go Jimmy.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm becoming a Jimmy fan.
Al Doan: I like Jimmy more and more.
Eric Jorgenson: I was Jimmy Ignorant, and now I'm a Jimmy fan.
Al Doan: As he gets real grown-ups around him to help him run his business... I think the stuff he's doing now is more interesting than I've ever seen, where it's like, giving people their sight. He still gamifies it and makes it all goofy, but he's doing very interesting philanthropic stuff that I'm like, all right, man, if you can use your power to like give a bunch of people water...
Eric Jorgenson: He's a machine. His story is good, too... No announcements to be made, but I'm interested.
Al Doan: Wait, what?
Eric Jorgenson: I said no announcements.
Al Doan: What announcement would you make? Are you going to die, Jimmy?
Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to need a big loan from somebody. A real big loan.
Bo Fishback: 3 billion. Take us there, Eric. Kick us off.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, so among the many series of fortunate events that have happened over the last year...
Bo Fishback: Since you've last heard from us.
Eric Jorgenson: Since you've last heard our dulcet tones together as a recorded threesome united, Al had a...
Al Doan: This could be any number of things.
Eric Jorgenson: Al had an incredible adventure.
Al Doan: Yeah, I'm going to run a marathon. My wife signed me up for a marathon in October.
Bo Fishback: Wait, is this true?
Al Doan: I'm a 6'7 giant.
Bo Fishback: This October?
Al Doan: Yes.
Eric Jorgenson: Can wives do that? This is terrible news.
Bo Fishback: Please consider this as Al's last podcast.
Al Doan: I'm not a runner. I've had all the runner's moments, like pooping in a ditch, wiping with grass at mile 12. It's been insane. It's got to look at you. No, but my max I've ever done is I did a half marathon last year. And so, I can muscle 13. I can just muscle it out. And max right now, I've done 12.
Bo Fishback: It’s a grind though, bro. You're on it.
Eric Jorgenson: They say, what was it, if you can run 15, you can do a marathon.
Bo Fishback: I believe 16 is the wall... 16 is the place.
Al Doan: And then it’s just like, my feet just keep- honestly, it's run- My wife talks about a runner's high. I've never got that. I'm grinding. Like if I do a three mile run still today, I'm like, this sucks. But it also sucks doing a 12 mile run.
Bo Fishback: Al, men our size do not have a runner's high. That is for small men and women. They get it, but we don’t, we're ineligible.
Al Doan: Small men and women.
Bo Fishback: You have to run 160 miles if you want a runner's high, and so it's just not achievable.
Al Doan: Proportionately, I have to go so much further.
Bo Fishback: Yeah, no, that's never happening.
Al Doan: Yeah. I think it's just a trick to get me down underweight. She's trying to get me in a personal aircraft.
Bo Fishback: That's right. No, this is just all the drone conspiracy.
Al Doan: It’s all a scam to get a quadcopter that's going to carry me to work seven miles.
Eric Jorgenson: She's playing the long game. I like that.
Al Doan: Well, and it's hard because she's looking better than ever. She's looking real good right now, and I'm like, I feel self-conscious now. Dude, coming out of the pregnancy era and stuff, I was like, I'm a freaking rock star. You know what? You're lucky. You're lucky you got me. Okay? Okay? And now we're in hot Drea era, and I'm like, hold on.
Bo Fishback: The tables have turned. The tables have turned.
Al Doan: All right, I'm back at the gym. Okay, this is a little routine. We're just going to do- I'm trying fruit only till lunchtime. I'm like changing up the breakfast stuff. I don't know what's happening.
Eric Jorgenson: She comes back and she's like, babe, good news, I signed you up for a marathon. And you're like, what? How am I supposed to read into this situation? What are you trying to tell me?
Bo Fishback: I know how to read it.
Al Doan: A man could never. A man could never, never sign his wife up for a marathon, which she wasn't even running.
Eric Jorgenson: That's the male vacuum for Christmas. Congratulations. I got you a marathon.
Al Doan: ...She absolutely did.
Eric Jorgenson: I came up with a really good thing for us to do together, which is you going and running a marathon.
Al Doan: Let's have a little companionship goal for you.
Bo Fishback: Seems right.
——
Al Doan: It’s funny, man, because there’s some real ones around you that like as soon as you say, Eric and Bo, you guys were both ones that as soon as I’m like, hey, I’m trying to do this thing, can you help? People, your tribe sort of rallies around you and goes... I called my wealth management guy, and he's like, oh, sorry, I don't know any rich people that would be interested in participating in any kind of deal. That's weird. And I'm like, you guys are a bunch of douches. But like your buddies, man, you got a couple of guys that like when the deal makes sense and everything's there and it should happen, that like we just go to work and make it happen for each other. And it's such a great feeling of that community and the tribe. Like we were on the phone I think at your baby shower, I was like, I met a buddy. We almost closed the thing. We're like, yes... okay, now I'm going to intro you to these guys.
Eric Jorgenson: That whole period, I was like 20 hours a week working for a speculative deal for a company that I didn't even work at. I was like, this isn't-
Bo Fishback: To buy a bankrupt thing. It was wild.
Eric Jorgenson: This could be a massive inflection point in Al's business and life to like get this deal closed. And if I burn 80 hours going to bat for him with everybody that I know that might be interested. And it's like an amazing deal. Like, I think it could have been an unprecedented, unbelievably good deal.
Al Doan: In the Mormon religious tradition, we've got this story of like the brother of Jared. And this story, he's like sailing across the sea and God tells him to build these boats that are like fully enclosed submarines, essentially. And he goes to God with two problems. He's like, so how do I get air in there? And he's like, cut a hole. And if you open it and water comes in, put the hole back. He's like, all right, and what about light? God says, go figure out the light thing. You tell me what you want me to do. And he comes back with like 16 stones. And he's like, God, can you touch my stones, and they'll glow all the way there? And so, the story is in my head, because I'm like, man, what a stupid idea. This brother of Jared had to feel like such an idiot. Where like God can show him a potato with two wires that lights the light bulb. He's like, can you make my rocks glowy? And I came out of this conviction that I'm like, yeah, we're in a space of abundance. We're supposed to be doing great stuff and aggressively doing amazing things up here. I'm investing in towns that I'm never going to get a return on. I'll never be able to sell freaking downtown Hamilton for anything. But like, I'm building these things and these like monuments to community and stuff that I just want the world to be a better place. So I'm like, I have conviction that like the space [?] was supposed to be a thing. And I'm sorry, God, but my best idea is fabric. Can you make this rock glowy for me? You can show- I should be doing Facebook version two. I should be inventing, like why aren’t we AI researchers making $250 million a year? Instead, we're cutting it out on fabric, and here we are. It was like a great soul-searching moment. Like, dude, honestly, almost, like I'm not even kidding, an hour or two difference in something would have changed everything for us.
Eric Jorgenson: When we talked right after, I feel like you said you dove for home two steps too early.
Al Doan: That's what it felt like.
Eric Jorgenson: I was wondering if you learned anything about the deal, the process, the like- Is there anything that you would actually do differently?
Al Doan: Well, you hear about when a husband and wife, if they have a kid and the kid dies, a lot of those end in divorce because the immediate thought is, I want to blame somebody for this tragedy. And me and my leadership team, I kind of had this moment where I was like, oh, my instinct is to say, you should have gone on a plane, and you tried to play hardball with them. You should have... we should have done a... But really, dude, we did everything right. We did everything right, and it didn't fall our way. And that's why like the basketball analogy really sits with me because... what would you... Hey, what would you do different to make that shot next time? It's like, dude, nothing. I’d take the shot. I was aiming for the hoop. I wanted it to go in also. And there's no- for us, there was no big missteps. We had a couple like big challenges that got thrown in our way with some crappy funding partners that did some stuff and things blew up. But we mitigated, we fixed, we marched on, found crazy last-minute solutions that pulled this stuff together and let us all do it. And we had a great look, took a great shot. And so, the instinct to blame was so jarring to me though, because like I hadn't been in that spot very often where like somebody screwed something up because this should have happened. And letting that go and not needing to like have that be a thing, I think, was a big deal for me and my leadership team as we were like talking through it. Because instead we got to be like, we're not going to see a next one. There's not another $2 billion fabric company that's even out there. And so, we’ll never get a shot at that scale and that opportunity again, which is a huge bummer, but like we did it right. We played as good of a game as the cute little quilt shop in Northwest Missouri could possibly play. And so like, the business lessons were all entirely like, yeah, man, I can't think of a single hard left turn that life's given me in the past that I would look back on now and say, ah, it really screwed me. And so like, that's my big lesson. It's like, even in the moment where I look at this and I'm like, this was supposed to be... the story, it was going to be a- dude, I had the PowerPoint deck. It was going to be a great presentation. I was going to give it to everybody and just be like, and if you just believe, and if you really are committed, great things happen, and you can do anything, if you believe it, if you dream it, you can do it.
Eric Jorgenson: You too can own Joann Fabrics.
Al Doan: That's right. And now I've got the story of like amazing opportunity opened up, incredible thing happened, incredible thing happened, incredible thing happened. And then it didn't, the putt didn't drop. And like there's a lesson in there too. It's not as interesting or exciting of a business lesson, but the lessons just like, man, like any time spent thinking about the deal that didn't happen is a waste at this point. You just got to keep moving on. So, I don't know. I don't know what lesson you want to take out of it, but for me, it was like, I was real shook. You guys saw. I was shaken up.
Eric Jorgenson: He needed so many sandwiches.
Bo Fishback: And now he gets to run a marathon to get them all...
Al Doan: And now I’m paying the price. Yeah. But just like, man, just keep taking the shots. Like a shooter's got to shoot. You got to keep shooting. Stay in it. Yeah. Something in there. We're in a basketball facility.
Bo Fishback: That's true.
Al Doan: Dude, yeah. I'm going to be the guy that's like, I invented Napster. You just don't know it. You screwed me, telling the story...
Eric Jorgenson: You mean Spotify?
Al Doan: No, Napster. We tell this story in college. Oh, you kids, you wouldn't know me. I was going to be a millionaire.
Eric Jorgenson: I hear Sean Parker is actually doing okay... Worked out. He took that second shot.
Al Doan: And he took the second shot. And that made all the difference. It's hard not to be cheesy or nostalgic about any of it, too, because there's no happy ending. But in business, a lot of times there is no happy ending, but we got to be excited to be trying and doing stuff.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, you came to this deal with a position of strength, too, in the sense of it was nowhere near life and death for you. It's all upside. It's like we can do something incredible if we get it, but like, okay, just back to business as usual.
Al Doan: You wake up the next morning and it doesn't happen, it's like I still got a great family. My business is still running just as well as it's ever run. Everything's good. Everything's good. But also I'm pretty sad for this thing that didn't happen. And it's funny too, man, you get- like diving into some of this stuff, coming from the venture world where you're like, hey, I can go and create all this opportunity to do this thing, dealing with like a bankrupt asset was so different because all the financial models are built around like, it's like people doing crappy storage deals in Atlanta or something. They look at it and they're like, oh, I'll give you... we got a bunch of offers for like 80/20 money. We own 80% of it because we're the only money in and we're doing this and this and this. And I'm like, I'll put a little money in, but like... I need the money to go and do it. And they're like- I'm like, but I'm not going to give you 80%. Like you can have 80% until I make all the money back four times or something. But I'd never stared down the barrel of like such crappy terms either. It was really shocking. I'm just like, oh... And they're not- I mean, the sophisticated investors were like very quick to be like, hey, look, it looks like this here, looks like this in four years. Like, let's get you squared making money. We need you incentivized to knock this out of the park. But man, there's a lot of just crappy investors out there that like the terms coming back crazy. And then you hear about people that do deals like that. They sell their whole soul for 20 million bucks that they own 3% of. And I'm like, why would you do that? You'd be better off working at the corporate office of Arby's or something. Get out of here.
Eric Jorgenson: Certainly, that'd make the- the tight timeline, I think people smell that and they're like, oh, he'll take whatever. And so that worked against you.
Al Doan: Yeah. It was very interesting though, man. Everybody's got some crazy story about buying some crazy bankrupt asset and how that worked. And I'm like, all right, yeah. It was this whole new world I got to like... I think I did like 120 meetings over the course of those four weeks, just like one after another. My poor assistant, dude, was just back to back to back in these things. And I'm like just churning through it and had- Dude, great networks opened up though, like got into some big family office folks. And I can say, I'm like, I'm looking for the rich uncle that doesn't care about due diligence that just wants to give me some money and get a great return. And there's not a lot of those out there. It turns out people want to talk to folks.
Eric Jorgenson: You can't ask for no due diligence.
Al Doan: Well, the due diligence, so the due diligence on the deal is like it was a huge company. It's now dead. But the trailing 12 month revenue is $2 billion. The website is operating today. I would like to keep it operating. And then go put product in it. But like, it's bankrupt, technically. So, like in everybody's mind, it's resetting to zero, and they're not sure. It was really fascinating dynamics in all this where like, yeah, we may email millions and millions of people, and nobody wants to buy fabric anymore, even though it's the same fabric. Like, that could happen. I don't think that’s going to happen. I got a good hunch that we're onto something. Like, oh, I don't know. I'm like, all right, I can't convince you. But in the end, we found people that believed in it and were super supportive and like the perfect deal- we got everything we wanted. It was awesome.
Eric Jorgenson: And then they took a lower bid for a worse outcome.
Al Doan: Yeah. Well, the other thing that was so interesting is like all the money stuff at that timeframe, every check that was willing to commit was from a personal relationship that knew me. Which that was another interesting insight, just like when you show up and you're trying to like gear somebody up to do a seven, eight figure investment in 30 days, I was vouched for very well. And I'd show up on these people's doorsteps with a great track record and you can come and visit my town and see my stuff, and we can talk about all the things we're doing. But like the immediate yeses were all people that are like, oh my gosh, absolutely. Al, of course, let's go. And every other one that was outside of that realm was like, ah, I'd be good for a couple hundred grand. I could do a this or that. Like I can do a little bit, but I'm not going to come in for the whole thing. And it was just like, man, the personal relationships and being able to do some things together, even if it's not the big things, but just having a track record was the most valuable asset that I had in any of that stuff. Which again, it was like, in my mind, when you go out and like raise money, it's easy to sort of, I don't know, apologize for yourself, where like I'll go raise, and I'm like, well, the pitch, like not this business but like other startups I've done and stuff, I'll be like, well, the idea is incredible, and I'm incredible and everything's incredible. And they didn't give me money. So obviously they must- like you start playing this game. And I'm always like, man, I'm glad I don't have... I'm a successful white guy, middle-aged man. Like I have nothing that I could attribute any discrimination too. And so, I just have to own like, I don't know why they're not buying in, but like, I don't have those personal relationships that make that go really easily. And it gives me a lot of empathy for people that are like, if you're a first time founder coming into this, you're like, well, they hate me because I'm short. They hate me because I'm this or I'm that, or like they don't invest in these kinds of things.
Bo Fishback: I'm too young. I’m too old. I'm whatever it is.
Al Doan: It's a no, it's an automatic no until they have some reason to like know you somehow, want to be in business with you, something, and it's hard to do. Anyway, this is a long story I'm telling about Joann's. I don't know if we're trying to go that far.
Eric Jorgenson: No, that's great fun. I think it's an incredible- It was a really fun thing to like get a front seat to and just super interesting, like the fog around how those deals work and the multi year process of it even getting into that position and like you being in that position and having a shot at it. Like it was very interesting.
Al Doan: And now Michaels [?]. Guess what? Michael's debt isn't trading in at a dollar. Just saying, just saying, maybe, maybe.
Eric Jorgenson: Next time.
Al Doan: Those guys got a billion dollars on their books and Apollo's not happy with that deal, I guarantee it. Bought those dudes at the peak of COVID. Could you imagine buying an e-com company and taking them private at the peak of COVID? Not pretty. Not pretty.
Eric Jorgenson: It seems like a very- it seems like a predictable mistake.
Al Doan: What's crazy too is like the crafting space is a $35 billion space, almost as big as youth sports. But the future of how people buy crafting supplies is not...
Eric Jorgenson: A big box store.
Al Doan: A big box store. We've done it for the last 40 years. So like, it's kind of a cool spot to be like, all right, let's invent the next way. I don't know. I don't know what it's going to be.
Bo Fishback: I met with somebody last week actually who works at a big retail store. And when they told me that 89% of all of their sales are in the store and 11% is online... he had to tell me like three times that was the case because I was like, that doesn't even make sense, but it's their whole business.
Eric Jorgenson: What’s the category?
Al Doan: That's actually pretty standard though. 7 to 13% of a big box store sales should be online, which is nuts, right?
Bo Fishback: Scheels.
Al Doan: Sheels. Yeah. That makes sense though. But like why? You guys should be crushing it online.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I mean, it's a fun store to go to.
Bo Fishback: Well, that's why it works.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It’s got a Ferris wheel in that store, guns.
Bo Fishback: It's an amazing store. It's an amazing store. Culture is great. But even in that, if you would have told me it was 50/50, I would have been like that makes a lot of sense. If you would have told me it was Missouri Star Quilt style and actually like the big secret is 90% of sales are online, but 10% is in store, but the reason that people buy online is because the store... I would have believed all of those things. 90/10 in person, I was like, wow, like that is- there’s a lot of industry that is like that still.
Al Doan: The PE angle is like there's a bunch of these, if it's under 7% penetration online, they're like, we should buy these guys and roll them up and do a thing. But it's like surprisingly low e-com penetration. That's when COVID, it shot up to like 25, 30%. They're like, we've made 20 years of e-com progress in the last two years. And then it all drops back to these normal levels. A lot of people still like to go in and shop, which like, yeah, I don't know. Here's the thing I know, activating a customer is hard. And so unlike the crafting space, like these Joann's customers, dude, billions of dollars, that doesn't just flow into all your local quilt shops now. Like everybody doesn't just get that money because these customers are so emphatic about going to buy this thing today. No, they're getting activated by a big marketing engine that works really hard to get their money. Most of that stuff is just going to go away. The industry is now smaller because these guys went out, new customers are going to be harder to get. Like, it's actually a very net negative for the whole space. And who's going to come up and take that? I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. But like, yeah, activating a customer is frigging tough.
Eric Jorgenson: Are you running a strategy around like lost and wandering Joann's customers?
Al Doan: A little bit. Like we saw some of this during COVID when all the Joann’s stores shut down and people went online looking for stuff. There's like a little bump that happens. And so, like we own a good- the long tail stuff we're doing great on and actually, I mean, good tailwinds right now as the glut of inventory that got liquidated starts to get used up and people still are like, all right, I'll go Google a thing. But for the most part, most of Joann's was not quilting. And so, it was like these other categories I was excited to move into. But like the wandering customer, for the most part, they just can't find anything. And then you... Like, we can't really advertise to it – hey, Joann's... There's not a classy way of being like, hey, your friend died, but I'm a good date. And so, like finding a classy way of like inserting yourself into those DMs has not been apparent to me.
Eric Jorgenson: We can brainstorm it.
Al Doan: Sorry your boyfriend got married to someone else, but...
Eric Jorgenson: Sorry, Joann is with Michael now. But we've been thinking about you a lot... That concludes the private equity portion of the venture capital podcast.
Bo Fishback: That's actually, that's not what I think. I think the thing that's interesting to me, listening about that, even though we kind of like lived through it tangentially through you, is like we're like real operators. Like the people who are building- like we're not private equity people. We're not bankruptcy people. We're like barely around venture capital people. We're like operators of business on the one hand who are really, really interested in like what is possible with technology on the other hand. And that is like... that is like hard stuff to get your head around as an operator, like you do it all right and it doesn't work, but it's just like the realities of capitalism actually is what it is. And so, I don't know, that is one of those, as I was listening to that, it was like, I feel like we have a unique amount of empathy for founders no matter what. Because they're trying really hard. This shit is hard. You have technology risk, you have market risk, you have timing risk, you have all of these little things or whatever. And that's like roughly where we live in real life. And then we get to do a cool thing, which is back other people who are kind of trying to do that.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that is the 40 to 100 hours a week we actually are like running businesses and one to 15 hours a week, depending on the week, we are having some fun with other people's businesses and helping them find some capital.
Al Doan: I feel like most of the time when you forward around an investor update, Eric, it's either like these guys are crushing it, or startups are actually really hard. That's all I'm going to say is startups are freaking hard.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, I mean, the binary, it kind of like- we feel at least a certain amount of greatness about every company we invested in and then they just...
Al Doan: Startups are hard until they're crushing it. There's a lot of these like, it's just hard. It's grind, it's grind, it's grind. You don't know and we don't know. Maybe we'll die, but we're working on it, and we're going to come up... Hey, we figured it out, and now we're off to the races. But yeah, dude, capitalism, an unforgiving mistress.
Eric Jorgenson: And there's a lot of things that founders, especially younger founders, need to know and learn that is very hard to learn from a professional venture investor that all of us are dealing with every day on some level. I know you were working through a bunch of that with Ross, just managing a team and finding the right people and building a culture, that like some people are doing that for the first time. Even if they're incredibly accomplished in their field, they haven't like led a company before.
Al Doan: Yeah. And the phone calls, the phone calls from... well, because a lot of the checks we write in are like buddies that we're helping figure it out. And so, we get to be in that peer or friend column often, which is fun. And the calls are like, dude, I'm 20 hours a day in here, and I got people clocking out at five o'clock. And I was like, yeah, you kind of only paid them until five o'clock. That sucks. And I know that feeling because you think it's a mission and you're building a mission and a vision. And like, you think you give them equity, and that's going to make them motivated to be there. And it doesn't. Sometimes it does. It doesn't though. And like here's some stuff to think about and here's how to pick yourself up. And like I remember we got on the phone with one company, and Bo was walking them through like the fundraising stuff. It was one of those where like I felt like I got a hug. I was like, oh yeah, man, there's this whole other playbook people are running. And if you can talk to people that know, it's so comforting just to have like a friend on the inside sort of being like, hey, here's what they're doing. And this is okay. Don't feel like it- Don't feel bad. It's fine. And so, I mean, for everybody else out there, if you're in the middle of some of that, like pick up the phone and talk to some buddies, because people care about you and like this stuff is freaking hard. It's just hard. And it's hard until it isn't. And then even when it isn't, it's still freaking hard. Champagne problems that if we don't fix, we die. Glad we have- We're growing so fast. Scaling is like the worst problem to try and fix, man. You're trying to hire people in one day. It's nightmares. But good luck. Hope you guys figure it out.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Good point, Bo. The last year or so we covered in the last episode – Cascade, Astroforge, Ouros. We got a couple other ones that are quite thrilling.
Al Doan: Can we get a company named Astrophage. Can we just get a Hail Mary thing coming up? The good movie in March.
Bo Fishback: It's going to be great.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, we have one in the hopper that might qualify. This is the closest we've come to an astrophage company, but we can't talk about that one yet.
Al Doan: Oh, it's amazing. If you guys knew.
Eric Jorgenson: All right, let's do the Los Angeles project.
Al Doan: Yeah, yeah, tell us.
Eric Jorgenson: A lot of people think unicorns don't exist or that Pokémon don't exist or other animals like glow in the dark rabbits that have yet to be created. This is a genetics engineering company thought about by Josie Zayner, that is like taking advantage of new CRISPR technology and actually just like putting the pedal down on like let's build products, which in this case are animals and life forms that have never existed before, just like due to the random branching nature of evolution. But like we now have the power to create things that have never been created before. So, let's try that and build really, really the product is a- the company is a platform to do like high volume genetic experiments and manufacturing and creation, which is an incredible opportunity that I think people are skittish about. And she's just like this visionary who's been in this space for a really long time and has the courage to go after a vision that I think a lot of people are like unsure of. But if you picture this like 2050 utopian solar punk thing, like we almost certainly have a much greater command of biological growth than we have today.
Al Doan: And we'll make some stuff.
Eric Jorgenson: This is one of those. So, it's kind of wild to say that they're like engineering new animals. But that's exactly what's happening. And it's a very fun group chat.
Al Doan: Did we just get to a new mastodon? Like a mastodon meets a T-Rex or something?
Bo Fishback: The thing is, this is like one of those where it's like there are real things like fish that glow that were genetically engineered that you can go and buy and put in your fish tank. And that's like this little tiny thing that is kind of like, well, how far can you push it? What does it look like? Literally their deck was a non-sarcastic, what if we could create a unicorn? And like, I don't know. It's like, this is one of these, it's like, is it utopia or dystopia? We don't know, but like it's going to, I mean, it is going to happen. Like it's going to, going to happen. They are hilariously like focused and also smart about how to approach this in a way where it's like, hey, if you're going to entrust somebody with going to work on it, it's like the right group of people. And like, I don't know, what you said, like put the pedal to the metal and see where it goes, but it's a wild one.
Al Doan: There's like, is this ethical? And I think it is. I think we're fine here. Like, it's very exciting, like the idea that somebody could go and get like, I don't know, instead of a tattoo, you're going to go make a part of your body glowy or something, like it is very like steam punk. I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do with it, but we certainly should... certainly should ask if we can before we ask if we should.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and a reasonable response is like, well, what's the market for glow in dark rabbits? Like, don't know.
Al Doan: We never glowed them in the dark.
Bo Fishback: But you fail to test on what is your total addressable market on this. It's like, no, no, no, this is one where you make the market.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, you make the market. And what's really- it's difficult to predict like the adjacent local maxima that you can reach from climbing these first hills of like, oh, we made glow-in-the-dark rabbits and like nobody really needed them. But we figured out how to like engineer and inject thousands of embryos in a platform that is like automatically identifying and iterating and improving. And it turns out that we can engineer like animals that are disease resistant and if that market opens up...
Al Doan: We made a three extra large rabbit that replaces a lot of chickens with the meat, the meat supply’s here and they grow more efficiently and they do this thing. And we didn't know. But now Tyson Foods is going to buy it. It's like, oh, good. Way to go.
Eric Jorgenson: It's just one of those like incredible technologists and visionary and scientists like working on something that we have not found anybody else working on. And it's going to be a cool and crazy ride. Really, really fun.
Al Doan: Do you guys... There's like a... I'm trying to think, like a pink watermelon or... It's illegal to grow yourself because it's like a...
Eric Jorgenson: Patented pink pineapple.
Al Doan: Yeah, I'm like, dude, that's crazy. But like the idea that there'd be some new species going to come out, it's like, actually, you can't breed those. That's our idea. We can breed them and make more of these. But then we get to sell them. It's like such a bizarre world to live in that we've never even tried to see if it could do a thing until now.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And you have to kind of get comfortable with the belief that like humans deserve to have dominion over the creation of new forms of life in the way that we haven't before. But that's the story of human progress.
Al Doan: Personally, I think God's having a great time watching us screw around down here.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Finally, you guys figured it out.
Al Doan: It's like, yeah, it's fun, isn't it?
Eric Jorgenson: The tools have been laying around forever.
Al Doan: You're barely trying- oh man, I've done so much creation I can't even...
Eric Jorgenson: If we're god's children, he just wants us to grow up and play like we do, or play like he did.
Al Doan: Bo’s like whatever, dude.
Bo Fishback: I don't know. Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: We're going to have to merge a lot of different ideologies to make this work, but that's okay.
Al Doan: Hey, we're fine. It’s good gymnastics to do.
Eric Jorgenson: Okay, another really, really fun one, Airship.
Al Doan: Well, yeah. Wait, we haven't talked about Airship?
Eric Jorgenson: No.
Al Doan: Oh man, I love Airship.
Eric Jorgenson: Talk about Airship.
Al Doan: Yeah, well, Airship, and correct me if my memory doesn't serve me, but a bunch of ex like SpaceX guys that were like, hey, we noticed it takes a long time to get stuff over from China, like thinking about...
Bo Fishback: On boats.
Al Doan: Cargo ships like, yeah, viruses come very quickly. But on boats, on boats, you got a container that's just on the water for like three months. And they're like, actually, blimps got a really bad rap with that whole Hindenburg fiasco. Turns out, Goodyear's been doing it different for a long time, and we're going to take blimps and like make it where they don't explode accidentally, and we're going to go hit the jet stream and we can get from China over to the US, skip the port, drop the container right in your backyard, and it takes us like eight days and dramatically cheaper, like by a factor of like seven or eight, something ridiculous, cheaper than like flying it in a 737. And our vision is just this whole train of blimps that go up, take a container and drop it in my spot right there in Kansas City, and those dang longshoremen that are refusing automation, we don't even think about them anymore because we go right past them and drop it right in your backyard, which I'm like, that's freaking awesome. That's so great. Is that roughly the correct representation?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, former SpaceX guys building rigid airships with a bunch of like new materials and incredible techniques that didn't exist 20 years ago, even 20 years ago, doing point to point air freight for shipping containers.
Al Doan: Nobody's trying to- like we haven't innovated in the airship blimp space in the last... X years, man. It's a lot of years.
Eric Jorgenson: It's incredible.
Al Doan: I don't remember when the Hindenburg happened. I was going to say 100, but I don't know if that's right. It's been a long time.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think it's probably the right order of magnitude.
Al Doan: What if it could do this?
Eric Jorgenson: There's only like a handful of active blimps and airships in the world, like sub 10 I think.
Al Doan: They're mainly for the Indy 500.
Bo Fishback: Yeah, that's right.
Eric Jorgenson: There's a tourist one in Europe somewhere. But yeah, it's a very- I mean, if you've imagined like what does a blimp or a rigid airship look like if SpaceX builds it, and it's gigantic and it's got sky cranes, and yeah, point to point air freight is a huge unlock. And if you can match the timing of air freight, which actually you imagine just the flight from like port to port of being 12 hours, air freight's fast, but actually things, it takes days to make it through all of the checks, all the logistics, all the different freight forwarders and transitions. So, if you have one vertical operator that goes point to point with a proprietary technology that's built this fleet of airships, it's...
Al Doan: And like the jet streams move most of it. Like you have a little motor scooting along, but like...
Bo Fishback: Super efficient. That's what I remember is like payload solving for giant payloads. And then if it was one was speed and the other was like ridiculously efficient compared to like powering a gigantic 767 or whatever it is they fly. And it's like, yeah, just kind of elegantly floats from one place...
Eric Jorgenson: It sounds relaxing.
Bo Fishback: It does. It does. Yeah.
Eric Jorgenson: So, I'm like super excited about that. That's one of those like companies with potentially like completely singular capability. Like if they have a 10 year head start on engineering or engineering ships that nobody else is even thinking about right now with unique economics and the fact that like who's running around thinking about just disintermediating the entire existing freight supply chain and being their own provider with a totally new mode of transport that most people think are just like...
Bo Fishback: Also, very hard regulatory challenges, technological challenges, like hard, hard, hard. And if you can pull it off, kind of transformational. And that's awesome.
Eric Jorgenson: This is actually one of those that I think like everything, a lot of these kinds of companies live, whether directly or not, under the shade of SpaceX in a good way of like, if SpaceX hadn't done what they did and Tesla to some extent, and like proved, shown the way of like what this engineering culture looks like and how these big material like hard atom projects are happening...
Al Doan: You could check everything, and like it's not as crazy as rockets to outer space. I'm not inventing rocket travel. It's just a blimp. It's like, oh yeah, you're way less crazy than that thing that's already being successful. Just stay here.
Eric Jorgenson: Culturally and like the tools and the people and showing that there is capital available for these kinds of things, it's just changed how a lot of people think in amazing ways, which is very exciting. Love Airship. I expect them to be kind of just quietly working away for a while, but...
Al Doan: Well, I think that they've got like little scale stuff that's moving around. But I mean, don't we all? Again, we all have scale.
Eric Jorgenson: Maybe the blimp can get Al off the ground. Maybe if it's doing cargo ships.
Bo Fishback: It's not, it is no longer a quadcopter to carry Al’s big ass. It is a blimp, an elegant slow moving blimp.
Al Doan: They’ll zip line me down.
Eric Jorgenson: He's got a harness.
Al Doan: You’ve seen the Walmart like zip line delivery drones. It's the blimp that just zip lines me into the office and then waits for me...It darkens the whole city. It's a little Joker-esque Batman moment. Like, I love this. It’s the only way to travel people.
Eric Jorgenson: Hell yeah. Paint your face on the front of it. Give the blimp a beard.
Bo Fishback: No, you'd sell marketing and sponsorship of it. Like, you'd get a...
Al Doan: Listen, we cut out the sun for an entire six hours every day in your town. You really should pay us to be on this blimp or to move it. We'll take money for either thing.
Eric Jorgenson: We’re getting a lot of eyeballs on this blimp. All right, that's Airship was Q3 2024.
Al Doan: Good job team.
Eric Jorgenson: Go team.
Bo Fishback: That's crazy, in my mind, we invested in that company like four years ago, dude. That's crazy.
Al Doan: We gotta do these podcasts more often, Eric.
Eric Jorgenson: I'm trying Jennifer... Yeah, it does feel like a long time ago.
Al Doan: What else did we do? What other things have we done?
Eric Jorgenson: Well, also that quarter was Terraform Industries, which is... so awesome... so fun.
Al Doan: Tell them what Terraform does.
Eric Jorgenson: Terraform is headed up by the inimitable Casey Handmer, which if you have not read his blog, go do it. A lot of alpha on that blog.
Al Doan: Last name Hammer.
Eric Jorgenson: Handmer, but we should rebrand that.
Al Doan: Yeah, I know a guy named Troy Doom and I'm like, bro, if I had that name...
Bo Fishback: I could sell so much fabric.
Al Doan: I would have murdered somebody. Casey Hammer, just go with it. Just accept it. Anyway, Handmer?
Eric Jorgenson: Handmer.
Al Doan: What a loser name. I'm just kidding.
Eric Jorgenson: We've got- he's an Australian certified super genius. Multiple degrees.
Al Doan: How do you get certified in that?
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. In Australia, you can.
Al Doan: They're certifying anybody these days. When I was a super genius, it was a whole thing.
Eric Jorgenson: They’ve got a whole different system over there. And worked at NASA, PhD from I want to say Berkeley in I think applied math.
Al Doan: Like a young Mark Rober.
Eric Jorgenson: Just he's like a nerdy energy focused Mark Rober. I mean, I know Mark Rober is nerdy, but like...
Al Doan: He's not. Mark Rober's a YouTuber. This guy's building real stuff.
Eric Jorgenson: Building very real stuff. So, the insight behind this company is basically that solar is- solar photovoltaic energy generation has been on this like exponential cost decline, and every year, people predict that solar installation is going to level off, and every year, they blow through it again on an exponential. And so, the amount of solar panels that are getting installed and the amount of energy that they're producing per cost is like dropping precipitously. And Casey’s been like plotting this and blogging about it and writing about it for like years, like maybe 10 years or more at this point, in the same way that like the people who saw sort of the solid state drive, like getting cost decreasing, like predicted iPod and stuff like that. So, this is a really interesting thing. And the insight that he has is like, once this energy gets cheap enough, we're going to cross a threshold where a chemical process called the Sabatier process is going to become economically beneficial instead of like you can currently do it, but it just doesn't produce more than it consumes. And that process takes air and water essentially and produces synthetic natural gas. So CH4, like methane, like you would drill or mine and have to then like refine and produce and sell as energy, you could just produce it anywhere on Earth with water and air and a giant solar field and the machines that he makes. And so, it's an incredible, I would say, mind blowing vision of the future of like energy independence for all with sun.
Al Doan: Well, the genius is like keep your existing infrastructure. I'm going to make free energy and shove it into exactly the same pipes that you're using right now.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So, all of the natural gas infrastructure is still relevant. All of the solar infrastructure is still relevant. It basically just turns a solar field, instead of needing converters and going into the grid or into a data center, you can just like put a terraformer, which is what he calls this thing, in and either truck or pipe natural gas or to store it. And so, it is a much, much, much cheaper and longer term storage method than batteries.
Al Doan: Yeah, that's interesting.
Eric Jorgenson: And uses all the same infrastructure, also infinitely storable, and it can be transformed into all these other natural gas products. The thing that you have to do in order to do this is make these machines just filthy, filthy, filthy cheap. And so, it is a really tough discipline around, can you drive down the cost, which is just like, he just hires all these genius mechanical engineers, and everybody who works at the company is a math genius and an engineer. He's like, don't talk to me about anything else. We're driving down the cost. We're building more of these things. Here we go. I feel like he's just such a visionary in terms of skating where the puck is going, pushing the world in a positive, incredible direction, understanding energy as this fundamental driving improvement of everything. It is one of the companies I'm very most excited about. It's the only SPV we've done. We did our biggest individual check so far into that company and rounded a bunch of extra money around it to go into their series A. I still get a little stomachache when I think about missing the seed because we have some friends that invested in the seed round earlier. But we'll take what we can get. When you see a company like this, you try to get everything you can. And I'm just a huge fan of him.
Al Doan: But like, they're doing stuff already. Like, they've got these active and moving and going. And that's the crazy thing about a lot of this is, you would hear about that and think, oh, in 10 years, once they've researched it and done it, it's like, no, no, no, they've got them. They want them cheaper.
Bo Fishback: And they've got real people involved at every side, investors on the team. Like it's a big one. I mean, it's a big one.
Al Doan: It's funny, man. When you think about free energy, a lot of times, like our brain immediately goes to like one or two very predictable spots. We're like, oh, we need... what was that LK...?
Eric Jorgenson: The LK-99, the superconductor.
Al Doan: If we get that, imagine you're like nuclear energy, we're not thinking about like, oh, what if we could just make gas for free out of out of the air. And it's like, oh, well, that would actually- that'd be great, too.
Eric Jorgenson: That'd solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Al Doan: Yeah. It’d be awesome... But like the idea of, oh, set this next to the ocean, you pull some water in, and now energy. And it just goes forever. You're just solar farming energy, instead of doing anything else, you're just putting the energy right out there in a way that we can already use it. I mean, could be the most revolutionary thing that ever happens. And it's just natural gas getting free.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's another one that like probably nobody outside the energy industry will know or care about. It'll just be kind of like, oh, wow, life is better now over 20 decades or 20 years, the next 20 years of them like kind of scaling up and producing more.
Al Doan: And this AI data center doesn't have a power bill anymore. That's crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That was... I’m very glad we did that.
Al Doan: Good one and good job. So, the SPV, like it just went out to our LPs initially. And a lot of people excited about it also. It's good on you for writing in your checks, people.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, well, I think... SPVs are kind of a run around. And so, we only do them when they're like really special.
Al Doan: You don't want to commit and then like not have your people like respond to it. That's where it's a little bit of a gamble of like maybe they've got plenty of exposure already. We don't know if people want a bunch more. But we love this so much, we want to try and we're going to take a chunk of this and see if we can do it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's a ton more like individual meetings and pitches and things. But when we feel like we've got something really unique, once a year, we'll go do that, but it always goes out to LPs first. And if they feel the allocation, they feel the allocation. But we do a fair number of like people in family offices who are like, I kind of like putz along and then like look for a place to pile a big amount of chips. And so, like you help us kind of trace lines and see like where it's worth making a much bigger bet. And so, we try to like shine a light when we’ve got one of those.
Al Doan: It's so cool.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And I'm very excited to be a part of that, that Terraform one. Okay, we did another small follow on check into Omella.
Al Doan: Omella is great.
Eric Jorgenson: Which they’re just marching along.
Al Doan: That company is the you go to school and your kids are all going on field trip. They need $10 from every kid. Either the teacher is running a Venmo shenanigan and trying to like remember who paid and who didn't. Or you just use Omella and say here's all the 20 kids. It sends the reminders. It gets the Venmo payment from them, and then it's done. And like teachers love it. It's mainly like school and baseball teams and stuff like that that are collecting from big groups. But it solves such a big problem that like nobody that's not running that realizes it's a problem, but the person running it with their like yellow legal pad, trying to check stuff off and forgetting to check one and chasing down a guy that thought they already paid him, but they're not sure. It's just such a mess.
Eric Jorgenson: And cash boxes. And like the bet from the beginning here is that like Brett Kopf is just an incredible, incredible like customer development person. And so, he just like talks to the customer. All he does is talk to his customers, which are like high school coaches, teachers, administrators or club organizers. Like, what do you need? Where are we serving your needs? Where are we not? What's frustrating? What's hard about collecting money? What can we build for you? And so, they are like, they've grown from the kind of like just field trips or whatever and now started including point of sale and card readers. And so now they're doing like concessions and they're doing dances. And so like, it's really cool. They're like an entire solution for schools as in general to collect money. And so, it is a really... it's such a lumpy...
Bo Fishback: That's what I was going to say. It is like up and to the right, up and to the right, up and to the right, up and to the right. Every time they send an update, it's like, hey, we said all the things we're going to do, and then we did all the things we said we're going to say, and then they do it again. They're just machines.
Al Doan: It's easy to fall in love with that.
Bo Fishback: Execution machines.
Al Doan: We did everything we told you.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And they're just, through basic block and tackle, listen to the customers, do the work, I mean, they're five years into this now, I think, maybe more, starting from the beginning and just listening and building and listening and building.
Al Doan: Started at the bottom...
Eric Jorgenson: Now they're here. So yeah, Q2 just did another small check there. We invested in Tripleblind that, right after, not right after, but like a couple months after we invested, ended up kind of doing, yeah, doing cellular mitosis into two different companies, which is interesting.
Al Doan: Had a very classy way of handling it. They're like, now you own a bit of both companies, but now we all need more money. All right. All right. I like this.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it was cool. I mean, we invested in a pre-seed and then there's suddenly two companies that went off and raised separate seeds to go after like different visions with different customers.
Al Doan: And one of them is like Tripleblind, which is the technology of like personal or private- two parties don't ever have to disclose themselves to each other and a third party sort of intermediates it sort of thing. How do you describe that? They're doing that for healthcare and they're doing that for like authentication. The authentication one is like let's never send an SMS authentication again. Like we can take that away, and I'm like that's a future I believe in... And then the other one is like, hey, you have a disease, HIPAA laws say you can't just- we can't market that anywhere, but now you have a disease and this person has a trial drug that's going to fix it. And like, you guys have never been able to find each other until now. It is going to be anonymized completely, negotiated and then resulted in that whole flow. And like that's a cool future also.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's a really, really cool one. Ideem is the seamless two-factor auth company, and Toby Rush has been on the podcast separately, telling that story. That's an interesting one, very international finance apps like are the customers there. And yeah, Selfie is the brand of the healthcare thing, which are already... And Das became CTO there. And they have... I mean, they really put the pieces of a behemoth together, I think, because healthcare software is... I mean, you've worked in healthcare software for a long time. It's brutal stuff. It's a tough market. But I think they've got a shot in a really cool vision and they're starting already to come make some of those life-saving connections that have been just like illegal functionally to make, even though all the data exists and everybody wants that outcome.
Al Doan: I feel like there's been a bunch of people that are like, we're going to solve that, that have almost made a run at it. But always either the patients need to go and register at another place, which they just don't reliably do or something, but the fact that all that can exist and the infrastructure is there right now. Maybe.
Eric Jorgenson: This is hard for so many reasons. But yeah, I mean, I think Das’ last update was like we saved the life of someone who had the same condition that my father died from, who wouldn't have died if... like this technology existed, which is like what he dedicated his life to solving, which is just an incredible story and mission. And the company is still young. I think there's so much more they can do.
Al Doan: Rapid fire. We got to get Bo out of here. What do we got?
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, God, yeah, we do. All right, we got two more. Do you want to do Tideway?
Al Doan: Tideway. Tideway. The genius behind, so these guys are just these scrappers up in Detroit... their big idea is they can build like warehouse automation robots dirt cheap. Like an ARAS system for 20,000 SKUs is going to cost you like seven million bucks.
Eric Jorgenson: What’s ARAS?
Al Doan: I'm sorry. ARAS is an auto retrieve auto store. So, like in a warehouse, if you're in Amazon, you have, instead of having your person walk up and down the aisles, you stand in one spot, and the warehouse brings stuff to you. It's an automatic store automatic retrieve, and so you scan your pick order. It's like, here's all the stuff you're going to need, and you're just taking it out of the bin and putting it in the order, and it's queuing it all up behind you. Well, these guys are like, yeah, this actually isn't that hard, but all the companies that provide it are these big, giant companies that do this stuff, and robotics has gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And the big incumbents aren't incentivized to drive that price down, because most of their value isn't just the robot. It's this idea of the solution. We're going to solve your problem for you and take as much money as we can. These guys are like, we can do it for like a tenth of the price. No, really. We can do it for a tenth of the price. And it doesn't look the same, but like functionally it will do the same work. And that's what we care about. And so, there are these smaller, like warehouse robotic units that would go onto a pallet racking that would move stuff around in that space. And so, normally with a big investment like that in a warehouse, you're looking at it like 7 million bucks. All right. I got to replace this many employees over this much time before I get an ROI. These guys are coming in and being like, hey, what if we did this and automated this tiny section? It's going to be like 16 grand. And you're like, yeah, I'd absolutely do that. And so, their market is like anybody, any warehouse that's not Amazon that isn't like fully roboticized has a desire to be more automated, and incremental automation and stuff is a big deal. And so, that's the big pipe dream with these guys is if they can pull this off and start manufacturing this in an interesting way, it goes in every warehouse. Every 3PL should be using many different instances of these guys. That's the exciting part.
Eric Jorgenson: It's a cool market. And like there's a lot of warehouses that aren't Amazon and they're... and you're not going to get a small business running a fulfillment center like yours to pony up $5 million on a full...
Al Doan: Like my long game on this is like I think stuff gets pretty close to free to deliver in the next decade, even to the last mile. And to do that, you've got to have a lot of automated moving parts that solve this. You want to place an order for your Q-tips at whatever. Well, that should go on to a thing that moves it here, that moves it there. No human should have to touch this, but there's a lot of micro-automations that need to exist for that to go. So, you're getting stuff delivered for $0.50 instead of $5. And when we try and envision like what pieces need to exist for that to work, something like this is part of it, I think.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I think... I mean, there's a lot of robots to build between manufacturing and creation.
Al Doan: Thanks, Eric.
Eric Jorgenson: Cheers, Al. All right.
Al Doan: I needed it. I needed it.
Eric Jorgenson: Our last one and then we're all caught up after a long, long break. Watoga.
Al Doan: Watoga.
Eric Jorgenson: Watoga, these guys, the Canadian mining prodigy software geniuses, met through Twitter, really smart interesting dudes who are like coming out of Canada's top mining school, which is one of the top mining schools in the world.
Al Doan: Everybody talks about that top mining school in Canada. I mean, we were pissed when we didn't get in. We had to go... Where did I go? Hawaii like an idiot. Those guys went to the top mining school.
Eric Jorgenson: Anybody who didn't go to college in Hawaii I feel like is missing out. You definitely got that one right. Really, really like sharp guys coming into this industry that is a gigantic industry with a very surprisingly small number of humans in it. I remember like being shocked talking to them, and they're like the Colorado School of Mines, they graduate a few dozen mining engineers per year for like an industry with trillions and trillions of dollars. And I think it's something that's very easily forgotten about is that like behind all of these industries and robotics and new manufacturing items, like somebody's got to get this shit out of the ground or out of asteroids. But Watoga is focused on building software for drill and blast mining using like new physics simulation stuff. And most of these guys operating mines are like just trying to keep the lights on and not let anybody die. And like 24/7 operations, hard to pick your head up, hard to make strategic decisions, hard to make big improvements in the systems that they're running. And so, these guys are coming in with software saying, every time you blast a shelf of rock, you're either making a few million dollars or losing a few million dollars or making a $20 million mistake. And you're using outdated information and imperfect data to make those decisions. And like, there's no reason for that. We can build software that actually like updates in real time and helps you make much, much, much smarter decisions. So, I think the napkin math that they showed is like we can improve mining operations outcomes by like 20%. Which is an incredible, like that is a massive value creation event, if you can just like unlock the right data and get it to the engineers at the right times. So really, really cool thing. And they've got many dreams about adjacent products and how they can capture even more value or operate mines or whatever it is. But really fast moving, sharp math and software guys coming into an industry that they're already working into. This is not a market that some YC hackers are going to unlock and go customer develop their way through mines. These dudes are working in mines, operating for mines, come from mining families, went to mining schools, in the industry, but really like ambitious, disruptive, eager to make improvements. And so, I think that one's just really fun, and they're super fun to talk to because they're like, yeah, it's Indiana Jones. I mean, they're like all over the world. They're working with crazy characters, like visiting mines, blowing shit up.
Al Doan: I feel like it's funny too because with us I feel like it's easy to imagine the future as only outer space or nuclear energy or something. It's like no, no, man, every industry's got a place that it's going, and the trillion dollar mining industry, I mean, maybe these guys end up working with Astroforge to bring stuff down and pulling it out that way. But like either way, the mining tech needs to get way better. And like, is there a path to get there? Is there a great outcome when we do? Absolutely. Great. We're early backers that are enthusiastic.
Bo Fishback: This is a very like software's eating the world, Andreesen Horowitz kind of thing. And it's like it was going to get to the mining industry eventually. It's like these are the guys who are bringing software there, and like that, it needs it. It'll make it better. If they get it done, they'll be ridiculously valuable because unlike inventing an industry, they are in a trillion dollar industry, that like 20% is a gigantic improvement, gigantic. And like, it's going to happen. It's just a question of if these are the guys to do it or not. And like that's a bet we make every day.
Al Doan: Yeah, it's funny. Like an autonomous vehicle probably means more to like automating a dump truck driving into a mine so that somebody is not at risk of losing their life. Like that probably means more and is worth like millions compared to like 20 cents in an Uber pool. But like if you can automate this and make that work, like that's such a big deal as opposed to any of these other projects.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I feel like part of the kind of meta thesis of building a utopian future is not, software is eating the world, sure, but like every industry, like this generation of startups is coming for every industry. And some companies will out innovate the disruptors and like stay ahead. But like, we have mining, we have construction, we have energy, we have... These are markets that are so, so, so much bigger than even the enormous software market or the marketplace market or things like that. And so, I think there's a common like, I don't know, refrain... there's only two $10 billion outcomes created every year in the venture world. And if you're not in one of those, then like you're not going to return your fund. I'm like, well, one, our fund is tiny, so like we're definitely going to return this motherfucker. And the other is like, who, what law of physics says there's only two $10 billion companies created? We are on an exponential growth path. We have startups with ambitions and tools and markets that are so much bigger than what people were investing in 20 years ago. We've got to project out literally 20 years from now at our current growth rate to see what are the exit values of some of these companies going to be.
Al Doan: Not even two years ago, we didn't have Gemini, we had Bard.
Eric Jorgenson: I forgot about Bard.
Al Doan: Remember, like we weren't even in... Two years, 20 months later, it's like this is a completely different universe that has ever existed. This is crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Which is why we're, I think, biased a little more towards some of these companies where almost all these that we've talked about actually are affecting physical processes in the real world where software is a massive accelerant, but the moat is not going to like go away overnight because of some new AI thing. Like, if you got five years into building a platform for genetically engineering embryos, and you're the only person with it, like software is going to be a tailwind to you, and it's going to expand your margins or accelerate you, but it's not going to mean like some kid in an apartment is going to replicate your progress overnight.
Al Doan: I was going to ask Grok to imagine a new embryo and I'm going to beat you guys all tomorrow.
Eric Jorgenson: Just don't hit dirty mode.
Al Doan: Give me the spicy embryo.
Eric Jorgenson: We all know what that button does, Al.
Al Doan: Boobs on an embryo.
Bo Fishback: Weird again. Yet again.
Al Doan: Every time, it’s so crazy.
Eric Jorgenson: Evolution is a miracle.
Al Doan: See, you guys.
Eric Jorgenson: See you in the bathroom.
Bo Fishback: Yes, I'm going there now.