01:28:55 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Mark Gurman
[01:28:55] S1: Okay. Well, I appreciate your your your your discipline there. [01:28:59] S0: Very cool that Apple makes billions from casino games. So... [01:29:03] S1: Yeah. [01:29:04] S7: Good thing they criticize and say shouldn't exist. [01:29:06] S1: Yeah. The digital economy. They get their cut. Anyway, the house always wins with Apple. Always wins. Thank you so much for coming on the show. [01:29:14] S0: I wish we had more time. [01:29:15] S1: Of course. Always. Let's hang out soon. [01:29:17] S7: Yes. See you guys. [01:29:18] S0: Thank you You for having sold... I think you sold me on the Duo. Oh. Really? Okay. You need one now because I see [01:29:23] S7: it's a big... Yeah. [01:29:24] S1: There's a big big [01:29:25] S0: chunk out of this one. [01:29:27] S1: Pretty durability testing.... Dude. He's the Whistlin Diesel of technology, Jordi Hays. [01:29:31] S0: Let's get a... Can we get a replay on that durability test pulled up especially Tyler's [01:29:37] S1: throat? [01:29:37] S0: I think [01:29:37] S1: the replay is tied to the Gong cam specifically. Let me pull up MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just own the data platform. Don't just don't just build AI. Own the data platform. [01:29:49] S0: Production team. [01:29:50] S1: It. Chow. [01:29:51] S0: The next guest is with us. Let's let's work on getting a a replay. [01:29:55] S1: Because we have Zach [01:29:56] S0: Rash from
01:29:56 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Zach Rash, Jasper Zhang
[01:29:56] S0: Rash from [01:29:57] S1: Coco Robotics, the cofounder and CEO for his first appearance here on TBPN. Welcome to the show, Zach. Thank you so much for taking the time [01:30:05] S0: to talk about [01:30:06] S1: with us. How are you doing? [01:30:07] S8: Gentlemen, thanks for having me. [01:30:09] S0: It's great to have you. [01:30:10] S1: How many of these robots you got these days? [01:30:13] S8: We got about a thousand of them, but we have our next robot coming out soon, so you'll start seeing those around LA. [01:30:19] S4: What Have [01:30:20] S8: you guys gotten a delivery? [01:30:21] S1: Wait. Wait. I have never gotten a delivery from a delivery robot. I see them all the time in [01:30:26] S0: Los Angeles [01:30:28] S1: that I know of. Can can the robots release the item autonomously? [01:30:33] S0: We don't know that that Coco's not live testing humanoid form factors with, you know, rubber masks that that make them. Potentially. We don't know. We don't know. That's true. They haven't come out and said that they're not doing that. [01:30:45] S1: But the current the current system is if I were to get a delivery in a Coco Robot, I would go up to it and pull the bag of food out of the bucket. Right? [01:30:56] S8: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Well, we gotta get you guys a delivery then. [01:30:58] S1: Let's do it. [01:30:59] S8: But, yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, I mean, this is this is what they look like. This is a miniature three d printed version of it. But Yeah. It's a purpose built robot, designed for, moving goods around our cities.
01:30:59 · Zach Rash, John Coogan, Mark Gurman
[01:30:59] S8: But, yeah, for anyone that doesn't know, I mean, this is this is what they look like. This is a miniature three d printed version of it. But Yeah. It's a purpose built robot, designed for, moving goods around our cities. [01:31:11] S1: Yeah. And you're expanding to The UK. How did that come together? [01:31:16] S8: Yeah. So we... Here in The US, we work with Uber Eats and and DoorDash. DoorDash had recently acquired Deliveroo, which is based over in London. [01:31:25] S1: Sure. [01:31:25] S8: And so we've been working with DoorDash for, I think, almost four years at this point. We have a really close partnership, and we wanted to bring it across the pond and bring it to London. And so we announced just the other week a kind of multi year bidirectionally exclusive partnership to bring Cocos all throughout The UK and bring it to some real scale. [01:31:45] S1: How do you how do you think about... Or how is... How are these sidewalk robots different from the delivery network that you might see on DoorDash with people in cars? Like, is there a specific robot assigned to an individual restaurant because they're just going back and forth, or is it more like a fleet, a network, it's driving around, and it might stop by any random, restaurant, and the restaurant just has to sort of see the robot and say, oh, I should put this there. How does that work? [01:32:12] S8: Yeah. They're... So they're shared. So they'll... We'll get offers from the different platforms. We also work directly with some retailers. Mhmm. [01:32:18] S7: So we get
01:32:18 · Mark Gurman, Zach Rash, John Coogan
[01:32:18] S7: So we get [01:32:19] S8: a bunch of offers coming to our system, and then the robot will, you know, go somewhere to pick up an order, deliver it to the customer, and then go on to pick up the next one. So just in LA, I mean, we have probably a few thousand merchants across grocery, food, retail Yeah. That use the robots. [01:32:34] S1: Has there been any movement on getting the restaurants to help do some of the charging and some of the infrastructure sort of, like, use their back rooms for space, or do you have to do sort of what Lime and and, Bird did where you have trucks driving around servicing things? Like, what's been the solution there? [01:32:55] S8: You had some mix. I mean, ideally, you don't want to be going around swapping batteries because it means you're, you know, doubling... At least doubling your battery CapEx. It takes forever to drive across a place like Los Angeles to manually swap the batteries, and there's not that many deliveries happening at four in the morning. [01:33:09] S7: Yeah. [01:33:09] S8: So ideally, they go back to merchants. The merchants plug them in, and then they take a few hours of downtime. Right? So you run them twenty hours a day, and then maybe you have four hours of downtime to do cleaning and charging. We do work with some of our merchants to do this. We work with a bunch of kinda ghost kitchen companies that also are a great fit at actually charging these and helping us do some of the maintenance. And then some of our big retail partners, they have a bunch of space. They might have twenty four seven staffing
01:33:09 · Zach Rash, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[01:33:09] S8: So ideally, they go back to merchants. The merchants plug them in, and then they take a few hours of downtime. Right? So you run them twenty hours a day, and then maybe you have four hours of downtime to do cleaning and charging. We do work with some of our merchants to do this. We work with a bunch of kinda ghost kitchen companies that also are a great fit at actually charging these and helping us do some of the maintenance. And then some of our big retail partners, they have a bunch of space. They might have twenty four seven staffing [01:33:34] S1: Mhmm. [01:33:34] S8: In which case, we can kinda work with them to drive some incremental revenue back to their store in exchange for doing some of the fleet management. So you'll never have a 100% in any one of these categories, but the idea is to kinda work with our partners to reduce the overall cost of operating the fleet. [01:33:48] S0: What's the bottleneck to going from a thousand active robots? Sounds like this new in The UK will will increase that. But how how do you go to a million? Like, what what are the kind of things that need to happen?
01:34:00 · Zach Rash
[01:34:00] S8: Yeah. So, you know, we're gonna bring... Coco's in about 10 cities today across The US and and Europe, and next year, we should be in between 40 to 50 cities across even more continents. And, you know, the first step is regulatory. You know, you need to create new policy for this. This is the new class of of thing. It's not a vehicle. It's not a person. It's it's a robot. And so you need to define laws around how the robots operate in our cities. So you work with different either national transportation agencies or at the state level or at the city level, depending on where we're going, introduce policy, and then ramping up manufacturing of our of our new robots. So this is Coco two. It's the next gen robot that you'll start seeing rolling around the cities in the coming weeks. So we're planning on making about 20,000 of those for 2027. Mhmm. So you'll see a pretty large step up in the fleet size across a lot of new a lot of new territories, and then the path to a million feels pretty inevitable from there. Mean, I you look like, you know, a platform like DoorDash probably has 10,000,000 drivers or something like that working working on the platform in The US, and the volumes on these platforms is still growing 20 to 30% a year. So you just compound this out. I mean, look at the at the end of the next decade, right, at the end of this... In the next ten years, you're gonna have you're gonna have to have, you know, 50% of The US working population, you know, driving for these platforms. So you you need to find a way of increasing supply without getting human drivers because you're just gonna run out of people.