This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of September 14th, 2020

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

E1109 featuring Ritual's Kat Schneider: https://rb.gy/agkzxy E1110 featuring Ghost Locomotion's John Hayes: https://rb.gy/r4r188 E1111 featuring Archive.org's Brewster Kahle: https://rb.gy/seuwah Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

All right, Kat Schneider from ritual.com is here. She makes vitamins and she does it really well. And she went out to raise money when she was pregnant. And I've heard from a number of female founders who we've invested in. That's always an interesting experience. Tell me how did that go for you? I feel like I'm always pregnant raising money now. But hopefully it's my last time.

Well, you had three kids over a six-year span and it was the same span or the same Six years that you started a company, so no degree of difficulty there, obviously. No, it's become the norm. It's become the norm, yeah. But I couldn't do it, I don't think. But you did it. I mean, it's super impressive. But what did the VCs?

Where's their reaction to you? So it was interesting because I came from the VC space. I came from investing in companies, and I knew a lot of VCs early on. And it's interesting that a lot of the VCs that actually went to kind of passed because they didn't want to touch the vitamin space. And then there were VCs, one in particular, that I had an investor who I knew for a long time tell me, and I think in a more friendly way, like, you can't start a company and have a family at the same time, like, trust me.

Wow. So I think, yeah. You would never say that to a guy. You would send them a onesie with the VCs. see's logo on it. Like, you would never say to a guy like, you're having a baby. I mean, it, there is some truth that it is challenging to have kids while being an entrepreneur. Yeah, he was right. It was challenging. He was challenging. But that's, yeah. But I would, yeah, but I also don't, yeah, for me, it was, it was, it was really empowering because I wanted to prove him wrong.

But I also would have never started the company, you know, had I not had that experience of, of being pregnant. And now we're thinking of other products as well, being a mom of three over the last five years. It's really impacted how I think about kind of this family context and what we should launch next and what, you know, families and moms want. So it's actually been incredibly important for our business. Because I'm building, I'm building this company at the end of the day for myself as well. Yeah, I mean, understanding your customer is at the core of product innovation, marketing, customer service, all of these things. If you don't understand who you're, if you don't understand your customer or have an ideal customer profile, you know, how can you ever hope to, to build them a product? You are the ideal customer profile. You're a woman who has multiple kids, which means multiple vitamin journeys, right? I mean, you have the prenatal and then kids. kids take vitamins. I was lucky enough to be an investor in a company called Smartypants.

My friend Gordon Gould, who's just been a friend of mine from New York, who's trying this thing. I was like, yeah, yeah, put it. Here's 50K or whatever. And then this company became giant. It's like unbelievable how big it's become now. And I think they started maybe five years before you. You're in kids vitamins now, too. I take it, yeah? We will be. You will be. Yeah. I knew that was coming. Don't say anything bad about Smarty Peds, but they've done pretty well. It's a pretty good category, yeah? Yeah, I think that, and I know, and this is kind of the reason we're going into family is just once you have a family, you start caring about the health of your kids and your partner more than you even care about yourself. And so that's a really interesting kind of transition that we're seeing for a lot of our customers.

we, and I don't remember if I mentioned this, but we, so when we launched the prenatal, we only launched that about two, about two years ago. It's actually become one of the top selling prenatals in the U.S. We sold out of it about a month ago, and we had over 20,000 people on the wait list already. Wow. That's just only increasing. And it's a prenatal, it's not like a eye cream or something. So.

You got to get through that wait list pretty quick, because, there is a ticking clock. I mean, if people are signing up for it, you know, you have to get them the vitamins quickly. Yeah, for sure. It's kind of become a cult product and we need to, I can't wait for it to come back. So today on the program is John Hayes from Ghost Locomotion, which they just go by Ghost. Welcome to the podcast, John. Hey, glad to be here. But is there any technology that could be game changing either in chip technology or sensor technology that's in the work that people are looking at going, well, if that goes right, boy, that could be a game changer. Are there any game changers you can think of? So the interesting sensor technology I'm

looking at, and no one quite builds it. I've seen presentations, they all say 18 months away, which is like never. Yeah, that's the standard technology. And that is, yeah, and that is 5G, and not using it for a data transport. One of the things that 5G has is it has a beam forming radar in it. So 5G at its high frequencies operates at the same frequencies as radar. But instead of just being a single pulse that you send out in the scene, you can actually scan the scene by controlling the direction of the beam. And so what's interesting to me about that is first you could make a high

resolution radar return, but based on solid state devices that are in every single phone. So you get high quantity, high quality, you know, that'll drive the power down, drive the cost down. So you have those forces. So there's something there in the, you're going to have one side of it, the 5G people, you know, driving the cost on the intent of design, driving the cost on the DSPs or however you process the signals.

Yeah. And that would be very interesting for us as a really, call it unintelligent collision avoider. Right. In that it doesn't have to understand anything. All it has to do is say, I want to avoid frontal collisions. and you could build a very, very simple system that would prevent all forward collisions.

I think that would be a very interesting advance. Why doesn't that exist as a standard safety technology that every car is required to have, you know, under 35 miles an hour, slam on the brakes if you're going to hit something within five feet of you, period? Like, shouldn't that be much easier than self-driving to create as a, you know, airbag type, you know, stepping stone along the way and just get rid of every single fender bender and then retrofit every old car, like that could be a $300 product for you that insurance companies would pay for and say, you know what, no more fender benders. Technology in the auto industry evolved very slowly.

I think that's what it comes down to. It's like it already has to be proven. And some of that is because when you build something into a car as opposed to adding it on, cars have like a 20 year lifetime. Right. And so that's often why technology in the auto industry tends to lag the consumer industry by five to seven years because it takes a bunch of extra time to prove that some piece of electronics is going to last 20 years into the future. And so I think it's something that they'll probably, it'll probably will be introduced into cars. Yeah. That'd be the ultimate aftermarket thing. Just no fender benders. You put this device like, you know, those in, those in grill radar detectors you can get after market, like an in grill device that just slams on

the brakes, if there's something right in front of it, you just solve that one acute problem, that's got to be half of all accidents or tiny 35 mile an hour or less fender benders, right? Yeah. And we're very lucky to have our guest on the program today. He's an internet legend. And he has been building, I think, his life's work for the last couple of decades, the internet archive, which many of you know as the way back machine, the ability to look back and see what was on the web in the past. Welcome to the program. Brewster, Cal. How are you? Thank you. It's great to be here.

Talk to us a little bit about what you've accomplished so far in basically backing up software and then what you haven't figured out yet because I think the app stores are a particularly hard. Oh, yes. The internet is software. So we started with the old stuff by working with these communities. there's a community of people that had been building emulators that were kind of maim and these awesome emulators but they were difficult to use frankly and it took some real dedicated effort and there are other communities that were dedicated to the Amiga

the Commodore 64 or the Apple 2 or some of the old game consoles that they went and basically took the bits off of the proms to try to get them into the emulators. And working with these different communities, there's this guy named Jason Scott that works for the archive. And he said, I think I figured it out. We could go and emulate those games, those old platforms, the Apple Tour, IBMPC, in your browser by using JavaScript. And I said, no way.

That's never going to work. He said, yeah, yeah, give me a little time and no budget. And let me see if I can just work with these different communities to get it to go. and they took MAME, which is this emulator software written in C, and they used Inscriptin to cross-compile it into JavaScript. Oh, my God. And then got it. So when you go to thearchive.org and go to the Historic Games Collection

or go to the IBMP, you click on it, it downloads the emulator in JavaScript, and it boots an IBMPC in your browser. It's just surreal that this works. And then it goes to the Internet Archive as a virtual flopper, drive to go and get the software and then download that into the into your browser and you're playing Oregon Trail. Interestingly, that's my experience.

My wife and I knew about Oregon Trail from the 80s and 90s when we had that game on a floppy disc. We told our daughter about it. She was obsessed with it. And the way we found it was if you go to the internet archive, you can find the MS-DOS version of it and hit power and hit play and just play. it in the emulator right there, your childhood popping right up for you to see, whether it's Atari or Camus 64, all that software, not disappearing. Okay, Jason, I got to ask, did you ever win at

Oregon trailer? Did you always die somewhere by Indians or dysentery? Yeah, always die. And then you also have Prince of Persia on there, which is a really good book out right now about the story of the creator of Prince of Persia that like the strike price. I've been trying. I can't get that to, I die every time. When we put up these, it was so fun. So Jason Scott got all this together, and we sort of came up with a few thousand games and some of the old productivity software.

I'd actually never, I'd use Excel, and I'd used Lotus 1, 2, 3. But VisiCalc. It was the original spreadsheet. I'd never actually been. So I thought it was going to be, people were going to, wow, you can actually use VisiCalc. It's like, nope, it was Oregon Trail.

And so people just went for Oregon Trail and it melted our servers, and we had to go and reinforce it and put copies up. And it was so fun as people were trying to discover and kind of relive the 80s and 90s, sort of a little bit of nostalgia, but also be able to show it to their kids. It's like, hey, and some of it actually is worth reusing.

The cool thing about Oregon Trail is you always lose. It is just such a non-2020 where everybody's a winner. Yeah, here's a trophy for showing up. It's like, no, you're dying. Okay, let's figure out another way for you to die. And so anyway, I have met a few people that have actually won an Oregon Trail, but I think it's just evidence of misspent youth.