This Week in Startups - Best of This Week in Startups: Week of September 28th, 2020

Episode Date: October 3, 2020

E1116 featuring Cabana's Scott Kubly: https://rb.gy/iyrmuv E1117 featuring Citizen's Andrew Frame: https://rb.gy/azvdoz E1118 Emergency Pod - Humane's product: https://rb.gy/ru23xp E1119 featuring Wonderschool's Chris Bennett: https://rb.gy/kwqlyh Follow Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

And when I saw this next company, Cabana, I was enamored. And my friend David Sacks had invested in the company and introduced me to the founder. And I just thought, wow, I have been watching the van life hashtag on Instagram and other places and been enamored with candidly people driving up and down the coast and across the country and going to the amazing parks, national parks we have here in America. And I thought, wow, that's a great idea for a company. Of course, then cabana.Life, you can go check it out, came out with a fleet of vehicles that allow you for about 200 bucks a night to rent a van, a conversion van that has a bed and a bathroom and cooking equipment and all that great stuff. So you too can go live that great outdoor lifestyle, full disclosure.

We have invested in this company. Not only have I, but our syndicate at the syndicate.com has invested in this company. And we're very pleased to have made that investment because we think this idea has legs. Welcome to the program, Scott Kubli. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. What lesson did you learn in the micromobility space? And do you think those micromobility companies are going to ultimately be profitable in work?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. That's a long pause, Scott. No, I mean, I don't know. I don't know. What I liked about this business, how about I focus on what I like about this business? Yes. Well, it's also, but also the lessons from Lyme, I mean, the scooter companies, they have challenging unit economics, right?

They do. And so what I really like about this business is there's a lot of similar muscle memory and technology and things like that, user flow and whatnot. It's very capital intensive, as you mentioned, but from an operational standpoint, like, there's a lot of details that are much more intense here, but there are some that are way easier. And what I like about it is that I think the barrier to entry is higher. And I think your success is predicated more on execution than capital availability.

So when I look at like a lime bird fight, it's really about like your customers are competing for price and they're choosing based on price and proximity. And to a much lesser degree quality. And with an average transaction of three or four dollars, right, it's pretty hard to create an experience that, you know, people are going to choose you, even if they have to walk a little further. Whereas, you know, our average transaction is, you know, $1,200, right? And so we really, really can focus on high quality execution and it actually matters. Yeah. And so that's, that to me, a lot of the lessons learned are kind of on the operational side. But then, you know, the lessons to unlearn are you really, really have to focus on the consumer experience and you can't, you know, everything needs to work.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to you this week in startups that I'm really excited about. Our 10th guest in the 10-part series of The Next Unicorns, his company is Citizen. His name is Andrew Frame. And this is an app that many folks are aware. of, especially if you live in a big city, New York, San Francisco, come to mind, Los Angeles. You've probably seen people tweeting about it. It gives you alerts on what crimes are going on in your area. And it is something that is become kind of essential for living, sadly, in San Francisco,

where there is a lot of crime going on. Welcome to the program, Andrew Frame. How are you? Hi. Thank you for having me. I'm curious if this type of thing you've got reports back of, hey, this really helped us with policing. I mean, I think, yeah, countless. Too many to tell. Yeah. Do you have a good one? You have a good story? We have so many. I mean, the first thing is the principle, right?

So one of the foundational elements of this is we must restore trust between community and law enforcement. That is the only way forward. And we have been trying to do that since we launched in 2017. And step one is to create. create an equal shared system where everybody has access to the same information. The police, they're doing a job paid for by tax money and they should be okay operating in public. Well, with or without citizen, they are operating in public. We are not here to invent the transparency movement. That has been done already, right? Everybody is already live streaming or going live

see George Floyd and a million others that have created this kind of justice. So we are in the transparency movement, citizen is simply organizing and accelerating it. And we have a strong focus on crime and police response and everything else. And so by creating a shared system, that's step one of accountability. The live video component shows you exactly how a crime was resolved. So you get to see exactly how the police officer conducted himself or herself and exactly what they did to bring it to resolution. Explain what that feature is. So you can go live. So if it says A citizen can. Yeah.

So people go live on almost every incident. And so you can live stream what's happening. So it's not just data saying that there's a missing child. It's live. It's here's the helicopter. Here's the response. It's a full live system that allows you to tune in to everything happening. And what this does is now when you're under observation, you are going to change your behavior.

We know that that's the psychologically proven response to being under observation is behavior changes. And so. For the better. for you better. You're going to be more buttoned up about how you're approaching. So the way this works on a workflow basis is a call comes in on a scanner. There's been an incident and the police have been called for a bar fight or something. And there's some fight reported on Union Street.

The police show up. But all the citizens around there may have gotten alerts. If one of those citizens is out there, they might stream and that video is attached to the call that came in, correct? So it's all one piece of data. So now you have a third part. view of, hey, how did they break up that bar fight or whatever it was? Yeah, you might have 100,000 people tuned into your live stream. And that's one of the differences between Citizen and like a social media network.

It's all about the relevance of content. It doesn't matter who you are if you go live. You know, I just thought of this. We have so many countless stories about this helping people. But here's one I'm going to mention. And I don't mention this one often because this happened a long time ago, but you made me think about it when you said bar fight. there was a woman and she

called the police because she said that a man had pulled a knife on her and this man worked in a Chinese restaurant according to her and she went live on this incident and so she was live streaming and another person went live and the police would not help her and they thought she was crazy and this is a black woman who was just pleading, passionately pleading for somebody, please, please stop treating me like I'm crazy. And the police would not respond to her. They basically acted like she did not exist.

And then one of the users that was live goes, hey, look at this. I'm live on Citizen. You've got 5,000 viewers and pointed that at the police officer who instantly changed the conduct. Now all of a sudden it was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. where was it? Let me take the police report. She got zero attention. She was treated like a lunatic up into the point that somebody said that this is on citizen with 5,000 viewers. And to me, that is exactly the mission of this transparency. She needed somebody. She needed that voice. Attention everybody. This is an emergency podcast. Two Apple engineers with thousands of patents have left Apple to create an iPhone killer, and we know what it is. Humane today on the emergency podcast. Stick with us.

Okay, the billion or trillion or zero dollar question, depending on how the startups go. Hardware is hard. But it does seem like a fascinating device and I'm excited about it. I'll be totally honest. I will be the first to buy it. What are they making? Well, I got a lot of DMs and I got a lot of people, you know, sharing information with me. And so somebody said they're building a contextual recall memory device, an AI cloud wearable camera with an app store. They want to put a camera in every human and then reconstruct 3D environments or just fetch images and videos to you. It has a search engine where you could ask while walking on the street, what building is that? And they'll answer it. Okay, this is a very interesting.

So that must have been something they talked about in their demos, et cetera. And that's something I was just using with my Louvre example. But yes, you're walking by a house. You could say, is that house for sale or, you know, how many square feet is that house or looking at a building in a city? Hey, tell me about that building in front of me. It says, oh, that's a flat iron building. It was built in this year, et cetera. These are the companies inside of it.

They're first-time founders with huge experience. Hope this helps. Big fan of the podcast. Learn so much from you. Thanks, Jason. And then another insider told me, imagine a thin eye watch that you clip to your appell. So this is the accurate information, I believe. A thin, you know, maybe the size of,

a cookie, but you know, square with curved edges. And it will serve as something between Snapchat, spectacles, Google Glass, and an eyewatch. So that means they're probably going to build glasses. But it has a laser that can project a UI onto your hand for interactions like dialing a phone number. So this is, now we know what this is. You put this little square on your lapel. It clips on or it magnets on. And then you put your hand out and you say, say, make a phone call and it projects the phone call. Or you say, call an Uber. And now it projects onto your hand with its lasers, a UI that says, would you like Uber X, Uber or whatever, and you just press a button on your hand. Boom, boom, boom. No need to take out your phone.

No need to look at your watch. No need to break your discussion with another person. And the thesis is they want to have people more immersed in the real world, which is what their website says. So that checks out. And the patent seems to explain that as well. They're basically former Apple execs who want to, former Apple execs who want to break phone addiction. So that's going to be their marketing, I believe, is, hey, phone addiction is bad. Use our addiction. Use our phone that doesn't require you to look at the black mirror. And then on Twitter, somebody posted a leak.

And it's been deleted, but somebody sent us this image that was tweeted. So if you're watching us on YouTube or you're watching the video view of the show and the Apple's iPad, you'll see this. or you can just go to our YouTube.com slash this weekend, where you can type Humane This Weekend Startups, and it should come up. You'll be able to find our video pretty quickly. And here's the League Prototype. So let me zoom in section by section.

Cloud Connected Site enabled AI platform with ServerSide app ecosystem. And so here you go. That looks like, that little square, looks just like an Apple watch. The hardware, according to this, is 180 field view camera with optical image stabilizer.

makes sense, sounds like a GoPro. LTE and GPS, of course, that makes sense. An accelerometer, that makes sense. LIDAR and time of flight sensor, that's expensive and doesn't make sense. But, okay, I guess they want to make that 3D version of the world. Photovoltaic surface to sustain battery, inductive charging, which means you could probably just snap it off on the magnet. It's going to be a magnet clip.

That makes sense and just drop it somewhere to charge it. You're probably going to have to charge it a whole bunch. There is a word here, hydrant. intrafobic, tending to repel or fail to mix with water or suffering from hydrophobia. So I guess it is going to be, that's a fancy way of saying waterproof. The mounts, tension clasp, interlocking pin back, or magnetic. And they show that here. So a clasp would be like a pen, right?

Like that little clasp on the back of a pen. The interlocking pin back would be like a lapel pin. And magnetic is obviously like when you get those really crummy name badges with the magnets and they fall off five minutes after you use them. Hopefully they use something stronger. In terms of what they say in this leak, the camera captures moments you didn't think to capture, moments you want to recall.

You can mark that by tapping record, and those moments will be queued to be processed on the server. So you recall them in a different style. This is just like William Gibson had like this little machine called God's machine or something that will record your whole life, where this is basically live casting, which means these things are going to be banned in bars

or are you going to get punched in the face like people with Google lasted, a bunch of dipshit, like, tech people went to bars with Google Glass and got in fights. And it's like, if you walk up to people with your Google Glass on, you're taunting people. It's like walking up to somebody like a paparazzi with a camera in their face. It's just obnoxious. So I predict these things will be banned. Humane will be banned from gyms, restaurants, clubs, and bars.

So that's going to be a non-starter. And I had a friend Addeo from my friend of Deo from the Founders Institute. Many of you know him. He's been on the pod, friend of the pod, friend of mine for a long time. And he showed up with one of these stupid life casting things. And I'm talking to him. And I said, is that a camera? He's like, yeah.

He's like, don't worry about it. I'm like, what the fuck? I'm sorry, what the beep? Are you doing? Beep that out, please. What the beep are you doing? Like, we're sitting here having a conversation like, and you're recording me? He's like, oh, it's just recording like low a minute.

I don't care what it's recording. Take that stupid thing off. And I just left the table. I was just, I was so mortified for a day off for doing something so stupid. Like wearing that stupid camera to a dinner. And it's just uncut. So I do believe Humane will be banned in workplaces. It'll be banned in conference rooms.

It'll be. So if you wear it, be prepared to get in fights, is what I'm saying. So this could be a non-starter for this device, I do believe. Just like people when you go to concerts or parties now, they put a sticker over your front and back phone. And if you take your phone out, you don't have the sticker on, they throw you out. I don't know if you've been to parties like that, but I think it's kind of cool. I love the idea of collecting phones before you go into a party and making everybody more present. But anyway, I tweeted.

somewhat, you know, simply, I'm looking for the best fifth grade teacher I can find. If you help me find that teacher, I'll give you a $2,000 Uber Eats card. You know, that kind of stuff does work when you do that. And I wound up on TMZ. Oh, wow. Daily Mail and San Francisco Chronicle as a rich guy who was stealing a teacher from the public school system, even though we were committed to hiring a teacher who was not currently employed, which was in the tweet storm,

but people don't want to read that. But one thing that happened that was interesting is about 100 people said, do you know Chris Bennett from Wonderschool.com? Because he is doing that exact thing. And I said, yeah, I've heard of Wonderschool.com. Let's get Chris Bennett on the podcast. So here he is, Chris Bennett,

the CEO and co-founder of Wonderschool.com. Welcome to the pod. Thank you, Jason. Super excited to be here. When you look at the entrepreneurs, because I look at what you're doing, very similar to what Uber did in creating entrepreneurs or Airbnb created entrepreneurs or Etsy created entrepreneurs through an infrastructure in a marketplace that allowed them to do business and find customers. What does a successful micro school teachers business look like?

Do they have 10 students at 10K each or 20K each? Do they make twice as much as they did when they were a teacher, 25% more? Is it the same, but they get more control? What does it look like at scale? We have the most data around childcare, so between the ages of zero and five. Sure. And, you know, what we've seen from a child care perspective, because we're all over the country, so our averages, you know, can, they're all over the place.

But roughly, you can go from about $30,000 a year to $70,000 a year. Oh, wow, double. A little bit more than double. Yeah. But, you know, we have providers who are making, who can make $150,000. $1,000 a year running a child care program. I've talked to when we launched our microschool solution, I've started to build relationships with existing microschool providers all over the

country to learn more about sort of their businesses. And I've talked to folks who are making $200,000 a year running microschools in clearly affluent areas. But there's a lot more upside that you have access. to running a micro school. What I love about what you're doing is you actually have the pricing on the site. So I just did a search

on Wonder School for my zip code. And looking around the peninsula of the Bay Area, you can see different microschools from a thousand to two thousand a month. I'm sure that depends on how many hours your kids are in. And I'm sure there are

a kids, but they all make a profile, a beautiful profile where you see the program director. And they've been background checked, what days, the ratio one to three providers to children, what a great ratio. So you've really dialed this in and answered all the questions people would have. And then you even have a great section, Chris,

on the site, when you're looking at these profiles of the rhythm of the day, 7.30 to 8.30 drop off, breakfast, cleanup, diaper change, circle time, art, snack, outdoor time, dancing time, dramatic play, free time. You get the idea, nap time, pick up time. and then you even have the calendar there and admissions and how to apply and to take a tour, you just basically take all that friction out. It really is like looking at an Airbnb. And I'm sure that was part of the inspiration, yes.

That's exactly right. And that's the key. As a consumer, right, as a parent, these are things that you expect to see when you're looking for a school. When you're an educator, these are things that are very foreign to you. You know, it's very common to find that most schools don't list their price. You have to work so hard to get the price. But these are decisions that we all use when we're making decisions. So we try to surface all the things a parent needs to be able to make a decision.

And we try to be as transparent as possible so that the parent can make the best choice for them. Because the other interesting thing about childcare and school, it's sort of like buying a home. you, me, and we took a sample size of 10 of your listeners. We all have different ideas on where we want to live. We have different ideas on the types of homes we want. We have different ideas around the type of schooling that we would put our children in. There's a lot more variables that go into making that decision than the average decision.