This Week in Startups - Cana CEO Matt Mahar on launching a "Replicator for beverages," turning a product into a platform, working with The Production Board and more | E1399

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Cana is back on the podcast, previously David Friedberg teased the "molecular beverage printer" on E1365.  This time, we speak and to CEO Matt Mahar about pricing, their go-to-market plans, their cartridge subscription process, Cana's potential climate impact, current flavors and more!  Molly was the first outsider to tour their facility and she tried a whole bunch of beverages from the Cana One. (0:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s topics: a deep dive on the just-launched Cana product! (1:30) Molly and Jason break down Molly’s site visit to the Cana facility and the taste tests (8:36) Bubble (9:57) Cana’s starting price point, cartridges, cost per drink, and more (19:34) Masterworks (21:06) Molly’s intros Cana CEO Matt Mahar, and they talk about the origins of the product, impact of the bottling industry, how the product works mechanically (31:39) Superside (32:53) Understanding non-obvious climate solutions, Cana product breakdown and pricing (40:03) Cana as a creator platform, big picture vision of what is possible (54:09) Cana’s economic impact on the bottling industry, Matt’s background, working with TPB Check out Cana: https://www.cana.com FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood

Hey, everybody. We've got an amazing show for you today. That's right. Kana, David Friedberg's Beverage Replicator Company, has officially launched. As of today, the first versions are available for pre-order. Okay, and Molly got an exclusive look. She got a tour of the facility. And we're going to show you for the first time the product in Molly is the first person to actually use and taste the product in the world from outside of their company.

Yeah, I love a field trip. It was just a delight. I also then was lucky enough to talk to Canada's CEO, Matt Mahar, about launching the product, about the future of the business, and the possibilities of what their platform offers. It's going to be an awesome show. Stick with us. This week in startups is brought to you by Bubble empowers people to design and launch their own apps, marketplaces or tools without needing coding skills or pricey engineers.

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One that doesn't sacrifice quality for speed. Get $3,000 or more in credits when you sign up for an annual subscription at superside.com slash twist. All right, Molly, you did your big site visit to Kana, David Freberg's company where they're making a replicator, if people don't remember. Freeberg joined us to talk about this new company, Kana, C-A-N-A on episode 1365. I did that interview with my bestie. And then Molly got to go visit and meet the new CEO or the CEO.

And we got a lot of information, including the price of the replicator. And we've got some video here too. So maybe we could, for those of you who are watching on Spotify or Apple podcast, we do this week in Startups video, you search for that, you'll find the video feed, or you can go to YouTube.com slash this week in. We're going to play the video. And Molly, you can maybe talk over what we're seeing here and how, what you thought of the product and how much it costs.

Yeah, definitely. So for those of you who maybe have not memorized every episode, I don't know why you haven't. But in case you haven't, the deal with Kana that we can't. that we keep calling a beverage replicator is that it is in fact that. It is a 3D, they call it a molecular beverage printer. So what they've done is reverse engineer, the molecular makeup of beverages.

And they want to replace your entire beverage aisle with this one machine that can print on demand, basically, with a series of teeny little amounts of these chemicals mixed together, a whole day is worth of drink. So what you just saw is the machine producing a blueberry citrus hydration water. And you can customize the amount of sugar in the beverage. You can say that you want it carbonated or not carbonated. And then because it's so customizable, not only will this thing eventually be able to produce

like Coke, right, or red wine, it also is totally tweakable. So you can say, oh, I also want some wellness vitamins in here. I want to make a custom vitamin water. So this was kind of like a little, you know, vitamin water. Yeah, it looks like vitamin water or like any other sports drink. But you're saying you could actually set the grams of sugar in it, the sweetness of it. Yeah. You can say that you want more.

They say that the presets are all better for you, right? The presets are all pretty low sugar. I suggested, like, I'm like, you guys got to integrate with a My Fitness pal or a fitness app so that you could track your sugar through out the day and that it would maybe suggest. You could add caffeine to it if you wanted to. I mean, it is pretty remarkable. And so if it was the morning and you were about to do a workout, you might want a little sugar and you might want a little caffeine.

But if you're working out at night and you've already had something sugary and you're trying to burn off the sugar and you've got enough sugar in your system, you could say, hey, I just want this without the sugar or maybe even fake sugar. Does it have fake sugars? Did they know what that? I think you can have fake sugar, yeah. Wow, that's crazy too. Big sugar or real sugar and then as much as you want.

So they sort of took me through, we're a little out of order, but they sort of took me through a day. And what was so impressive about is, you know, so we started with cold brew coffee. Right now the machine can't do any hot beverages. So it's all about the cold brew. And so you can see on the screen we're doing cold brew coffee. I could add a little sugar to that. you could see Matt, CEO Matt Mahars selecting the amount of caffeine in the coffee.

So you could say I want, you know, a strong one or not a strong one. And then coffee comes out to see my excellent cinematography here. Beautiful actually. Yeah. It looks dark and rich. Yeah. But you, if I remember correctly, like me, are a bit of a coffee snob. I am.

I thought the coffee was fine. Okay. So it was okay. If I had added ice cubes and a little milk. A little half and a half. Like I like it, I think it would have been lovely. So the coffee was like perfectly good. A little half and half is what it needed.

Yeah. And then we went from the coffee to that blueberry drink that you saw the really purple one. Yeah, the sports beverage. Yeah, it looks beautiful. Okay. And if you're watching the video closely, you could see that there's literally still a drop of coffee. I was like, how is this not going to taste like coffee? What about the cross-contamination?

Nope. No. They've solved for that. Hmm. And you can really see that they've solved for that when they go from that bright, purple drink there. I mean, they were very smart about the appearance. They go from the bright purple drink to grapefruit sparkling water. Okay. And this is the one. Like pinkish. No, it's clear. Oh, it was clear. And it should look pinkish because they just poured

this pink drink. Got it. But it didn't. And then this is the one where they customized it added a multivitamin blend. I could have put some tequila in there or some booze in there if I had wanted, you know, but instead I got this like beautiful, clear, sparkling water beverage. Lovely. Probably my favorite of them. Got it. So it's really easy to do a flavored beverage like Lecoix or whatever you're into. Yep.

So that was great. The coffee was acceptable. Coffee was acceptable. Vitamin drink was yummy. And the sports beverage was good? Yeah, totally. I don't usually drink those. So it was sort of like weird to have this sweet.

What was actually really noticeable about it is that it was sweet and almost like sticky. Like it had mouthfeel. It wasn't just like colored. Water. Got it. And then I went to fizzy water. And then because it was the end of our day in our theoretical demo here, a mimosa. Ah, mimosa, which is orange juice and champagne, which means carbonated orange flavor and then a little bit of alcohol, I guess, in it.

Yeah. And if I were to give you this mimosa at Sunday brunch, you know, not with like some signature fresh orange juice or signature champagne, but just, you know, your average. mimosas at a brunch joint for, you know, whatever it is, $6, $7, $7, $8. Would you be able to tell the difference, honestly? Would you know it was made by the machine? I would know that it wasn't orange juice. It was closer to like a tang and champagne. Ah, very interesting.

Because right now, and you can see how bright orange it is. I mean, it's also a completely different color. But it definitely tastes like sparkling wine and orange juice. The reason that it has more of a tang kind of look or orange. orange flavored drink is because they can't yet do the suspended solids of pulp. You're talking about pulp. So because it's- Or something even approaching pulp, right? You know, even pulpless orange juice is thick.

Right. It has a, what do they call it, viscosity to it? Like, viscosity. It's got a little viscosity to it in the mouth feel. So the flavor profile was like a mimosa. If I'm reading you're correct, but the mouth feel was different. Exactly. It tastes in just like a mimosa.

Okay, great. And as you can see, you can customize the alcohol. less normal more or it maxes out at 12% and yes it does have parental controls okay very nice so yeah yep I mean so you put a pin code on it or something

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Head to bubble.io slash twist and snag one of those 500 coupons. And the, when we talked to David Freeberg, my bestie, the Sultan of Science, he had put, I think, he set $30 million into this company or something crazy. And I just thought, well, this is like a, you know, a really fancy device. I thought the price would be $1,500, $2,000 or something really high-end because this is like kind of mind-blowing to have. So is it, are they going with the Tesla Roadster pricing? Are they going with the Model S pricing or the Model 3 pricing?

Where would you put this? Okay, how much? It blew my mind. Okay. There's going to be the first 10,000 versions are at a steep discount. Okay. I kind of want you to guess because they asked me, they were like, what would you be willing to pay for this or what do you think would be reasonable?

but, you know, I'm a knucklehead, like a high-end gadget consumer. Right. I could see them, I could see them blowing through 10,000 very quickly at, you know, 1,1,1, 1,100, 1,200, no problem, like the 9,95 kind of thing. Because, you know, I put this in the one touch coffee machine category. We're investors in a company called Terra Cafe, which makes, I think, the best one, which is about $8 or $900. So if you're into beverages and you're into convenience and you're into,

saving the planet, you would pay $1,000 to $1,500 from this. If you were an early adopter, fairly easy. I think the early majority, if we're talking about the bell curve of adoption of technology, early majority would pay $1,000 to $1,200. And I think the laggards or the mass audience would pay $500 to $800. Those would be my sort of zones of how I would price it. I would price it at no less than $1,200 right now. You would be wrong.

I feel like I'm their marketing department right now, which is a little bit of a weird experience for me. The pre-orders for the first 10,000 versions, which are like the, you know, the creator version, are the cheapest at $500. No. And then the production model, after those first 10,000 will be $800.

So wait, they're giving a discount to the first $10,000, not a premium pricing? That's dumb. Wait a second. Why are they doing that? I had questions. It costs $99 to reserve it. The goal, I mean, they're thinking as they explained it to me.

And I also am like, I have a couple little suggestions as future board members for them. But the thinking is that they, it's a see it to believe it kind of thing. Like everybody's familiar with the idea of a curry coffee maker and a little pod that goes in there. But they're only doing 10,000. It's hard to grok. Yeah, but what they want is for those 10,000 to go to creators and influencers so that this thing is. like on TikTok, right? So they're going to lose money on the first 10,000 maybe, or break even or something.

I don't know. Seems like, yeah, happily. I don't know. See, I don't like the strategy. I think this is, if they're $500 and I need to buy one for everybody at inside and launch because I just need to reserve like 40 of these for me. It would be my Christmas present. Honestly, like I send people bonuses.

I send people ice cream. I send people gold belly. I send the member mugs. Like, for me, this is the ultimate gifting. I would love to gift this to my team members, you know? 500 bucks is a number. brainer. And then I think that everybody would be super happy with this because this is, I mean, it literally turns water into wine. They wouldn't let me try the wine by the way, because they don't

feel that it's ready because they've only accomplished a 92 out of 100 on the wine spectator scale. Got it. So they really wanted to be like 94. That I can appreciate. I appreciate them saying, let's do the things we can do really well. And let's keep grinding on things we don't do well. any indication of what the cartridges will cost. And then, because I talked about the cartridges, and I was like, well, what if I don't drink alcohol and got an alcohol cartridge, then I'm throwing it away with all the alcohol in it? Is that like really wasteful?

And he said, well, there's going to be some sort of recycling program. And because they're doing the chemicals, it's not that big of a deal. But I could see if you're into citruses and I'm into coffee and you're not into coffee and then a third person's into wine, are we just like only using 25% of the cartridge and then throwing away 75% of the compounds? I never got clarity on that, but there's going to be some sort of recycling that happens. There will be recycling. I was wondering about that too because I'm the kind of person that like I get kind of stressed

if I get through the conditioner before the shampoo. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is kind of like that. Yeah. Yeah. So the cartridges, this could get to be a little bit of a pain in the butt. The cartridges last a month.

What they do is they just automatically re-up every month. They send you a new one. And you send the old ones back. And you send the old one back. And it learns your. your preferences and or I assume that you can set them in the app because they were like, listen, if you wanted a cartridge that was just like one big pomplamose or, you know, only alcohol or no alcohol, you could do that.

Do you have something to confess, Molly? Just theoretically, is there one that's just wine? Why am I asking so many questions about wine? I don't know. I was wondering if there's a mommy juice version. Oh, now I really want to make a custom alcohol. drink and just label it mommy juice. Yeah.

Mommy forget juice. Everyone's already thought of that, I'm sure. Yes. And that is their thing. So that's good. They're going to start learning your preferences. It'll learn your preferences and it'll recycle whatever you don't use.

And the, um, you pay per drink that you pull. Okay. How much is a, see, this is where I'm, now the price is starting to make sense. If it was really discounted, is it like, it's not $2 for a coal brew, is it? In fact, they said it's, they think that their goal is to come into a third to half of what a beverage would cost.

So if you buy- A beverage costs in the store or a restaurant or a coffee shop. Okay. In the store. I mean, he literally was like a pulled cocktail would be like a dollar. Okay. And then- Versus, you know, an $8 canned cocktail in the store.

I'm like, you mean an $18 at that annoying bar where it takes forever. Yes. So $0.29 for the bar. Like $0.29 for sparkling water. I can live with $0.25.50. Yeah, because a can cost a buck now, I think, right? Or 75 cents or something. So I go at that.

And then you don't have a can. You like never buy. You have the convenience. See, that's the thing is like when, and I got three kids and all my daughters are like addicted to sparkling water right now because we don't let them have soda. And so, you know, it's like twice a day. I'm cleaning up grapefruit and cherry and this flavor and that flavor all over the house. I got La Coy everywhere.

It's like. They don't ever finish the freaking can. They never finish it. Then I'm like, hey, I want to split this three ways. You can have a second. can and then the girls are like, but I want to have grapefruit and I want to have orange and I want have cherished. Oh my God.

I'm like turning into my dad. Then they leave the door open with the air conditioner on. And I'm like, this energy's not for free. And they're like, kind of, you don't have any grit. And they don't know how to be tough. And they could never walk up hill both ways in the snow to school. God, almighty. All right.

I like it. So yeah. I mean, it's like, look, everything gets more real when you see it in person for good or for ill. And there were parts of this that were freaking amazing. The end of single use. plastic bottles or the idea that every beverage in your day comes from one box is incredible. Well, think about all the space you're going to save. Think about like if you can take three or four cases out of delivery to your house every month or in our case, a case per person,

you know, people drink one or two of these a day. You'll save money. You actually will save money. I'm not even in it for the same money. I'm in it for the like just not killing the environment and the inconvenience of all this. Yeah. Was the sparkling water good? Because, you know, This is the other thing. I had one of those, I forgot the name of it, the one where you press on the top to make your own sparkling water. Soda stream. I hate Sotom, maybe I'm doing something wrong,

but it's never got enough bubbles in it. It's never crispy enough for me. Yep. So, I'm right in the garbage. I'm embarrassed to tell you what my DIY boyfriend has rigged at my house, which is a can of carbon dioxide, or like a metal container like brewers use, that he gets filled at a welding shop.

with five pounds of CO2 and then a hose with like a brewer so I can adjust the bubbles if I want to. But I go back to this like industrial thing with like a water bottle and like put the hose on and like activate the CO2

and shake it up. I mean I don't mean to be creepy can I date your boyfriend? I mean, I don't want my own soda stream. He will set this up for it. I mean,

you'd be delighted. Oh, he put it like Keggerator style in his fridge so that he always has a five gallon thing of fizzy water on demand. How long do you have to, how long before you have to change out that canister of CO2? He said that this one, the five-pounder should last me six to eight months.

What? The soda stream is like three days and we're throwing these things and trying to return them. I mean, I bet he would do a house call. That's hilarious. Because I just think these. But this thing's going to solve the problem too. So that means it has a CO2 cartridge somewhere inside of it. And you have to-CO2 cartridge.

It has an ethanol cartridge. It has a water. you know, reservoir much like an espresso or an espresso maker and you just fill that. And then the top part is kind of where the

little cartridge holder goes with all the little do do do do do do and you can hear it go like as it just like takes out teeny teeny teeny tiny little amounts of these kinds of. Love it. All right.

So let's get to it. Congratulations on the interview and no, no. Thank you. Oh, right. Yes. I'm really excited to listen to the interview along with the rest of the audience, so let's get to it.

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Matt Mahar, thanks so much for joining me. Hey, I'm happy to be here, Molly. Thanks for having me. And I'm so excited. Thank you for the tour. Everything we're going to talk about, I have experienced for myself, which is pretty exciting. Yeah, you're the only person in the world who has seen what you've seen. So it's a big deal.

It's a big deal. I'm really excited to be able to talk to you about it. It's fantastic. And I know you had quite, it was quite the end. adventures, a lot to take in. It was. It was a big adventure. And I'm glad we actually get to then follow it up with proper details. First of all, though, I should say, I'm talking about a thing that the audience has no idea. What I'm talking about, Matt, is the CEO of Kana, which regular listeners to this week in startups will remember as being the big thing that was announced

when Jason talked to David Friedberg of the production board, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago. but our shorthand for it internally has been the replicator for beverages. Tell us about Kana. Yeah, so I think it's always good to start with the problem, right? And so at Kana, our goal is to reduce the environmental impact of beverage, you know, creation and manufacturing waste. And so to put it in perspective, you know, the average American household uses about 2,500 bottles and cans. and plastic containers every year, just drinking the beverages that they drink in their home.

And so when we started thinking about this, we were like, how can we stop that? Like, how can we really stand as a company and try to reduce that? As we know, there's a global trash crisis, especially with, you know, plastic being really hard to recycle right now, you know, we can't ship it overseas anymore. It's just to pile up. Unfortunately, piling up in our environment, right, and in our water. So that's where kind of where we got our thinking. You know, that's where we originally started.

It was like, how can we stop that? And that's what we stand for at. Our core really is like, how can we change the way that we currently manufacture and distribute our beverages for the better of the planet? So how do you get from there to we should reverse engineer the molecular structure of beverages and then just print them on demand? How many years does that take? Yeah, let's build that bridge a little bit.

So it takes, yeah, it's about over three years. But I think there's a couple key. insights to know is essentially any beverage, and I brought a can just as a prop, but any beverage that you're drinking, only about 1% of it is the actual ingredients that you need to give it its unique taste and its unique aroma. And so all the trash I was just referencing, we essentially have these bottles and cans being shipped around with only where 1% of that actual bottle or can matter. The other 99% is just water. And so what's crazy is you have all this water being shipped around from point A to point B.

And so where we started with was that 1%. We said, how can we figure out a way to just ship the 1% to people? And then actually, the other question we asked ourselves was, what is that 1%? And there's there a way to recreate that 1% and get that to someone's home? And so, yeah, taking about three and a half years. And what we've done essentially is we've created a universal beverage ingredient set. That from that ingredient set, we can recreate infinite different types of beverages. So it's pretty, it's a long road.

There's a lot of steps in there. And the big breakthrough came when our chief science officers, his name's Lance Kaiser. He was in one of the original founders with Dave Friedberg, Lance comes. from chemistry and biology background, and his experience has been in using modern instrumentations, so we call it G CMS or an L-CMS, so liquid chromatography and mass spec, and using those to figure out what all the different ingredients are in a beverage that represent that 1%. And essentially, he built a system, an automated system, that allows us to understand that what all the ingredients are across all different beverages. And then from that, we have this massive,

catalog of beverages of ingredients, I should say, that then allow us to recreate those beverages. I mean, it's sort of Star Trek on both ends, right? Because you scan it with the LCMS that you just mentioned and sort of figure out what the ingredients are at the molecular level. And then you create the replicator out of that. You've got like the, what is it called the tricorder? First you scan it. Then you create what is effectively a molecular printer. And I want you you know, like break that down for people a little bit because it's easy to think, even when you see this thing happen, it's easy to think like, oh, you just have a little Coke syrup in there. And then you just dispense that syrup that's already mixed and add water.

Right. Yeah. So that's not it. No, no, it's actually, yeah, it's much more complicated. All those ingredients that I'm talking about, so that 1%, so there's about 80 ingredients we've figured out around 80 ingredients. And those are shared across every beverage. So those same ingredient, 80 ingredients can be used to make a beer or a wine or a tea or a soda or juice or even a cocktail. And so what the technology that we've created is we've taken those 80 ingredients and we've shrunked them down into a cartridge. We call it our ingredient cartridge. And the cartridge lasts about a month. And we actually use the cartridge 12 times.

So it's, you know, great for the environment. So you can use that for a month and before, for a year, I should say it, it before it gets recycled again. But yeah, but so that's one part of the technology. And then the other part of it, that's kind of the science, science in a cartridge, right?

And then the other part of it is the molecular beverage. And then wait, before you go on to that part, I still want to go back to the ingredients. Like, give us some of the weird science. Because again, I just want to make it clear people. It's not coconut,

orange. Oh, right. You know, like, give us the weird science names of these ingredients that are inside the cartridge because it's a whole mix-em-up science set. You have a scorbic acid that kind of gives things,

vitamin C, let's say. You have different flavonoids that are in there that will give an oak flavor to a wine or a buttery flavor to a wine. We have those types of ingredients. We also have sugar, different types of sugar. And actually, what's interesting, Molly, is it's not just those individual ingredients, too. It's actually when they're mixed together, right? When you mix an ingredient that gives something, you know, sugar and an almond ingredient,

actually when you remove the sugar, so when you remove the sugar, it's just almond. when you add the sugar, it actually tastes like cherry. It's the exact same ingredient. And so all we have to do is add a little bit of sugar and we then have totally changed the type of beverage. And so, yeah, that's the big unlock is it's the exact same ingredient. We're just changing the amount of that ingredient to then jump from one of those beverage categories, say a beer, jumping to a wine. Right. All right.

So that was step one. And then step two is the printing, I assume, right? Yeah, exactly. The printing. Yeah. Yeah, the magic cartridge goes into what we call a molecular beverage printer. And it's really interesting. The molecular beverage printer, the first of its kind, right?

There's nothing like this in the world. And it uses proprietary dispensing technology. It uses a hybrid microfluidics and pressure time dispense. And what it's able to do is, and the thing is we should keep in mind that 1%, like we're talking pico leader, like tier drop level, you know, amount of a liquid to change the taste. So we're talking about dispensing like the littlest, tiniest amount of a liquid. And what the molecular printer does is it'll simultaneously dispense up to 80 ingredients. It'll mix those with the water that's already in your home. So none of the trash associated with shipping and in bad environmental emissions with shipping water. It'll mix those ingredients

with the tap water and recreate the beverage for you right there on demand. So what's magical about the printer is it's pulling those 80 ingredients. It's actually pooling water, carbonating water. And if you are drinking a drink with alcohol in it, it'll actually mix ethanol into it at the same time and dispense it in about 30 seconds. And so this isn't a device that just sits on your countertop. And this, I want to be clear, sounds bananas, but I did this. And it would be one thing if it was just, I mean, you guys were very smart about this. You set up a. tasting so that it was multiple beverages in a row. And I went from, you know, a nice cold brew, basically, to a blackberry kind of vitamin water, bright purple drink to a clear,

fizzy grapefruit flavored sort of soda water with some additional like vitamins in there to a mimosa. All just one after the other. Boom, boom, boom. I want you guys to be able to picture this. And the good news is you'll be able to because there will be video of this all. on YouTube because I went there and took some video in landscape mode, everyone who watched the Audi video and was mad at me. Is it a C to Believe kind of thing? It's a very experiential, yeah, situation. I think, you know, if you can, if you say something like we can do infinite different

beverages and, you know, we're putting the beverage aisle on your countertop, people are like, what do you even mean by that? And so. Correct. Yeah, exactly. You have to see it to believe it. We're talking about the way to think about this is like, you have every beverage you need from a.m. in the morning with a coffee, cold brew coffee, all the way till a cocktail at night. And we can do everything in between there. And so for, yeah, when you came in and you saw this, the point in showing that spectrum is that that's the range that we can do from one device, right? This is not just a one device, one category of beverage. This is very unique because we can do all the beverage categories from one, from one single device. And they all taste.

Well, you tell us, but I'm biased. They taste really good. I am kind of a coffee snob. So the coffee, I think, you know, it's a little on the sour side. It's like hipster coffee. Okay. We can keep working on that recipe. Everything else was absolutely delicious.

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an annual subscription. This is a Twist exclusive. It's only valid for the next three months. oversight.com slash twist to get 3,000 in credits when you sign up for an annual plan. Draw that bright line for us because I think like one thing we're discovering in the age of exploring climate solutions is that some of them are non-obvious. And I feel like this is one of those ones that people don't necessarily think about. Like certainly they think about plastic bottles are kind of wasteful. But draw for us that bright line, the one-to-one, about how profoundly impactful this could be on what I believe is a two-trial. trillion dollar bottling industry? Yeah. And this $2 trillion beverage industry is just built on

like scaled up old technology, right? This is industrial revolution and stuff. And when you, when you bottle what is essentially water into containers and you ship them, you're emitting like, I think it's around 500 million metric tons of CO2. It's just ridiculous. Like that's the planes, that's the trucks. That's the cars getting everything around. And at the same time, you're using around 400 trillion liters of water to create those beverages. And what I mean by that is that's the processing. So you've got to grow the grape. You got to grow the barley, the wheat, the hops, all that stuff has to be grown. And then you actually have to process it in the plant, which uses more water. I actually use just as much as irrigation to grow them. And then they get shipped.

So you have this huge water waste. You have this huge emissions waste. Then you have this huge. As a result of you and I, you know, everyone consuming, we don't think about it, but you have this huge bottling and packaging waste. And so for us, I think the way the bright line is that it's a kind of a one-to-one ratio. We're going to go have one beverage, you know, one, one flavored soda, and it comes in one can, and it's used all this water and it's emitted all this CO2. And you get one drink out of it. And what we've done is we've flipped it. Our ingredient cartridge, right, has enough ingredients. ingredients in there to give you a month's worth of beverages. And so what that does is that significantly reduces the amount of packaging waste.

And like I said before, we used the ingredient cartridge 12 times. You actually send it back to us. So it's not just a month. We're saving a year's worth of waste, right? And then at the same time, a year's worth of all the water that would get used to create the beverages. So very significant impact using this, what we call like a, decentralized model where we've essentially got everything you need to make a beverage in your home.

And to get you the ingredients you need to create all these different beverages requires just a fraction, a fraction of our natural resources. Yeah, when I think about climate investments, I try to apply the filter of systems, gigatons, or behavior. And this one kind of has all three. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think of it this too, is like we're changing the system. And when we've done some rough math, it's about a half a gigaton of CO2. If you're talking about gigaton of CO2, that's about if we are, you know, broadly adopted across that two trillion dollar industry, it's about a gigaton a year, half a gigatons, sorry, a year that we could, we could remove. Yep, that's significant. Not millions of time. People are still talking about

millions of tons. So if you are in the gigaton range, you're already, you're already hitting that mark. So we are talking today, as you're announcing, pre-orders for Canada. Give us. the kind of breakdown. How can people get this? How big is this do-hickie? How much is it going to cost? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, okay, so canada.com, right? Go to canada.com. This fits on your countertop. This device looks amazing. It looks like it's from the future, but it should fit and it fits in your on your counter now. It's a beautiful brushed aluminum. We chose that because it's recyclable, highly recyclable as well. And it's got a beautiful seven-inch touchscreen on the front that allows you to select all your beverages, comes with an awesome mobile app.

But you go to Canada.com. And so what we're doing now is we're taking reservations. And so the first 10,000 reservations, the reservations are $99. The first 10,000 gets you the device for $499. Okay. And then after the first 10,000, the price goes up to $799. And we'll be shipping in mid-23. So this is the founders edition that we're, we're,

looking to get to people. And so, yeah, yeah. So what's really novel about it is that reservation price gets your spot in line. And then the 499, the device shows up. The cartridges are free. All the cartridges show up automatically. That's kind of the magic of this too. I mean, we're asking people to take a pretty big step with us.

So we want the experience to be, like I call it like a perfectly round, round-tripped experience, but you don't have to think about any of the steps because we're asking people to change a habit now that they have about going to the grocery store or going wherever to get their drinks. And so we've thought about everything. All the cartridges auto ship to your home based on your usage, not just based on a timer where things boxes stack up. You know, you go on vacation, boxes stack up.

That's not us. Things show up exactly when you need them. And you pay per use at the device per drink. And our target is that those drinks per drink should cost about 25% to 30% less than what they would cost you at the grocery store. And then you just have a credit card in the system, basically. you get sort of a monthly charge based on your consumption? Yeah, exactly. Okay.

That's right. Yeah. And then when you say at the grocery store, like a glass of wine would be broken out, it's not, you know, it'd be like, not that this is a passion point here, but like, what might that pricing look like for drinks that we don't think of as a per dispensation? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like sparkling water, let's say that's about 29. For us, that's 29 cents.

and if you go to a store, that's going to cost you a dollar, 99 cents, right? And then on the other end of the spectrum, so like a premium cocktail, for, from Canada, that's a dollar 99, you know, and if you go to, you know, you get an RTD or ready to drink cocktail in a can, that's easily $3. Yeah. Right. And so, and then if you were to, you know, we don't even compare ourselves. We're 15 at that stupid bar where it takes forever for them to make it. Exactly. Yeah. So significantly less than going to. a bar restaurant. But, you know, we're trying to really compete with that beverage aisle. And so we want to be cheaper than, than, or more affordable than what's in the beverage aisle. And I think

the reason why is we're taking a very different approach than most, I think, like cutting edge hardware companies is they usually come out with a really premium product that has a premium price. And there's no problem with that, right? There's people like me, like, cool, like I'll take a premium electric car when it first comes out because I'm really want that. But, We're trying to go for mass adoption, so we want the price to be as low as possible, both per drink and for the device, so that we can get mass adoption as quickly as possible. And the more drinks that are served from Kana, the bigger impact we can have on reducing the environmental waste. And so that's the goal is get it priced so that as many people as possible can get one of these that they're in their home. I want to ask you about your other potential big revenue stream, which is partnerships.

Like, Kana is not just a molecular beverage printer. It's a platform for beverage creators, it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, yeah, you were in here, right? We talked about that. We talked about... I heard some of the songs.

It plays little songs. Yeah, the Mali Margarita. The Mali Margarita. The Batanga. The Batanga. Could be a future state. So, yeah, think of Kana at the end of the day. What we've created is a beverage creation platform.

And what we're all in. hoping to do is invite any creators onto our platform. And so we'll have a couple at launch and we have a couple that we're saving for later on. So we have about a dozen so far. And think of this as like very non-traditional partners. These aren't your big beverage brands. These are the YouTube star that's known for doing something amazing in their field. And they have a couple million followers. They're really interested in what that person is doing. Let's enable them as a creator to make a beverage that that, you know, really aligns with their followers. We also have, we have some beverage brands more, we look for more like emerging,

cutting edge rebel brands that want to partner with us and really are mission aligned. And then we even have stuff, we even have some partners that are organizations, non-profits. Let's help them with their nonprofit as well as them helping with us. And what we do is they come on to the platform. We provide free of cost all the services needed to create a brand. So if we did the Molly Margarita, we would, you come on, we'd help you create your brand, create the beverage, no cost. And we just split the revenue on our platform.

And so as people are ordering that drink, you get to share in some of that, and some of that revenue. Have you determined what the split is yet? Roughly, yeah. We're still working on it. We're still working on it. It's early days. But we have a rough idea.

I think we're trying to make it as, I want to create owners. We want to create like honestly a beverage brand owners. And so how can we give them the most advantage possible? And so I think this will be an opportunity. The way we're thinking about the revenue is very unlike what it's very generous comparison, I think, to what most people are used to. It's super fast. We can turn these beverage brands in about two months.

So this is like, you know, someone who's busy, someone who's a creator, you know, someone who's super busy. We can turn all this for them in about two months and we can get it from concept to a cup is what we call it concept a cup. So have someone drink out of it in about two months. With some branding and some on-screen display, because we should say there's a little, again, this video will probably be playing if you're watching the podcast on Spotify or something like that.

There's a touchscreen where you can customize aspects of the drink, but also see graphics and hear music. And are you saying that you will help create those brand experiences in-house for these creators? Yeah, we have a full partner development team, think of it as. And I think one of the, one of our takes is that, that marketing and brands have totally shifted. It's not a, a big brand that's static talking to many people. It's now shifted, right, with TikTok and YouTube. It's, it's one to one, or it's millions to millions.

And I think what we're taking that and saying, how do we apply that to beverages? And so, so we're going to create all the assets, all of the beverage for, the partner. But all of those assets are alive. These are like, you know, you saw, right, you saw on the screen, these are videos. These could be introductions from the partner themselves. It's very interactive. There's music. There's audio. There's motion. And so our goal is to actually contrast so sharply against this monolithic, just like, you know, kind of faceless and nameless brands that you see in your beverage aisle now. We're the complete opposite. We want to be alive, give faces, give names to beverage brands.

And that's really exciting for creators. And I think it's really exciting for people that are getting drinks too, right? It's really interesting to learn about a beverage actually from a person, you know, in your house and get an idea of what you're going to drink and maybe even something you can pair it with, you know, in the future. Someone could suggest something to eat it with. It's great. It's also, I love the idea of like beverage sommeliers, basically, to being like you should totally. try this with funnions or um that was a unfair YouTuber a set of assumptions right there funnions it would actually probably more likely be like you should pale you know pair this with kale and tofu

anyway uh I'm just on a tour to like offend every YouTuber um what I also like about that concept though and when you see that screen and you see that interactivity in the fact that you can add or subtract sugar or put different nutrients in or add some caffeine or take it away that there also could be that level of creativity in your house. Like we sort of think of a silly us. We think of a beverage as a static item whose ingredients are fixed by the company that brought it to us. But it seems like you're describing a future where I have an app and I can invent my

own beverages, whether or not I choose to share them. Yeah. There's two levels here. Yeah. There's the very specific like partner team and we help them craft something from scratch. And then there's, I think what you have seen in, say, like, like, Starbucks is successful because they created like a bazillion versions of coffee and everyone's got their own version when they go into coffee, right? They're into Starbucks. It's like the double Mogadina with whip on top with like caramel and it's like specific to you.

And then they write your name on it. And it's like there's like that's why they're successful. I don't think it's because like people are going in there and like I love doing my work from here. It's because they get something that's personalized to them. And so with Kana, because you have all those ingredients on board, and because we actually have added very unique ingredients like vitamins to our, to that cartridge, we actually let people customize the amount of ingredients in their beverage. So one thing, actually, one surprise that you didn't get to do when you came in was we actually, yeah, sorry, sorry. Not cool, man. Yeah, I know.

We actually can adjust the flavor intensity. So you can say, say, so we gave you the tour of the, it was a grapefruit seltzer that we poured, right? And so we could turn the grapefruit up. And at the same time, you can adjust the sugar up down. You could put alcohol in, take alcohol out. You can even adjust the amount of alcohol, like a double or a single. You can actually even put vitamins in.

So we have a wellness shot, a, and energy shot so you can start to put these mixtures together in very non-traditional ways. But that's just like what Starbucks did. That's why people got really, really like used to that is that hyper-personalization. And so that doesn't exist anywhere. It's not going to exist anywhere. And we're essentially unlocking that in your home for any beverage you want. And then instantly we save that.

As you saw, we save it. And that just shows up on the screen next time you come in. Hey, you looks like you have this. We make recommendations based on, you know, your previous preference. And we just serve it up again. And it's your perfect, your perfect blend every single time. And I think in the future, there'll be a point where everybody could be a creator. So then the, you know, my individual beverage or your individual beverage, you can actually

release that out to the community and potentially become a beverage creator yourself. What's the big vision for what is possible with the science down the road? I mean, what is possible? Not to take away from what is already possible, which is remarkable. But I wonder how you see, I mean, this is potentially such a sea change in so many things, enabled by some relatively recent technology breakthroughs, right? Yeah. So I think, yeah, after we give people any beverage any time, right, for, you know, significantly

less cost and for reducing the environmental ways. What have you done for me lately, though? Yeah. So after we're, we master that. And we, we knocked out of the park and we make the experience automatically send you the cartridges you want and we recycle them 12 times. No pressure. no pressure.

And you literally turn water into wine. After that, though, what cool thing are you going to do? After that, think of what we've created. So one is just like pulling back. Our vision is food and beverage, I think, canna long term, what we are mission, right, that environmental aspect of reducing waste, water waste, that applies to a lot of different categories, right? And I think what we've created, or the technology we've created is very legible,

leverageable and scalable. So we can do, what we've created is essentially a liquid, a liquid printer. So think any liquids. And it starts to get really interesting when you step away just from beverages to different types of liquids. So in the future, you can imagine household goods, perfumes, soaps, anything like that. Not from the same device, obviously, a separate device, but it would have, really have a shampoo, everything like that is open to us.

And what's even crazier is the same technology can be used for solid state dispense as well. And so we start to get into all kinds of different beverages, but we start to get into food. And I think what eventually happens with us is the same way that 3D printing evolved from massive $100,000 3D printers that took up like the entire part of your room and now they just sit on a countertop, the same thing will happen. with, say, beverage and food creation. I mean, ours sits on the countertop, but we'll be able to create food from a device that sits on your countertop and do solid state. And that technology, you know, evolution for what we're creating is we're really just at the starting point of it. And I think that's what we'll end up, that's where we'll end up in a future state. I would say, you know, food, food for sure, beverages with proteins in them, beverages with

THC in them. There's all kinds of things that we could start to do. how do you think about on that note actually how do you think about yourselves as a platform for what is essentially some kind of content you know like there may be things that you end up sort of accidentally endorsing that you didn't mean to or certainly we talked already about parental controls um which are a pretty obvious great thing that you're already planning for in terms of like my kid can't walk up to it and be like bear me um but it is, it can be a little dicey. We keep saying on the show that everything is content and all content is moderation. And I wonder how you're thinking about that in the future. Again, we're jumping ahead like a million steps because first, this thing has to end up on the countertop. It's always good to think in advance about what could go wrong. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

You want to, there's a risk-based approach to everything. Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, you mentioned two things there. But yeah, for us, we look at it and say, this is, we want it to be an open, we want it to be an open platform, right? But we definitely want to curate. And so we're still figuring out where that line is for us. But I think right now, that's why we've created that partner team so that we can figure out how to keep things in the right, you know, in the right curate it in the right way. And so, so yeah, we don't

want people in, you know, unknowingly endorsing things. I think there's just some basic tenants that you'd follow there, like hypertransparency, just be like super transparent with everything that's going on. Make it super easy to understand the beverages I'm ordering what that partner's about, you know, make sure that that's fully open. And I think once you do that and you create transparency, people can make, you know, can make really good decisions for themselves. So that's kind of how, you know, early days, but that's kind of how we're thinking about it.

Yeah, totally. And then just to sum up before I have a few more big picture questions, but just to sum up, what we are talking about here is the end of single use bottles, as we know them. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we're going to, we could have a massive impact. You know, we're doing some analysis now to figure out exactly what that is. But like I mentioned, we're essentially being able to give people a month's worth of beverages from one cartridge.

And you saw it, right? This is like, this is like the size of a rim of paper. This is a very small thing in comparison. You can use that from a cartridge. Not the whole machine. Not the whole machine. Not the whole machine. Like a microwave, maybe taller?

Yeah, it's like maybe. Like if a microwave were turned vertically. Turned vertical. Yeah. This, it's, it fits on any countertop. It fits underneath, you know, it's, it's about 15 inches tall, 17 inches deep and about 16 inches wide. And so that sits on almost any countertop based on the height of cupboards and stuff. And you don't even need to put it underneath a cupboard.

You can put it somewhere else. So really tall. I think eventually, though, like any technology, it gets faster, it gets smaller, right? And it's going to get cheaper. So right now, I think you're at the starting line. But it just looks. amazing in your home, right? It's a real showpiece. That's one of the things

we wanted to feel like. And so, yeah, I think it's clear that like this will evolve to a place where it's probably, like right now, the way I think it was, it's maybe like a toaster oven size. And then it'll evolve to a toaster. Right. Wow. That'll be crazy.

And the one you see in the video, just so viewers are aware, is a little bigger. That's a prototype. Yeah, it's bigger than the one that it's going to. It has the dimensions I just mentioned. It's a prototype. It's our prototype 1.5 actually is what we call it. And it's, it's the form factor. It's the look. It's got everything on there is the way that we're going to, we're going to ship the product. But like I said, it'll eventually continue to iterating and get smaller.

Yeah. How do you think about the economic impact of the change that you're proposing? It's not your responsibility, but it's also like a $2 trillion industry. A lot of truckers, right? A lot of packers. Yeah, I think, yeah, there's some fundamental changes. I mean, there's a, there's a ways to go. Prepare for it, it sounds like, right? Like, get ready, guys. This thing is launching today. Yeah. It's the same as any breakthrough product that happens in a category, right? It's going to start small. It's going to have a really positive impact for the people that are, that are going to join the mission with us, join the journey with us. And I think it'll take a little bit of time for the industry to wrap their head around

it. Although, I'll admit, like, they're trying to figure some of this stuff out. I mean, we're not the first countertop in-home beverage device. I mean, there's some companies out there that have played around with this. And I bet they're playing around with it for the same reason. They just have, I think, have tacked in a different way, which is fine. But yeah, I mean, disruption is somewhat inevitable when you're, you know, when you're trying to make something that's going to be better. And it just so happens that this industry, the infrastructure hasn't evolved in, you know, a thousand years essentially. And so it just happens that it's coming now. But there's, you know, we're still going to, you know, there'll still, it just be a different type of revenue.

Anyone can come on our platform and create a beverage and potentially there's revenue right there. Yeah. How did you end up at Kana? You were a VP at Vivint, right? Smart Home. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I was at Vivint Smart Home. So my background is essentially, you know, building and scaling hardware and software businesses. So kind of living at this intersection of hardware and software and mostly like emerging, emerging ideas. And so I was at Vivint and I ran their camera and video team business unit within Vivint. And we were on the bleeding edge of smart home cameras, right, when those came out. And we actually did it as a, they did it as a service. And so I came to Cana because I saw a lot of the same like really positive fundamental

like business aspects to Canada. It's a Consul's business. There's, there's great benefit for the customer. They're getting something that's high value. They're getting it for a lower price point. Like that's fantastic for customers. And then also similar to Vivint, we're doing something that's so like, like completely different than what is out there in the industry now. At the time, Vivint was doing smart home as a service versus buying one cool, you know, thermostat and putting it on your wall. We were providing the whole service. And that's, that's a round. Round trip experience, I call it, where like everything is really dialed in. You just walk away, like, whoa, they just delivered my system and installed it and all these things. The same thing with Kana. That's why I showed up here, because that roundtrip experience is so attractive to me to figure out how to just make someone's life way easier, massive convenience and save as much time as possible. And doing it in a way that actually has a really significant impact on our environment. So yeah, so I came from Vivint because I saw those two aspects, really killer awesome magical experience and this idea that, hey, the business is actually fundamentally sound.

I want to ask you about what it's like to be part of a company within the production board, which is such an unique entity all by itself. But I do feel like I have to do my duty and say, what can't, can a produce right now? Like there are some minor limitations that will be worked out when it ships or will be coming? Like, what will we be waiting for in the future still? Yeah, a few things to be clear on. Yeah. So it won't do, it can't do hot beverages right now. Right. And, you know, that's in the works, though. We can, you know, that's a, that's a Gen 2 thing. Most of the beverages that get drank at home are cold beverages and bottles and cans anyways, right? It's not necessarily warm beverages. And so that actually is really good for us to, again, to reduce the environmental impact. So it's actually really great for us. But it won't do hot at the beginning. And it won't, it's really tough. Like, so the amount of liquid that we're talking about dispensing. here, this pico liter, that's like one one one millionth of, or one billionth of a liter. And so when you

have something suspended in there, so a protein or something like a pulp that you would find in like a juice, it sometimes can get stuck. And so we've steered a little bit clear of any beverages that have that in them. Now, we can recreate the exact same taste. So when you tasted the mimosa, right, it's like that's orange juice. It just doesn't quite look. It looks more like tang and champagne, but it tastes like orange juice and chippy. Yeah. So there's a few things we can't do. Those are all things, though, that we, you know, we already, you know, we iron out as we, as we go. But, but, but that's it. Those are the only. No milk. Yeah. No milk. Yeah. Yeah. And else, you know, there's not just milk. You have to have about four different types of milk as well to serve customers across. Right. Right. Oat and almond and whatever, you know, regular. And so that, those thicker, those protein-based beverages, we still got to master those. But that's, that's about the existence. extent to the limits. And then finally, yeah, tell me about incubating, building, creating a company within the

production board alongside Dave Friedman with kind of these different incentives. Like, obviously, the goal is to make money and build a real business, but not necessarily with the expectation of venture scale returns. Is that accurate or not? Well, I, well, my understanding is, yeah. So you're like, no, I have to make all the money. Yeah, yeah. Like, I think people should always think, like, without a margin, there's no mission. And that just happens to be the reality of things, I think, right? I didn't make those rules, but that's what I believe. But I think in terms of working with the production board, Dave is one of the first, and it's a very refreshing type of interaction where he, you know, I think he walks the walk. He says, no, those things don't matter right now. This thing needs to exist. And the reason why it needs to exist is because of what it can do. Let's just make that happen. on all those things. And he's been a great thought partner and a great leader actually in trying

to push us to really just stay focused there because, you know, as a CEO founding a company, you know, limited resources, you're just trying to, you know, manage things correctly, higher at the right pace. And he's like, no, let's go make this a reality. So actually, my experience working at the production board has been been fantastic. And I should also say, too, it's not just Dave, like Barat Fassan has been, you know, who's Dave's kind of, Batman is his Dave's Robin is just like kind of a silent, you know, he's back there providing a ton of support. And both of them are like, just like big brain thinkers, bold thinking. And so it's been really good to have them push and provide tailwinds with just like really fresh ideas. And they're not worried

about our, you know, runway. And they're not worried about these things that I think most found, like most CEOs would get tripped up on. And they're there at like a moment's call at any time, you know, when it's like, you know, I want to. try we have a big problem. They're happy to to have a jam session and figure it out. So it's been great. I think the other thing that's good about TPB too is I've been able to plug into some other CEOs that are maybe one or two steps ahead. And, uh, be able to pick their brain and understand, you know, how do they overcome hurdles? How do they deal with this? And so, um, they, yeah, TPB has been a fantastic partner, pretty much on every aspect, I think, of being a CEO.

You know, one thing to throw out you too is you, I think one thing that's always fun is, um, when you're on the podcast is the origins of Kana. Great. Tell us about the name. So Kana, this is always a quiz. I ask people, like, do you know why we called it Kana? And so this is another Dave Freiburg idea. So Kana is the city in biblical history where Jesus turned water into wine. And so.

Of course it is. Exactly. Yeah. So back when he's- I think Freiburg and Jason, I'm remembering this. I think they did talk about it on the podcast, but it's important, you know, People don't hear every episode. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's a great, I think it's a great thing. It keeps us, you know, keeps our heads in the right spot. We're trying to, you know, make magic one, one glass at a time, essentially. I mean, no, I was a little, as I told you, I was a little disappointed. I didn't get to try the wine because you think, because it's only a 92 on the one to a 100 wine. Spectator scale. And you really wanted to be like a 97 or a 98 before I could try it.

And I was like, 92 is well within my parameter. of wine that I will buy at the store. Yeah, totally. Yeah, it's not there. We have a pretty rigorous process. Actually, a lot of our beverages beat out the competition. We send them external. So we have our own internal process.

We have an external process where we send it out to food labs through the U.S. And they test it with consumers on our behalf, but we're hands off. And they've actually asked us, like, what are you doing over there with your beverages? We don't have beverages usually score this high compared to what's commercially available. And so, yeah, if you're familiar with the wine spectator list, we want to get into that 94-95 range and we're just at the 92 range and so there's a little more tweaking to go but when we break that barrier I'd love to have you back um oh I'll be back in an Uber exactly do not drive down

I was like I can't have that much mimosa because I drove yeah yeah that's yeah anyone who comes in when they do a walk through we got to make sure we we we'll call the Uber but yeah right we'll invite you back you'll have such fun tasting parties like you can have a bunch of so many like it'll be amazing by the board meetings are become way easier because the We're just going to gather around the cana, have a couple of drinks, and everyone will be really lucid. And I can, you know, it'll be a much easier. Whatever. Every decision you want.

Yeah. Green light. Green light. All right. Well, excellent. I look forward to wine tasting day in Redwood City at Mahara, CEO of Kana, launching for pre-orders today at cana. Congratulations. We are excited to be here at the birth of this revolution.

We're happy. Thank you very much for having us. This is great. Yeah, I'm excited for everyone to come join us on the mission. We're, it's going to be, it's going to be great. Hey, everyone. Producer Nick here. I want to tell you about the SaaS Syndicate.

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