This Week in Startups - E1140: Dishcraft Robotics CEO Linda Pouliot on scaling Robots-as-a-Service | Rising Stars of SaaS 6

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Check out Dishcraft Robotics: https://dishcraft.com FOLLOW Linda: https://twitter.com/TheRoboLinda FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this week in Startups. I'm your host, Jason Kalakannis. And I've been your host for over a thousand episodes that you can go watch at this week in Startups.com. And we like to do a little series here on the show. And one of them that we did was the rising stars of SaaS. SaaS is software as a service, but as we are prone to do when we do these kind of little mini series, if you will, is to maybe open up the aperture and allow you to think about SaaS in a different way.

And one of those ways is to think about software as a service as hardware as a service. and our next guest is doing something really fascinating in robotics. The worst job you could ever have, I believe, in the modern society, having done this job in the 80s at my dad's bar and my baby brother, Josh, loved this job. I hated it. I was front of the house. I was a bus boy and a waiter.

My older brother, Jamie, was a bartender and a waiter. But my baby brother loved to be a dishwasher. Nobody I've ever met since has enjoyed being a dishwasher. It is the worst job in the world. Now, I know there are many precious snowflakes listening. Socialists all who believe that we have to be really careful, really careful, that we don't lose jobs. Oh, no.

What if we lose jobs? Newsflash, the human spirit and society has so many problems to solve. that getting rid of brutal, hard, manual labor is a good thing. We shouldn't try to protect backbreaking labor. We should try to automate it and move on. If you have any demented strange feelings about this, you're probably just a young person or a socialist maniac who has not figured out that when we got rid of telephone operators,

those people got jobs, when we got rid of bank tellers giving you money, when we got rid of people literally dragging plows and replaced them with horses and then replace them with, you know, the ice engine, life got better for many people. So getting rid of dishwashers, literally eliminating that job,

I believe, my personal belief, would be a noble thing to do, just like cleaning bathrooms. If somebody could come up with a way to automatically clean bathrooms, it'd be great if a human never had to do that again. My guest today is the CEO and founder of a company called DishCraft Robotics. And she has been working on this issue.

She may not have the same feelings I do strongly about eliminating backbreaking manual labor to let people do other jobs that we need. But welcome to the program, Linda Pooleo. Did I get it right, Pooleo? You got it right. Oh, thank the Lord. Okay, you heard my rambling anti-socialist communist craziness. because every time I talk about automation,

because I'm such a rabid capitalist on Twitter, the echo chamber that nobody should pay attention to, I get absolutely demolished because the socialist and Bernie Bros have found me and they attack me. How dare you want to have self-driving cars and all this stuff? How do you feel about it? You're working on, and we're going to get into all the details, but this is the number one issue that comes up in your life,

is, oh, my God, you're going to eliminate this job and there's just many millions of people who are dishwashers. How do you feel more like I feel that we should eliminate these jobs and move on to higher level things and there'll always be other jobs? Or do you feel like there's a zero-sum game here? We're going to eliminate all the jobs and nobody's going to have anything to do. Oh, we think that there is really great, wonderful, creative things to do in the kitchen, like cooking the food.

And so we think that that's where people should be working because then that creates a better guest experience. And the reason why dishcraft started was because so many people came to us from the restaurant industry and said, we can't hire for this role. And when we do have a dishwasher, they churn out within 30 days. And it takes us forever to find a replacement. So please, can you automate it for us? So literally, nobody wants this job. And getting rid of it, with the exception of my brother, who I think he just liked hanging out with the crazy cooks who were insane. He just liked being part of that culture. Like, it is an onboarding, but you could also be a prep chef. That was the other way to kind of get into the kitchen. I was told from a friend of

mine who was trying to run a restaurant in San Francisco proper that the going rate per hour for a dishwasher, because I think they were unionized, but was $30 or $35 an hour. Is that correct? In San Francisco and a union property correct. $35 an hour to clean dishes in San Francisco. How does a restaurant even survive if, and these are typically 10-hour shifts, 12-hour shifts? Correct. So back of the envelope here, am I correct in saying that dishwashers in San Francisco were making six figures if they were unionized?

It's, it costs the restaurant $90,000 if it's a union. That's not what the dishwasher makes, though, because there's fees and what. Got it. So it has become such a, it's become the hardest position to fill in a restaurant. Is that a fair thing to say? Correct. Kind of maybe always has been. So you as an entrepreneur saw this at some point.

Was there a moment of inspiration or did you just come from robotics and say, what's the next best thing, what's the best timing for putting robots in the restaurant, where you open-minded? Tell me how you came to the idea. Yeah, I actually wasn't looking at restaurants at all. I was so burned out from my previous startup that I was looking at, you know, large companies like Google and Facebook. And folks from the restaurant industry reached out to me and said, look, we know that you've done this other robotic cleaning company.

And we're really trying to solve this one problem. And can you point us in the right direction? A, can it be solved, and then B, who can solve it? And because I was in between gigs, and I was always fascinated by the food world, I just called up restaurants that I liked, and I said, hey, can I work in your kitchen for a few days? And then I started to do research and realized no one was tackling this one product. And it could be done, it could be automated, and that was a golden opportunity. And so I just started pulling together a team.

And previously, you had done, I believe, a robot vacuum, but more of a robot vacuum, but more a commercial grade one, is that right? Well, it was a consumer grade one, so it was Nito robotics. And at one point, it was a number two competitor to iRobot Rumba. Yeah, and you learned a lot from that about the limitations and the possibilities, I think, of what's possible with robots. Why did the Rumba and Nito and that class become, and am I correct, that they became the

first mass robot for consumers? Yes. Why did that become the first thing? Why is that use case so doable? Because people would not be buying these. And I know people who have them, they won't shut up about them, these cleaning robots.

So is it some combination of people hate vacuuming or the technology is just really good at this task? What is it? Why did that become the first one? You wouldn't expect that, I don't think. Yeah, it's interesting because when I started the company, what we really wanted to do was bathroom cleaning and specifically shower cleaning because if you ask consumers, that is one thing that they just would love help with. But from a technical standpoint, it was much easier to design something that would go along a floor and clean than to solve right out the gate the vertical challenge. Because of gravity.

Right. We don't have levitation boots or anything like that yet. So the enabling technology of keeping something on the ground is easier. Has there been another mass market robot that, you know, like the Rumba or the Nito, like the vacuum sort of segment? And if not, why, and what do you think has the next chance? Sure. I think it's pretty difficult for robotics right now to do multifunctions. And so vacuum cleaning was very nicely designed to just do one thing and do it really well.

dishcraft similarly, we are working on one task and can excel at that one task. And you start to see proliferation in robotics of these kind of attempts where you take one thing, it's very repetitive, it's very manual, and you automate it. And I think that the dream, of course, is to, you know, have a consumer product that can, you know, clean your entire household. We're just not there yet. It's a very difficult technical challenge. All right. So when we get back, I want to know how does one even start to create a robot to clean dishes and model? Obviously, you worked in these restaurants. So I want you to unpack that sort of working there. And then how your brain works to say, how do we construct this process when we get back on the speed of startups?

Listen, I have invested in over 200 startups. I've advised even more. I've been in the startup game forever. And one of the key things you want to do in a startup is you want to minimize your burn and you need to maximize efficiency because startups are always under-resource versus larger competitors, right? So I look for people who can take a nickel and turn it into a dollar of value. How do you do that? Well, look at all the different software products you're spending money on and how much time and energy your team has to put into integrating them all together. If you look at those two things, you're going to say we're spending too much money and it's too much integration time. Well, O-D-O-D-O-O.

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Plus, it's all open source. You can spend your time on talent instead of expensive software. You need to spend that money building a team. So we'll go ahead and get $1,000 from Odoo at odio.com slash twist right now. All right, welcome back to this week in startup. So Linda, you were telling me about your thinking about your next startup vacuum robots for consumers. They work. They're cheap.

get the job done. They don't need to levitate. But dishes, when I heard you were doing this, that to me seemed like, wait a second. We have dishwashers, but, you know, they're kind of rigid and emptying and filling the dishwasher is so brutal that that is the first task we give to any child as a chore. One person's got to load the dishwasher, the one's got to unload it. When you went into those restaurants and you asked your friends to go work and then what what was going through your mind as you were conceiving this as a product? And then what is the product of dishcraft and how does it work? Sure. So, you know, I believe you have to do the job yourself to really understand it.

And so we just started to look at how do dishes get processed? How do the dirty dishes come in? How do they go through a traditional dish machine? How do they come out and then go back into service? And we broke that down into a number of steps. and, you know, and then it first rights for everyone at dishcraft is actually washing dishes themselves. And so we then broke into all this different steps and said, okay, let's do each part on its own and then stitch it together. Because again, with robotics, as long as you can simplify it, it just makes everything much, much easier.

So what we do is we, dishes come in, they go into a collection system that is nice and tidy and clean. and saves a commercial food service place space. Those dishes are really going into carts. We take those carts and bring them over to the robot, and it almost acts as a cartridge. And when you push the cart in, then the robot takes over from there. It picks up every single item.

It recognizes, is this a bowl or is a plate? Is there something on it that could harm me? And then it goes through, does a pre-w rinse cycle, and then it inspects it for cleanliness. If it's past inspection, it racks it, pushes that rack into a traditional dish machine. And then on the other side, we now have a robot that will pick it out of the rack and put it into clean carts. So I'm imagining a cafeteria-like experience in some cases where I bust my dish, you know, at the Stanford cafeteria, whatever cafeteria. I put it on that conveyor belt that Googles cafeteria.

and it goes there, or is this for a restaurant where the busboy or the waiter, I guess bus boy is, yeah, what do you call it? What's the non-gender version of a busser? Is that really it? They call them a steward or a buser. So we are only meant for high volume places like a Google cafeteria or a hotel. And instead of having that big rotating round of trays that you probably saw when you were at a college campus, instead you're putting your dish into our collection system.

Got it. Then all of those get rolled onto a truck, sent to a central warehouse where big robots, you plug them in like a cartridge, and they get taken apart, basically, perfectly cleaned, and then shelved back into the same or other clean carts, I would guess, and then ship back. Into clean carts. You've got to clean the cart too, right? It's a cartridge system.

Yeah, we put that through a traditional sanitizer. And so the idea is don't even like linens. I remember when I was in the restaurant business, you, yeah, restaurants didn't have washers and dryers. They just got linens dropped off. Why have the washer and dryer take up space? Why have to maintain a washer and dryer and soap and everything? Like no restaurants do that, but restaurants do clean dishes.

So when you go to a restaurant, I'm assuming a midsize or small restaurant, this isn't the solution for them yet. it's the it's the it's the big chains or the cafeterias that want this correct initially this was designed for large-scale cafeterias because there was a lot of consistency there and long-term vision of course we would like to help restaurants as well we are starting a pilot

in December with a restaurant in Palo Alto but our main focus is offices, offices, hospitals, hotels got it And I wonder, I mean, COVID has an impact 20 different ways on this business. The obvious headwind is people not going to restaurants, starting to change, people not going to Google cafe, people not going to work, working from home. Putting that aside, we'll have a, we have two vaccines that look like they're going to be incredibly promising at the time we're recording this.

But the tailwind, I would think, is, I don't think a lot of, you know, I don't think a lot of of dishwashers are going to be as consistent as a robot, the robot is going to know if it actually got that really hard stain off. Or are there sensors that would actually know if there was bacteria present or temperature controls? Because I'm sure regular dishwashers have those. They get inspected on some regular basis. So talk to me about that and the sort of the cleanliness standard that you can achieve that maybe can't be achieved, certainly manually, and in a hybrid system where somebody's manually putting them into a dishwasher. Yeah, so we actually work on either side of the traditional sanitizer or dish machine.

And that's what's taking care of the bacteria. But we do do inspection on both sides of it. So we can guarantee a level of cleanliness that no traditional dishroom can. Each wear gets inspected 22 different times in different angles. And a human just doesn't have that kind of time to be able to do that level. or certainly to be able to do it consistently across a 10-hour shift. And so that's really the beauty of robotics there because you can get great safety, great cleanliness, you reduce slips, falls, trips, you are naturally socially distanced,

and you can do it at a throughput that just isn't normally achieved with a traditional room. And you have to use your own type of plates. Like, we're not talking about this is Tesla or Waymo building self-drive. in cars where they have to be released onto city streets, back roads. If you're on some back road in Half Moon Bay or something and Mulholland Drive, I mean, Tesla's are going to have really hard times with those kind of edge cases. Here, you eliminate the edge cases because you design the plates. This isn't for any plate style or pots and pans yet, correct?

Correct. So we have a set of wares, different size bowls, different size plates. We also are now doing mugs and flatware and will be doing glassware. But we work with major wear manufacturers, but they have customized the plates to work with our system. And we do that because when you are operating like a linen service, having consistency across a whole bunch of places just makes everything much more efficient.

And it also helps the robots be much more, have a much higher throughput. They can go faster. Speed is part of this equation because I would have, assume the quicker you can turn around plates, the cheaper you can charge people per plate per use. And is that the model here, per plate per use? We charge per meal. And so a variety of items are included in that meal. And we- Buck a meal or something?

Yeah, yeah, basically. And then we know what volume that location does per day. And so you just get a monthly charge, assuming that volume. All right. When we get back from this quick break, I want to know when you, when you you sell this to a campus, are they doing this because they want to save money or they just want to eliminate the headache? And if they are saving money, what is the cost savings today when we get back on this week and startups? Before you grow your company, you need to know your company.

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Welcome back to this week in startup. Linda Poo-Lio is with us and she is the robo Linda on Twitter. The R-O-B-Linda. You've been obsessed with robots for a while. You seem like you are. Since I lived to sell.

I mean, I love it. I just, I fell into the field and it's just fascinating. I love it. When did you first fall into the robot field, as it were? When did you first see a robot? Were you, did you go to MIT or something or were you watching Star Trek? What was the first exposure when you knew you were the robo Linda? No, I am the most unlikely candidate for it. Okay. I moved to Silicon Valley in 2004 and one of my neighbors. was at Stanford and had a hardware background. And he just said to me, hey, I'm going to build a robot company. I had a Roomba and was not that thrilled with it. And so we just started batting around ideas and saying, like,

could you make a better floor cleaning robot? And so I did not know anything about hardware, but I knew how to get things made in China from previous history. And so that's how I started and haven't left. So when we went to break, I was curious business model-wise, why are cafeterias? I know that you've got customers. You've had customers for a couple of years now, I think, two years of customers. How long have you had the product to market?

About a year. So in that first year, obviously people are experimenting. That's a good opportunity to land and expand. And right, that's what SaaS companies do or has companies, hardware's the service. You're kind of another category. We have to come up with another acronym for, you. RAS. Robots as a service. RAS. It's not bad. Does that actually exist as a term? I think so. We just made it up. RAS. I mean, within, within robotic companies, that's how we talk about it.

You do call it RAS? Okay, good. The first I'm hearing of it. I have, I have, truth be told, two other Rass companies, CafeX, which is, you know, doing coffee machines. And they recently are now selling the machine to other people now that it works and they got it all working. So they're taking a kind of similar approach to you. Like, you know, hey, let's sell it. to a Google campus or let's sell it to, you know, a coffee company that wants to have an extra five locations per airport. And then Root AI, which is using AI really interestingly to pick raspberries, which is another one of these use cases. That's really hard. But kind of ready, right? Like certain things that are kind of flipping. So for the people who are experimenting,

I'm curious, are they looking to save money ultimately, have cleaner dishes, or just eliminate having the pain and suffering of this high turnover job that nobody wants to do. Customers will come to us for a couple of reasons. One set would, of course, everyone would love to save money. Another has so much trouble filling the role itself that they just want it to outsource. And then there's a whole other set that really comes just for sustainability reason. So often there's a location that is serving on single-use disposables and doesn't want to. They would prefer to do reusable, but they don't have room to have a dishroom.

And so they will choose us, and it gives them, you know, often a cost savings from compostables, but then they are able to have like an elevated experience and serve on ceramic wear. That's fascinating. Now, sometimes we get into this philosophical debate. And I find it's typically non-scientists or people not actually doing the work we have this debate. Like people are like, well, Tesla's, you know, the batteries are terrible for the environment and nobody knows what to do with them. And they're kind of like nuclear waste. And nuclear is terrible because we don't know what to do with the nuclear rods. And it's like, I think we've actually, when I talk to scientists or I talk to Elon, they kind of say that that's not an actual issue. That's like fake news. When I've heard this story of using a dishwasher or hand washing or I'm sorry, or using disposable, I hear this religious debate. It's some people. Some people who start to sound like Trump. Some people are saying paper is better because it grows and trees grow and actually the soap and the washing and the energy used in dishwashing is bad for the planet.

There are so many factors that come into this. But give us a sense of how you would argue this. And is there any merit when somebody says disposable stuff is better because you're not using liquid soap and water? A third party has done, and I'm not allowed to release the name yet, but unfortunately, but has done a study on us and said that by far ours is better. Like a one of our customers had the study done and it paid itself back within only five uses. But a ceramic plate can be washed thousands of times. I mean, some of these ceramic plates, I know from being a product of like the public school

system in Brooklyn. Like, I think they were, I was using them in the 80s. They were coming from the 70s or 60s. Like, they have a decade long use. What's the use cycle on a duty cycle on one of those? Several years. I mean, it just depends on, definitely several years. And, you know, hundreds of uses. Yes. Definitely like at least 300, but we're not far enough along, but we believe thousands. Right. And now that you're working on, it, I would guess the robot could learn how to clean them and not destroy them, which is what typically happens with the human. They're going to just throw the dishes and break them more often or chip them, et cetera. But what about water usage? Because I have seen now when I was just

looking at dishwashers, as one does every couple of years. And, you know, we have energy consumption we think about for refrigerators. What's the state of the water usage, is water a major issue or not? Because that's another sustainability issue, is how much water this uses and the soaps and that kind of stuff, because it seems to me it's getting more efficient. And computer vision would know this plate, and I don't know if you're up to this point in the company at Dishcraft, which is dishcraft.com, good domain name. Like, does the robot know this is a particularly dirty dish, keep going, this one's clean, we can move it on or are we not there yet?

Yeah. So on the first part, which is water usage, we only use cold recirculated water, which is way less because we are able to enclose it versus in a traditional dishroom. You always need to use potable water. And so there's a lot more waste there. So we're definitely better on the water side and power consumption because we don't have to heat the water. The first part I get is like the water usage. That's cold.

Oh, the smartness. Sure. And the smartness where like computer vision would be like, still dirty. Like this one was used for a salad. Somebody had mac and cheese on this one. It's going to take a little bit longer to clean it. Exactly. So we're collecting tons and tons of data. And so the robot gets smarter all the time. The idea is we have learned what things are much harder for us to clean than others. And so long term, we would like to be able to tweak that up and down to have faster throughput with very light things. Like, If you're just doing salad or a sandwich, that's pretty easy to clean. When it's macaroni and cheese, it's much tougher. If it's baked on, you need to run it through extra cycles. And so we are playing around with that right now. What do, when I was going to the Cafe X experience, the RueyI experience, density, a hardware as a service company as opposed to a RAS company.

But similar, you really had, I mean, it was like running for startups. One, you have robotics, hardware. Two, you have software. Three, you would be having to give people a cup of coffee and then in the cafe actually you'd have real estate. You'd have to have a location. In your case, you have to have a software, a hardware. You've also got to do logistics and deliver these things to people.

It's incredibly a hard amount of work. How do you raise money for a company like this? Because you're not building a photo sharing app or a marketplace, you know, things that maybe don't take as much, you know, complexity. But how do you convince investors about this? How did you get investors to get on board for this? Because let's phrase it, there haven't been many big successes except for the I robot and Rumba, right? Sure.

So I did have credibility because. I don't know if I'm right. There's not, there aren't a plethora of examples of companies that have exited a billion plus. in robotics yet. I had definitely credibility from NIDO Robotics because that company was acquired at a nice multiple. I was able to show that no one was tackling this problem yet, and it was a very large market.

About half of the investors I know have actually, in one way or other, had their first job in a restaurant industry. And so they immediately had sympathy for the problem that we were solving. And so untapped market, belief that I could put together the team, belief that we could build something defensible. I mean, it was a pretty good recipe. And you've raised around $45 million to date. What is it going to take for this to become standard? Because you also, like an Uber or a DoorDash, I would assume you're going to be doing a city or even town-based rollout.

Am I right that you're starting here in the cradle of technology? the Bay Area? Correct. So we started here and we're making plans for other geographies for 2021 and beyond. And so the idea was to have partners that already had in many cases distribution across the U.S. and so that it was a land and expand account, the same way that you had phrased earlier, that start small, but you can grow. And COVID has actually frankly done us a favor because we were able to get into a lot of accounts when they're not at full occupancy right now. And so it's a way to partner and then grow with them. Ah, right. Because the restaurants are now at 25% capacity or 50% by law. If it was, if I'm a packed restaurant and you're going for the big

packed places, you know, doing this is risk, right? And it's change. And so that is always really challenging. When we get back, I want to know when will the robots be on location? Or is that just way too complex of a problem when we get back on this weekend startups? Sass companies with reoccurring revenue used to only have two ways, basically, to grow. You could sell your equity, shares in your company, or you could go into debt. And now there is a third way to grow without debt, without dilution, and that's Pipe. Pipe is a two-sided marketplace that connects, vast companies, people who have reoccurring revenue, with institutional investors who bid to purchase these revenues for their annual value up front. It's like the NASDAQ, but for software contracts.

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It's the rising stars of SaaS or Rass or Hasse, whatever you prefer robots as a service today. And this may be a trend. Many folks are looking at robotics and saying, hey, how can this get rid of some of the most painful, arduous, hard-to-fill jobs in the world. Was there some technology moment that made robotics? You know, like the smartphone has made the drone movement possible, right? Because accelerometers got made en masse, batteries got better. Is there something that's been driving robotics in a similar fashion?

Because it does seem to be making a lot of gains. Yeah, sensor technology became really, really cheap. And mostly because iPhones, the proliferation of phones. made camera technology much cheaper. So the camera, the camera is the key piece. But what about the arms? Because I know those arms used to be in, you know, millions of dollars, then hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And then tens of thousands. And now, I mean, there's a bunch of startups that can do it for very low cost. So, yeah. $5,000, $10,000. Hardware in general has come down quite a lot. The arms, do you guys just call them in the industry arms, or are they called something more like technical? No, they're called arms.

They're called arms. Okay, so what we will envision as a robotic arm, those I know from the cafe experience had gotten from 50 down to 20 down to 10, and we're literally moving a 12-ounce cup of coffee around with an arm that's rated to be able to pick up hundreds of pounds. These things are going to get to what level,

$500, $1,000 at scale? I mean, are they still plummeting in costs? Certainly, I think you could do it first. $1,000. Yeah. And what happens in the world when these things, you know, is there some next piece to that that needs to get better, the moving of the arm, or are these arms starting to hit proficiency that's able to solve most tasks? And we're just up to software and computer vision and the programming of the arm. Does that my question makes sense? Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a good question. It's a combination. I think the grasping technology to do multi-different

textures and shapes and sizes and weights is not quite there. yet. And the vision is another piece of it. So the grasping technology, whether it's, you know, you may be picking up a fork, which might be very, or a piece of China for a cup of coffee, that might be very delicate. But if you start putting frying pans in there that weigh four pounds that are heavy, you're going to need a different type of maybe the arms the same, but the little connector on the end.

Yeah, it's the fingers. It's like, like these hands are really amazing and robotic hands are not quite. quite as flexible as our human hands. Yeah, you need kind of the Luke Skywalker hand. The mobility of a Darth Vader hand that's being chopped off, a loose counterwork hand that's been chopped off, but that sort of we have this sensitivity where we could pick up a kettlebell that weighs 30 pounds or we can pick up a flower and not crush it.

I mean, it is pretty extraordinary. If you, compared to the human hand, what percentage of the way are we there? Well, I think it's the problem. We do have that technology. It's just having that done at a price point that is able to expand. That would be that $1,000 arm that I mentioned, having the manipulator on the end of it right now just can't be done under $1,000. So the manipulator exists, but that manipulator is really expensive to be able to be a multifunction manipulator fingers type thing.

It's really fascinating. We got the arm down. We're just got to get the fingers done. But later in our lifetime, I guess, in 10 or 20 years. we're going to have really good fingers, I guess, to do this kind of dexterity. Yeah, so dishcraft, the funny thing is we really spent a long time on that, and that's why we ended up with having our own dishes, because there's a very thin, stainless steel on the back that lets us use magnet, so you don't need the fingers at all.

See, this is what I was getting at. It's like, I think one of the interesting parts of these problems, and again, CafeX and density, which does people counting, until you roll up your sleeves and put this technology in the real world, you can't have those magnificent moments where you're like, wait a second, if we just put a magnet in the plate, we don't need fingers, we need a magnet, and it's automatically going to center it because the magnet's in the center, right? I'm guessing you can just boom, pinpoint the magnet where you want it to get picked, and it doesn't have to be perfect.

Exactly. The magnet makes it perfect. Oh, it's so smart. The cup at CafeX had gotten so, they had done so well in terms of the dexterity of it, because of spilling, obviously, was a big thing, that they started filling the foam to give iced lattes like the mountain top. I'm making like a little curving with my hand for listeners who are not watching on YouTube. And then they got so confident that when they would make a latte, the robot arm would do a quick

little swirl before they put it into the bay for you. And you'd watch the coffee do like a little swirl at a, you know, like a barista was going to do. And obviously, latte art and everything's coming next and super easy to do as these robots do that. So the other question, when does the, when do the robots eventually go to the restaurant and, and do it there? Or is that just not efficient? Like the linen situation is not efficient? I think that there is, is a certain percentage of the market where it makes sense to have robots on site if their volume is great enough. There is also a certain percentage where they're so small it would just never make sense at a cost to have one on site. Because if you think about, if you think about a lot of

restaurants, they're only open a certain period of the day, you know, and a robot could work 24 hours until you'll always gain, and we can have one person who can oversee, say, four to six robots, you're just never going to be able to get the labor advantages on site at a price point for certain small locations. I do think that they're in the future. We have dreams of packaging this up really small at volume, where it's less expensive and more flexible. But right now what we have, it works fantastic in this specific model. It would seem to me if you were doing thousands of people a day at a stadium or, you know, a college or a campus, you know, a corporate campus, no-brainer to move the robots on site.

Like you're saying, you know, you're, you get the value of running them 24 hours a day. But when they run for three hours a day, that's kind of like, yeah, it's just, an obscene amount of technology to not use it for 24 hours a day. The idea is even at a college campus, instead of having one dishroom per dining area, you can have one centralized hub and get all the efficiencies of, say, in the equivalent, a commissary kitchen, by just having one hub on the campus and you shorten the logistics time

instead of having 10 different small dishrooms. Knowing what you know about robotics, here's the question I like to ask more people. It's just like really always very interesting the answers I get for this one. Which will come first? A self-driving car that can drive from San Francisco to, you know, let's say, you know,

SFO. So from Union Square to SFO, a self-driving car that can do that route. Or a veto that can take off from the Embarcadero and land at SFO. electric, vertical, takeoff, and landing. Which one's going to come first for commercials use? No driver, I'm talking level four, level five, fully automated, no steering wheel.

Not, you know, you can driver can take over. Which one you think is going to come first and why? It's so interesting that question. I look, I'm not that smart. Neither am I. I'm talking you. You're smarter than me. I think more work for longer has actually been done on,

you know, the driving versus, you know, flying down. But there's, you know, like, I'm actually an advisor to one of those companies. So, you know, my guess. The takeoff and landing and fetal company? Yeah. Yeah. Those companies are fascinating. I think regulation is going to be such that cities with water, Sydney, the Bay Area,

it's in the name, the Bay Area, you know, Manhattan to Brooklyn, whatever. route, Staten Island to Manhattan. I think because these vetoes will fly over water, they have less of a chance of doing harm and therefore the impact, you know, of an accident will be a veto will fall out of the sky, God forbid, lose two propellers and land in the Hudson. Right. And they'll just get picked up by the Coast Guard. They'll be fine because it's only flying 200 feet above the water and it'll still be

able to do a controlled descent. It won't be like, I don't know if you know the history of Manhattan, but there was the Pan Am accident where they used to fly. I think they're called Chinooks, you know, the double-bladed helicopters used to fly. And when I was a kid, and I think it was in 75 or something, one of them fell over on the Pan Am building. And that was the end of helicopter flights over Manhattan. But you used to go to the Pan Am building above Grand Central and fly a Chinook helicopter to your flight to Pan Am to go to Los Angeles or to London. I mean, and we haven't had it since. Just because of that. one accident. And you know what the accident was caused by? It turns out one of the struts

was just malfunctioned and the helicopter tipped over. It wasn't a pilot's fault, wasn't weather. Nothing wrong other than a bolt was loose. It's so crazy that the whole system was thrown away. You couldn't fly helicopters anymore over Manhattan. Yeah, often, I mean, often it's something like a bird that just, you know, flies the wrong way. And, you know, my husband used to be working for Neo quite a while ago, which is an autonomous vehicle company. He's a lot. He's a He said, you know, the problem is there'll be some piece of paper that flies through the air and, you know, the vision system just doesn't know how to decipher what this is and how to handle it and where to go around it.

Yeah, so now you've got literally a car going 70 miles an hour swerving around a paper, a brown paper bag thinking it's a motorcycle or slamming on the brakes and causing a five-car pile-up. Like, people really don't understand how hard this technology is. I think they're just, everybody was, five years ago, everybody was telling me we'd have soft driving cars now. I asked them now

when we're going to have self-driving cars. They all say in 15 years. I don't know what, I mean, it's really hard to make estimates, but you're telling me cleaning plates and dishes, no problem. We got this.

The way we do it. Because we have simplified the problem so much that we've enclosed it and condensed it down so that it's a very known problem. The next steps for dishcraft is not the technology part is definitely solved now it's just expansion yeah getting people to adopt the technology i guess some people might want china or like maybe certain types of plates they want

fancier plates yeah so are any roadblocks yeah yeah there's a certain part of the market where we're just not a good fit for like fine dining that has a hundred different little tiny dishes but there's this other great part where there's a lot of consistency and it's simple and we can handle that. You know what's going to be nice too is I suspect because you're going to standardize you could do fun things like put logos on them or have different colors or have holiday skews. So if people wanted to have like, you know, if I'm running my restaurant and I'm a ramen restaurant or I decide to add ramen to the menu, you have a ramen bowl already because you've somebody else wanted it. So now you've got a magnetic ramen bowl and I can say, give me a hundred

a week. I want to try ramen for a week and just see if that works. Like you can just add a skew and I can just add it to my order, my website or my portal. We have visions. We are not working with Disney today, but we joke about the Mickey Mouse-shaped ear plates that we could supply someday. It reminds me of, you know, when you go through the TSA security,

they turn those luggage wrap. Remember, we used to go to airports and we would travel. They turned those bins into advertising, and they was really effective advertising for a while. I remember Uber was using it in the early days. You'd be like, what's Uber? and be like, you can get a cab right now in your phone. You know, you're going through security.

Download the app. All right, listen, this has been amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're hiring. So if you, who are you hiring for right now? Great. So we would love a software engineer and AI engineer and a head of marketing. AIA, oh, head of marketing too.

Ah, very cool. The branding part. Yeah, see, I think the branding, I like the branding challenge of your business as well because dishcraft like witchcraft is so much fun like ooh and I think get you know whoever the CMO of this company is is going to be able to have a cool impact because they could do some really fun stuff like around marketing or unique branding around the dishware that makes you know that it's this type of dishware and in other countries I believe there's some standardization of bento boxes and then in Korea they have the stackable

to go tins. I don't know what they're called, but they put Jaj Myeong in them, like there's certain type of noodles that everybody eats in Korea. And they're, I'm making almost like a circular cake pan and they stack and you can carry them.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Tiffin? But that's in India. Yeah. But it is like that. There was a movie about that where people were carrying them around and they would drop off everybody's lunch

and then... I love that movie. I don't remember what it's popular. What's the name of that movie? We're going to drive herself crazy. But wait, You know the name of it. Tiffin? T-I-F-F-I-N. Tiffin's, uh, food, India.

Movie. Was it slumdog millionaire? No. The lunchbox. No, there's another one. The lunchbox? The lunchbox. That's it.

It's the lunchbox. A 20th. What are the chances that you and I have both seen the romance film the lunch box? That is hilarious. So for people who don't know this, you just got a great movie tip, the lunchbox. But it really is about these Tiffins, which are a very cool way of carrying food. You got to be thinking about that for this food delivery stuff in COVID. Why don't we have a standard for this in the United States where when I get my Uber eats or Postmates or DoorDash dropped off, you pick up the next time the stuff.

I leave it on my front porch. That's what they do in Korea. You were thinking, we think we're already working on some solutions for that. Mmm, yum, yum. I love it. All right, listen, this has been amazing. If you want to save the world, get rid of bad jobs, and help the environment, you know what to do. Go ahead and apply at dishcraft.com.

You've been a great guest, Linda. Thanks for coming on the pot. And we'll see you all next time. Bye bye.