This Week in Startups - Loop Golf's Matt Holder on auto tee times for golfers, plus: Cruise robotaxi suspension | E1836

Episode Date: October 27, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Mercury. With Mercury Raise, startup founders no longer have to navigate roadblocks alone. Visit http://mercury.com/raise to get access to a network, connections, and advice. Corient. Real wealth requires real solutions. Corient provides wealth management services centered around you. For more information, speak with an advisor today at http://corient.com Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://vanta.com/twist * Today’s show: First, Loop Golf's CEO Matt Holder joins Jason for a jam session on scaling his startup, which is building an automatic tee time booking app for golfers (4:32). Then, Jason gives a recap on the news surrounding Cruise robotaxi & more! (32:43) * Time stamps: (0:00) Loop Golf’s Matt Holder joins Jason (4:32) What sets Loop Golf apart from traditional golf booking apps (8:17) Matt demos Loop Golf (15:23) Mercury Raise - Visit http://mercury.com/raise to get access to a network, connections, and advice (16:49) The sudden surge in the popularity of golf (20:53) The current state of golfer-tracking technology (24:27) Corient - Speak with one of Corient's wealth management advisors today at http://corient.com (25:29) Incorporating real-time features into Loop Golf (27:40) Thoughts on surge pricing and additional app features (31:33) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (32:43) The suspension of Cruise’s robotaxi permit in San Francisco. * Check out Loop Golf: https://loopgolf.co/ Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

And so we give them the power to basically set it and forget it, let us do the work for them, and book a tea time for them in their sleep, which literally happened for me last night. Nice. This weekend startups is brought to you by Mercury Rays. With Mercury Rays, startup founders no longer have to navigate roadblocks alone. Visit mercury.com slash raise to get access to a network, connections, and advice. Coriant. Real wealth requires real solutions.

Corient provides wealth management services centered around you. For more information, speak with an advisor today at coriant.com. And Vanta, compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com slash twist. list. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. As you probably know, golf is one of the most valuable sports in the United States right now. Last year, more than 25 million people played golf at an actual golf course that that sink in. That's about 10% of the population. And there

are about 10,000 golf courses open to the public here in the United States. Since COVID hit, man, golf has exploded even more with the last three years being the three-bousin. biggest years on record for golf in America. So we have a founder who is innovating in the golf space, specifically in getting those tea times, booking those really coveted tea times. Loop golf helps golfers book tea times automatically. And the CEO and co-founder is Matt Holder.

Welcome to the show, Matt. Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having us. So you can't, I met you through a founder university, our program. I'm just curious, before we get into what you're doing at Loop Golf, you went, I think, to cohort five. We're on cohort six now. Maybe you just tell everybody how you found out about founding university and what the 12

weeks was like briefly. Sure. Yeah. So, I mean, how I found out about the program was actually mentioned that I think a couple times on the All-on podcast, which I listened to every week, big fan. And, you know, when I heard about it, I took a look. And the description of the program just sounded like exactly what we needed, 12-week program, lots of high energy, lots of accountability to just make rapid progress.

And at the end of it, it was just like found it to be a really fantastic way to just spend 12 weeks and get a good crash course and kind of like everything in startups that, honestly, I think everyone in tech should probably take at some point in their life. But you've been an entrepreneur before. So you knew a lot of the information in the program. but you spoke a little bit about accountability there. Maybe just before we get into Lou Bough here, just talk a little bit about how that manifests itself in a 12-week program like Founder University.

As you know, as a part of the program, giving updates on a weekly basis is a core part of it. And that just gives built-in accountability for making sure that you are doing the things on a day-to-day basis at an hour-by-hour basis to make that rapid progress so that you have a growing trajectory of, you know, updates to give, as well as the community that you guys foster with each of the cohorts

and the extended family of cohorts. There's a lot of just kind of natural community accountability as well because you want to be able to share wins with each other. And there's a lot of activity in that, you know, and the community there on that as well. So it was really great. Awesome. Yeah.

And it's great to be part of a group, right? Because it's kind of lonely being a founder. And, you know, if you're in the group, I find, And other people are suffering through product market fit in that really hard journey, trying to get product velocity going, which is hard. You got to get a team that's willing to prank. I actually read your updates. It's one of the things people don't know is I hang out in the Founder University database

and I look at who's sending updates and I just peruse them. I'll just spend an hour looking at them. You did eight of 12 weeks, 67% of your updates. And I liked watching each week. We ask people for their one simple sentence. And you started like and you try one week was like, kayak for golf. You know, by the end, it was like, oh, the easiest, the quickest way to book a tea time. And then it was in the United States. But, you know, the easy way to book a tea time.

It was just such an elegant way to explain it. So let's talk a little bit about what Loop Golf is and why the world needs it. Awesome. Yeah. So Loop is, as I said, the quickest and easiest way to book a book a tea time at your favorite course in the U.S. What we've built is a way for golfers to tell us what their preferences are, whether from selecting a course to choosing which date and time they want to play. And then as soon as they book with us, we monitor the course 24-7, automatically booking a tea time as soon as that one appears, which as golfers know in some markets, especially like LA, San Francisco, Denver and others, it's nearly impossible to get a really great tea time and a great course. And so we give them the power to basically set it and forget it,

let us do the work for them and book a tea time for them in their sleep, which literally happened for me last night at a course as well. So it's sort of like there's this inventory that could pop up and you manage that remnant inventory or last minute inventory, which I think is just so brilliant. And then how do you make money from that? We charge on a per transaction basis. There's a nominal fee that golfers pay as a part of that that turns out to be a couple bucks more on a, you know, a 50 to $60 per player Greens fee, which the feedback we're getting from our users is probably not enough and that we should probably charge more, which is great validation to hear from our customers.

Because golfers don't pay until we successfully book them, there's literally no risk to them other than missing out on an opportunity to golf by not booking through us. And so it's a marketplace in a way, an on-demand marketplace as this stuff becomes available. Now, what about the T-Time software? There's a lot of existing T-Time software out there in the world. You could describe for me, like, how do golf courses manage their T-T-T-T-T-T-T times? They're using a book or they have it online.

It's like open table, and it's kind of janky, right? A lot of the stuff is old software, I understand. Yeah, it's a lot of old software that was created, you know, 15, 20 years ago that golf courses have been using and it's just kind of been built upon over time. So it's really cumbersome, actually, as a golfer to use, because golf courses in the area or LA use a handful of different systems. And as a golfer trying to book a tea time, you end up having to create three different accounts and search four different websites in order try and find that tea time at like midnight just to be able to book the one that you want to get.

And so what we've done is we've done integrations with all of those different disparate services and centralized it all into one place so that as a golfer, you don't have to do that. You don't have to have your wife irritated that you're up every night trying to book golf courses. I'm trying to snipe those last minute. Exactly. So what do they charge for that software? I wonder, like, how much they charge a golf courses for that tea time management software? You know, it's interesting.

It's, I think some of the courses in the way that that others do it as they charge probably, you know, about $10,000 to $20,000 a year or something like that for courses to do that. And, you know, they're about five to ten in the U.S. that dominate most of the market. So it's fairly saturated, but dealing with courses, they do, they consider changing their systems on maybe an annual basis. So it's a very long, very long sales cycle. Yeah, like education, you know, or healthcare.

These tend to be pretty hard. You know, you have incumbents in there, but does seem like there's a lot of room for you to grow. So maybe really quick, show us the UX here in the design of the products. You know, one of the things I really liked about what you're doing. and attracted me the team and I'm investing in the company. So I'm super excited about that. Thank for letting me invest.

That's why we do found a university. We want to help people, but we wind up investing in the top, I know, 10% of graduates or so. So here I see we're on loopgolf. Dot co, right? Or dot co. Dot co.

Yeah. So I see here, Los Angeles, T-Times, Rancho Par, Encino Golf Course, Balboa, yeah, Wilson, a bunch of different golf courses there. So how does it work? Yeah, so, you know, all golfers to do is come to loopgolf.com, perform a search for, you know, their local market. Find the course, their favorite course that they want to play. Simply tap book tea time.

And then they're brought into our wizard, which basically allows them to select their preferences of when and where they want to play. And the beauty of this is that most golf courses have a booking window of like seven to 14 days in advance. You can book it as far in advance with us as you want. You could do it every Saturday for the next two years. years if you were so inclined and just have a standing tea time going for you, we'll monitor it just the same as a last minute tea time. With that in mind, like, I don't know, I guess the week of Thanksgiving, maybe we want to play on Black Friday, so we'll select that date. You select your time window. So what we're finding is a lot of golfers, they have a specific time in mind,

but they actually have a willingness to play between, you know, an hour or two hour range on those days. So we give them the opportunity to set that however they want. Select how many players they want from one to four. So let's just do four because I like to play with buddies. Set their budget. So sometimes the courses have, sometimes they're charging 50 bucks, sometimes they're charging 60 bucks depending on the day. So we give you an opportunity to tell us what your budget is. We'll use that to determine whether or not we can give you that tea time. we have to at least have a budget equal to what the course is charging. So let's just save 75 for now.

And then you tell us here when you want us to stop looking for a T time. So we will monitor it from the day from the second it, the T-sheet opens all up until, you know, 24 hours prior to the T-time, six hours prior to T-time, depending on what your preference is. You know, most courses allow you to cancel with no penalty up to usually like 24 to 48 hours prior. If you want something that's shorter, you just need to let us know, like, and recognize that this is going to be a non-cancancable tea time. But let's put this to 36. And then once you've done all that configuration, you get to the checkout page, summarizes everything that you've chosen, what the course is, all of your preferences.

And you can see here that you're going to pay up to the amount of your budget. We will charge you whatever the golf course itself charges. And then you, your fee to us, which is only payable when we're successful in booking your T-T. time. And then you pay the balance of it at the course, which is what golfers are used to. They typically show up to the pro shop and just pay their tea time once they check in. And then once it's done, we're now monitoring for this tea time. And as I said to you earlier, you know, last night, I was I was able to successfully book a tea time. And it happened while I was sleeping. It was 11 p.m. The typical golfer might be, you know, scouring tea times late

at night. I didn't have to do that. I went, went straight to bed. And while I was sleeping, I got a tea time for myself through Loop. And the power of being able to do that is just game changing for golfers and a lot of our customers are saying the same thing. You can always tell when you have a good idea that it sparks a lot of feature requests. I'm wondering if folks have said, you know, I'm willing to play at these four courses. I want to play in Los Angeles. Tell me what's available for, you know, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and, you know, give me like a, you know, options instead of just guarantee me paying, maybe you tell me, hey, there's two options, pick which one you want. Have you thought about that, like split possibilities, giving them a little window of time?

I know when I book tickets for the fancy movie theater, you know, where they charge 15 bucks and they have like the food in the seats. They give you like five minutes when you're booking the seats to kind of make your decision on which seats you want and they'll hold them for you while you type in your credit card. Is there any concept like that here? Absolutely. So you actually hit on something that we're seeing in the data itself. We're seeing golfers, book the same course, you know, on multiple dates, even though our UI doesn't really conveniently handle that yet. And they're booking different courses for the same date, giving themselves optionality to have hopefully at least one place that they can play. And so we do know,

and we've built some user experiences at other marketplaces that my co-founder and I have been a part of that have worked really well to do that. So we have a few different feature ideas on that and how we make that a really convenient user experience for golfers so that they can book a backup and at least have somewhere to play on the date that they want to play, as well as empower them to book the same place multiple times just so that it's a lot more convenient to get on the golf course whenever they want. Fantastic. And then in terms of building the company, hard time to build a company, right? You can't get a lot of, you can't raise a lot of money. It's not, it's not easy. How are you running the company and like running it lean and is the goal here to get to

break-even profitability quickly, raise a bunch of capital. How are you thinking about the market right now? That's been a big topic of discussion. So you've got a new startup here. Obviously, I'm putting a little bit of money in at this time. I'm an investor. But how do you think about the market and the new reality of running a startup in 2023? That's a great question. Yes, it's hard. And I think that the key to right now is running as lean as possible. other companies in the really great years of the past 10 years, they get money and they really deploy it really quickly and start really accelerating everything that they're spending on and hiring.

We're trying to employ, like from a marketing standpoint, as many kind of like grassroots, krillotype marketing campaigns to make our dollars go a lot further. At the same time, you know, it's actually part of the fun part of being at a small-stage startup and an early-state small startup is doing things that are really, you know, grinding away and doing things that, you know, I think if you had a lot more money, you wouldn't be willing to do. And it actually gets you a lot closer to your customers,

which I think is fantastic because we get to hear straight from our customers what they, what they love and what they wish work better. And you're referring to, hey, you don't have a lot of money. So maybe you're doing things in terms of marketing that are more guerrilla, you know, meeting customers and just telling them about the product and getting that first 100 customers into the product. Yeah. So, some things that we're doing are just going to golf ranges at courses that we that we work for and showing up and just saying, hey, here's what we're doing. Would you give us feedback on the product and having just a gentle way of introducing the product concept to them and hearing from

them directly like what they use it? Do they want to give a shot? What do they love about it? What can we improve? And we're leveraging all of that as data for us to iterate on the product and make it better for our customers. Being a founder is one of the most amazing journeys you could ever go on. I suggest you do it, but you got to know it's going to be hard and sometimes it's going to be a little bit lonely. But with Mercury Rays, you don't have to go it alone. This is an amazing new program for Mercury. I'm part of it, in fact. Mercury Rays is a founder success platform that's built to remove the roadblocks at every step of the founder journey. And this is going to help you with the number one thing that founders tell me they need money. Yes, Mercury Rays gives

you access to investors. And then they give you access to industry experts. And finally, they connect you with fellow founders. What a great idea. It's like what I do in my accelerator, except it's open to everybody, not just people we invest in. So here's how you use it. And a lot of my founders have been using it. And I'm super happy about this. If you're fundraising, you submit your pitch and you get in front of hundreds of investors who are looking actively to fund businesses like yours. And I'm in that database. And I have found good companies in there. If you're looking for guidance, you can tune in to unfiltered conversations with industry experts. And if you're craving some community, which I know you are, you can meet fellow founders and navigate similar challenges.

So here's your call to action. Mercury Raise was created to help founders navigate obstacles. So more startups can become success stories. It's that simple. They care. And you can take your startup to the next stage with MercuryRays by visiting mercury.com slash raise. That's mercury.com slash raise. In terms of golf, usually there's like two million new golfers every year. I see that like there's been 3.3 last year in terms of the number of new people who took on golf. Is this because of top golf? I keep hearing people talk about top golf and that becoming a bit of a phenomenon. Is it television? Is there like some new Tiger Woods I'm not aware of? What's causing this golf craze? Or was it, do you think, just some sort of hangover from the pandemic? Because I thought the idea was

like young people maybe wouldn't want to play. It's expensive. It's for old people. You know, it's just time consuming. They want to be on TikTok. But it seems like a lot of young people are really, really into golf all of a sudden. What's behind the third? It's multi-dimensional. One of it obviously was COVID and golf was one of the activities that, you know, you could actually do. And so a lot of people started taking to it. And golfers, people who are already golfers were just doing, like me, we're doing a lot more of it during that time. But then you had also the introduction of top golf. Like Tiger Woods has a new golf league that's coming out that's going to be,

you know, very focused on media. I think Steph Perry just invested in a team and as based in SF. So there's a lot of money coming into. Tell me about that. Yeah, tell me about that Tiger Woods one. Yeah. So it's like Tiger Woods and Rory McElroy are putting together a golf league that is meant to, I believe be kind of like focused on the,

between the, you know, the months that the PGA tour isn't, is an active and be something that keeps golf as an all-season, all-year, evergreen, kind of like media sport. And so they're going to be playing with new formats of how you play golf. I think it's going to be nighttime, which is going to be really cool. Oh, wow, super cool. And kind of like a short format, not 18 holes, but maybe three, six, or nine holes. So most people don't know most, know a lot of information about the concept, but what we do know sounds pretty exciting.

But then from a kid's perspective, you also have over these past 10 to 15 years, a lot of parents, I've got young kids myself, kind of going away from some of the more high-contact sports into low-contact. Exactly. And so soccer and golf would be lower tennis. Exactly. So a lot of kids and parents are steering their kids into golf. So the surge in golf is really led by these younger golfers who are, you know, Gen Z, Gen Y, Gen Z, and even younger who are coming and pouring themselves into the game.

a really interesting, awesome opportunity to have this generational shift in participation in golf that if we do things right in the golf industry can be sustained for, you know, decades. How are the golf courses liking what you're doing? I would suspect that some of them love it. They have extra capacity. You're helping them. I suspect other ones that are crowded. Maybe they are control freaks and they want to control the whole experience. They don't want you intercepting their business or their customer. So how do you think about building a marketplace where, you know, maybe some people love you and some people maybe don't or maybe I'm maybe I'm just projecting into that. You know exactly, you know, where we are. Like there's love,

hate relationship that's developing with the golf courses and we went into this wanting to be a positive force, not only for golfers, but golf courses as well. Because let's face it, like, as a golfer, I want to go play a course that's well funded, takes care of their playing conditions and the course itself so that I can, you know, continue to play there and, and, uh, enjoy my time there. So we've purposely built our product such that golf courses retain 100% of the green fee that they market so that they're not losing out. That's something that is new within the golf industry because, you know,

existing players have the complete opposite. They actually take money from the course in order to market their, you know, market their business. And a lot of golf courses over the years have grown to kind of really, really hate that model. And so we're trying to completely flip it on his head and be, be a positive incentive line partner, not only with golfers, but courses as well.

And we think that over time, we'll be able to develop really close relationships with them. Did they track the golfers on the golf course in real time and know their spacing and stuff like that with any kind of technology? I was just thinking, like the marathon, I used to run the marathon. And when we ran the marathon, everybody started at the same time. But you cross the starting line, you know, in the New York City Marathon, maybe at minute 10 or 15, even 20 of your last people,

then I understand they put like, you know, RFID things on people's sneakers and they would, you know, tell you your minute miles and everybody had a custom start time, as it were. And so do they track? I mean, I would think the golf carts they can track, but I don't know if they do. That would be expensive maybe to put IOT on it. How do they manage the flow?

There is some management there. As you said, like the golf courts are kind of like the most obvious way to do that tracking, but not everybody. takes a cart. And so that makes it a much larger, more difficult to solve problem in terms of knowing what the pace of play is, where the bottlenecks are on a course, who's where and things like that. So behind that is obviously like a problem with playability of a course. And a lot of reasons golfers want early tea times as they know that they can play it in four and a four and a half hours versus if they get out in the afternoon or midday, they might have a six hour round, which is

just very time-consuming. And a lot of it has to do with pace play and how people navigate the course and different abilities of golfers at different times. So it's a big multidimensional smartphones. You know, if you had your smartphone on you and you had booked from LoopGol, then you have GPS. And so if they said, hey, check in when you get to the golf course, you could know that I checked in and that my phone, where my phone is, I could share my location with you. Does anybody do that yet? Funny enough, we do, we actually do a little bit of that. We do have an app that we've built that takes kind of the concepts of an app like Strava, which as a runner you might have used quite a bit or a cyclist, and combine it with golf.

So using a smart watch or your phone, just in the background while you play in an uninterrissive way, we're following everywhere that you go on the course. When you book around, we're giving you live GPS distances to the front, back, and middle of the green, ways of keeping your, ways of keeping your score and your performance stats. And then at the end of it, we put your path of everywhere

you've gone on the course over on a map that's shareable with your golf buddies into the broader loop community. Behind that, at some point, we can, you know, obviously use that to give courses better

intelligence about what's happening at different times on their course, as well as do things like build strategy maps that golfers can use to better understand how to navigate their way around each hole on the course and hopefully it leads to better scores for them. All right. Well, listen, I'm super excited. Thanks for coming to Founder University.

Thanks for letting me invest. And thanks for coming on this week in startups. Good luck building it out and encourage everybody to just go try loopgolf.com. Is there any specific geos that you're targeting first where you have more density of courses? because I know like you're you're just rolling out, right? This is early days. Right. Yeah, we're currently focused on the Los Angeles Metro.

So if you're a Los Angeles based golfer, please go to loopgolf.co. Give us a try and give us feedback. Tell us what you want to see us do next with loop golf and we're listening. And in the other markets, you can sign up and like join a wait list or something. Yeah, other markets you can join up. You can let us know which markets you want to cover and we might launch your market next. Yeah. Our friends at Corian provide wealth management services centered around you.

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they might be. Real wealth requires real solutions. For more information, speak with an advisor today at coriant.com. That's coriant.com. I think it would be super cool if, like, you were in L.A. if there was just like a, if you were like a member, like maybe you could have a membership to loop off if I was a VIP member, if it just told you like, these are the courses

that have availability and you gave me kind of a heat map, almost like, you know, there's a cool feature on Google flights where you can see a grid. And then it shows you, hey, because I do this, you know, it makes no sense. I know, but sometimes I have flexibility to my travel and I'll just tell my assistant, like, hey, when you book my ticket, just look the day before the day after if the ticket prices are radically different. And like, you know, when I went to Italy, I could choose my days. So I was like,

oh, let's leave on this day versus this day because, you know, business class was $1,000 cheaper if I left on a Tuesday instead of a Monday or something. And I don't understand why, I guess, you know, popularity of certain days. But you could do some really interesting stuff and like educating me, like, hey, by the way, you know, you put in Saturday at 10 a.m. Not a great time, but, you know, if you could figure out how to go on a 7 a.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, those are open 16% of the time, whatever, just some sort of system of like educating people. Have you thought about doing something with like real-time education of golf and tea times? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like on a course basis and day by day and day and hour by hour, there's differences in demand and supply. And so I think, you know,

there's a lot, there's obviously a lot we can do. The first step is that we're taking is just organized, like, collecting the data and centralizing the data, just so that we have the ability to do some, do some of those things. Obviously, like there's a big AI revolution happening right now too. And I think the golf industry is kind of not evolved enough yet to really take advantage of that because the data isn't centralized in a way

that makes it usable for, you know, those models. So I think we have, you know, in doing that, we have an advantage of being able to then make that evolutionary step into doing some AI stuff like that. For example, like golf travel and being able to say like, hey, I wanted to go do a bachelor party at or a bachelor party in Scottsdale. What are the best courses to play, build my itinerary, and get me the two times. So that is booked.

All right. You know, everybody's probably thinking this. And I was obviously involved in Uber, which had a very controversial feature, surge pricing. And then there's an app in New York. called Dorcia. It's like you can pay 500 bucks a person in advance to, you know, secure carbon or something on a Saturday night. I love the reference. Yeah, it's pretty sick. And you pay that Dorcia like $1,000. And then when you go there, if you spend $600, if we went there and we, you know, didn't order a bunch of wine or whatever, the $400, you still have

to pay. So it's kind of like, you know, premium service. Have you thought about surge pricing or had like to offer this amount, you know, to secure a time? And I'm willing to pay a little extra. We have thought about that during my time. So I was a director of product at Zillow while back. And we had some, we had some things that we did in terms of how we sold ads to real estate agents that had a prioritize weight list based off of willingness to pay for certain markets. So that's something that we definitely are going to explore at some point. And as a part of that, like there's an opportunity also to leverage that to partner more closely with golf courses in a way that they went to from that.

So we've started testing out a little bit. And we know that we know that that golfers have a much higher willingness to pay for preferred two times. So there is a big opportunity there for us to do that is finding the right mechanism to make it a fair system. Yeah, well, and if you have a bunch of, well, I don't know that it needs to be fair necessarily. But, you know, if they have some premium times, if you said, hey, we'll guarantee you that we'll take that time and we'll give you the extra $100. for the extra 25 a person or 50 a person. And then if you just put it into your system, you could take the risk of paying the extra 100.

And then you just email everybody and say, hey, we've got this extra inventory. Just like somebody who's, you know, a ticket broker or something might take a little bit of risk on having some Taylor Swift tickets or something. But it could be really powerful for you to just guarantee some inventory. And then you have a certain number of emails in Los Angeles. You could just send it to people and say, hey, we've got this tea time. This is the best tea time of the week.

who wants it. I love that idea. Yeah. Like that's almost, yeah. Anything else coming up in the product that people should look forward to or you keeping it close to the vest? I don't want to give away all your secrets, but anything you want to disclose that's coming soon that people can look forward to? Mostly keeping it close to the best. I mean, we're launching in L.A. is the first kind of like big step towards us getting

our marketplace flywheel going. And I think, you know, what we're investing in is trying to as successful as possible get as many people who order through us back on the golf course. in the most effective and most convenient ways. So a lot of our focus right now is just in the guts of the product, making sure that that works to a point where we feel like really confident that we can go not just not LA, but beyond that and launch multiple markets through 2024.

So that's, uh, it's the unsexy stuff, but it's the important stuff to get done. All right. Keep grinding. Everybody check out loop golf, L-O-O-P-G-L-O-F dot CO. Go ahead and check it out. One of my latest investments, super excited. If you want to come to Founder,

go to founder. Dot University. We're going to do our seventh cohort. I can't believe we're at seven cohorts already. In the program, we'll give a $25,000 investment, Prince and Family Investment, if people need that first check. And, you know, my name's helpful to get that first check on the cap table.

Or sometimes we invite people from founding university to come to the launch accelerator. Or sometimes we just directly invested them like we did here with LoopGoff. All those things are possibilities at founder. dot university. And, yeah, join the family, join the fun. Come learn how to build a startup and make the world a better place or make the world how you want to see it operate. Thanks again for coming on the program, Matt, and we'll see you all.

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That's $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta.com. Slice for $1,000 off. You're stock too. All right, everybody, there's some big news earlier this week, California's DMV. suspended Cruz's robotaxi permit due to the company allegedly, and this is where it gets interesting,

withholding footage after the incident in San Francisco a few weeks ago. This means Cruz can no longer operate its robotaxies in San Francisco. They're still live in Phoenix, although given what's happened here in California, if it's true, I could see them pulling Phoenix's license as well. Okay, now,

I am a big fan of waiting to get all the facts, but we're starting to assemble the facts here. So let's just go through what we know. On October 2nd, there was a hit and run. That did not involve the cruise vehicle directly. Somebody got hit a woman, apparently, and they were propelled sadly, tragically, in front of a cruise vehicle.

So, cruise did not do the initial strike on this woman. The woman apparently, and I'm sorry that this is a big graphic trigger warning if you've been in a car accident. I know it's triggering for some people. But the cruise car slammed on the brakes and reportedly stopped on top of the woman. Okay, this is something that happens when I worked on an ambulance and we saw car accidents. This is something that happened with pedestrians. You get hit. You could get hit by two or three cars.

It's not the first one that kills you in some cases. It's the person swerving around the car that got. the accident that hits somebody and clips them. That's why if you ever get in an accident on the highway, many, many people who die on the highway, it's not from the initial accident. It's because they get out on an active highway and they're disoriented and they walk across the highway and then they get struck a second time or the car gets rear-ended after it's been in an accident. So Cruz reported that the vehicle stopped on top of the woman and that they kept the vehicle in place until the first responders could arrive to assist the woman. This makes sense. And I talked about

this before on the All In podcast, I think one of the best practices is you don't move the car until the emergency people get there because if you move it, you could cause more damage. Okay. And if somebody has, you know, updated information on how EMS handles this, my information is 30 years dated here. So the police instructed crews to brick the car while on top of the woman. And again, that's standard operating procedure. And that's been confirmed now.

But what they didn't mention, and again, this is allegedly, was that the vehicle also pulled the woman forward 20 feet. Now, this has been confirmed by Cruz. Cruz mentioned this is a, in a detailed review of the hit and run published this week. Again, they did not do the initial hit, but this week they published a detailed review. Okay, so now here's where it gets a little dicey. The California DMV is claiming that Cruz withheld this footage of the woman being. being dragged the 20 feet from them in an accident review that took place the day after the accident. Here's the quote from the DMV's order of suspension.

During the meeting, the department was shown video footage of the accident captured by the AV's onboard cameras. The video footage presented to the department ended with the AV's initial stop following the hard-breaking maneuver. Okay, great. Footage of the subsequent movement of the AV to perform a pullover maneuver was not shown to the department. And crews did not disclose that any. additional movement of the vehicle had occurred after the initial stop of the vehicle, the department only learned of the AV subsequent movement via discussion with another government agency.

The department requested Cruz provide a copy of the video with additional footage, which was received in the department October 13th, 2020, 23. If this is true, this is really bad for Cruz, because when deploying and being part of the beta, Cruz is building trust with these agencies. And the agencies and crews have a lot to lose. They're in partnership in putting this new technology out there. And part of that is to own what happens when accidents occur. And accidents will happen in cars.

We all know that. So you have to be absolutely transparent and you cannot in any way lie. It's that simple. And so why has this video not been released is my question. If you were crews, and again, now I'm going to get into speculation. So if Cruz did a good job here, they would have released the video, right? Now, you can blur out the individual, but you would release some portion of the video if you were in the clear. I think you would do that.

Now, there might be lawyers who say, don't do it because it's, you know, could incite the public or something or there could be some more damages that would occur possibly. But, yeah, I think for society, these agencies and the car company should release the footage. and the data. This way multiple parties can see it. What they're doing right now, all the parties involved, is making us all wonder what is the truth. And in a vacuum, and I've said this before, when not presented with the facts, in a vacuum, people will go different places. And the place people are going here is that Cruz's car dragged the woman and that they hit it on purpose. That's where your mind will go if they're not forthright. Now, another group of people will say, hey, these agencies are anti-tax or they've got it in for Cruz.

And they'll go down that conspiracy rabbit hole. Just release the videos. You know, you want to be crystal clear about what you did right, what you did wrong, and then fix it. The fact that none of this data is out there points to, to me,

one of two possibilities. It cruises that fault and they were ashamed of it and they were hiding something. There was a cover up, in other words. Or maybe it's a jump ball. And I suspect that's the actual, situation here. I bet you it's one of these things where it's not clear how bad this is and maybe somebody made a very poor decision to hide this footage. But if the data was conclusive,

my opinion is you would release it quickly. Now, of course, big companies can behave strangely. They can get caught up and say, you know, hey, we don't have to, you know, there's some loophole they only asked for us to give them the accident information. They didn't ask us to give us the post accident information, right? There might be some weasel lawyer who told them, oh, technically we don't have to give them what happened after the accident. They only asked for the accident. So just give them the accident. You know how lawyers think. I think that's just to break in here. I think you're exactly right. I think that's exactly what happened. Because in that quote from the DMV's order of suspension, they mentioned the department, meaning the DMV, only learned of the AV

subsequent movement via discussion with another government agency. So Cruz did show this footage to another agency, but they just hid that part of it from the DMV. Right. Okay. So there it is, producer Nick, you know, working with me, J-Cal slash Colombo in figuring this out. So, you know, it's- I think the part about this that's so stupid, though, especially in San Francisco,

is you have this total contingent of like anti-tech. These things are horrible. They're throwing traffic cones on top of them to brick these things. You have just validated all of those people by appearing like this, you know? Like this sets them back a decade. I was about to say, I think this sets it back five years, maybe even a decade. Who knows? But I think, you know, self-driving cars in San Francisco, at least from Cruz or over.

I don't think they give Cruz their license back. And you know what? If they did hide it, I can understand their argument, you know, because what happens? I mean, if you're hiding this, what else are you hiding, right? It makes them look like the tech overlord, the corporate evil overlord. It makes them look like that. That's literally what it does. it looks like they're trying to get away with something.

So just whoever made the decision here at Cruise, if this is in fact true, again, I got to put that disclaimer in there because there's weird stuff going on right now. It's hard to find the truth. You know, maybe there's some mix up here. Maybe they gave them the second part of the video. They didn't see it. I don't know. But this is a mess.

This is sloppy on all sides. And yeah, this is just tragic for the industry because the truth is these things are going to save people's lives. him. What a disaster. You know, it's just, and that's the real problem here, as Freiburg pointed out on All-in when we discussed it, you got to take some risk to get the reward. The risk here is that, you know, hey, the car might drag somebody, right? But who knows if this had not been a cruise car, you know what I'm saying, Nick? And it hit them. It may have not done the aggressive braking. It might have killed the person.

Yeah. And that's where transparency matters. Remember I said before that a lot of times in the accident, it's the second hit that kills people. You know, either the rear end or they, you know, they get out of the car, they start walking around, they try to flag somebody and then somebody clips them. And you always see that, right? Cops, God forbid, they're going up to the car and they get clipped by somebody who's on their phone. Maybe if you put this information out here, somebody would have said, hey, by the way, this thing stopped on a dime. A human couldn't have done that.

Boom, it would hit somebody. This reminds me of the movie Flight. You remember, not Flight, Sally, remember Sully? I didn't see Sully, but I do love Flight. flights that's up there but in Sully another great pilot movie they put people in a simulation right and they try to say he could have gotten to Tito Barrow

but that was like math could have gone to Tito Barrow maybe technically but when they actually put pilots in the simulation and they had him do a double bird strike they all died yeah and this guy landed in the Hudson you know Sully's the hero um so anyway it's just said did you see this other thing that was trending on uh did you see I got into a little bit of a Twitter beef again

Gen X versus Gen Z? Oh man you are you are getting I stopped in it again. You are getting flamed right now. Crazy. I mean, there's a generation who've never commuted. I guess it's triggering to commute, but there's a video online right now.

Let's just play the clip first and then you can react to it. I don't play the whole clip because not the whole thing. All right. There was a clip on TikTok that went viral on X of a young woman who just graduated and just got her first job crying about how much she hates her commute. But I will say, in the clip, everybody's kind of framing it as, oh, nobody wants to work anymore. But in the clip, she does say, I love my job.

I would have no problem with it if I could walk to work. I can't afford. And I think she's talking about Manhattan. She says, I can't afford to live in the city. So I have to live at home. And I have like an hour commute plus each way. Yeah. So did I for a decade.

And then I made money and then I moved to Manhattan. Did you ever feel like the life was being sucked out of you from a really long commute when you get home at like 8 o'clock and it's dark out? I mean, I took the R train into Manhattan back and forth. It was long. Sometimes it took an hour of 15. Sometimes it took 45 minutes. And I got a slice of pizza when I get off.

I would, you know, get a cup of coffee on the way in, grab some juice than a donut. Right. But you had some days where it was a hard long day and it sucked, right? And you were like, man, this commute sucks, right? Did the commute sucks sometimes? Yes. Right. That's her point.

Was it hot? Was it cold. But I didn't get on TikTok and cry about it. You didn't get on TikTok and cry about it. There's no TikTok. It was on TikTok. I can run a blog post. I don't actually think any of the points she's making are that bad.

Okay, but just play it. It's the intense. Oh, now you want to play it. Okay. I just want to play the part. I'll tell you the part I want to play. Okay. I want to play is where she says, I have to leave my house at 7.30 and I don't get back to 615.

Yeah. It's funny. That's a little rough. Yeah. I know I'm probably being so dramatic and annoying. But this is my first song with my first nine. And she even admits that she's being dramatic and annoying. Okay, fine.

Fine. I'm after college. And I'm in person. And I'm commuting. in the city and it takes me forever to get there. There's no way I'm going to be able to afford living in the city right now. So that's off the table like

duh. If I was able to walk to work and it would be fine, but I'm not. So it literally takes me like I leave here. I get on the train at 7.30 and I don't get home till like 6.15 early. Yeah, that's not that bad. That's just okay. That's fair. I didn't realize that.

I would also ask. I thought it was like 6 a.m. And you get home at like 8 p.m. Come on, man. Your dad. My brother. Your dad, producer Nick. Right. You saw him leave the house at 6 o'clock as a fireman.

Yes, of course, but you have to understand. Yeah. But. And then you worked your ass. Yes, but guess what he also did? He would come home and say, oh, my God, that commute sucked. I want to cry right now. That's true.

That's literally what he would say. Okay. Everybody thinks. Commuting sucks. It's awful. And I think her larger point is it is so expensive to live in Manhattan right now. And you're not even putting into the, like, this is a whole. other thing, but this is a young woman. And right now, if you want to live in the city in

Manhattan, in San Francisco, you might have to live in maybe not such a nice neighborhood. And guess what? I lived in San Francisco for two years. I had a lot of guy friends. I had a lot of friends that were women, young women. And guess what? You know who gets messed with by homeless people and drug addicts? Is it ever young men? No, it's women and it's old people. So they have a whole other thing to worry about living in like. I get that piece. That's a separate issue. but yeah. I mean, I think there's a confluence

of things going on here with this. You think it's real? Let me ask that. Is it real? Or is this person doing engagement farming? Maybe a little bit of both. I'm not really sure. I don't know.

I got the sense, a little bit of both. Well, I feel I want to do something like this. I feel like I want to do a J-Cal meltdown video and release it, but not tell people I'm doing it. Like, what could I have a meltdown about?

I don't know, but what I need you to do in order for you to actually talk about this video, is I need you to have like an hour commute for a month straight every single day. Oh, that. And then I want you to just talk about how much it sucks. The office is 10 minutes from wherever I am. Exactly.

You haven't had an hour commute since 1992. No, no, it'll be a long time. I know. A long time since I had an hour commute. No, no, that sucks. Can you say that she makes some valid points? Can you just admit that? Yes, she does make some valid points.

But the part that's triggering is, you know, with her disclaimer, yeah, maybe I did pile on because she did give the disclaimer she says I'm being annoying I know and she says if I could walk to work I wouldn't I'd never complain I don't even care yeah but the 730 to 615 got me that was I was like I didn't realize that on the first viewing

I was like that I was thinking wait a second 730 you get to work at 839 and then you're leaving a 5 so you're actually working a literal 9 to 5 8 hours I wonder if she's eating at her desk but she's getting paid for a 40-hour week.

She's literally doing the bare minimum. Let's be honest here. And then she's like, I don't get to go to the gym and I don't get to date. And I was like, well, wait a second. I had an even worse schedule. I worked like maybe I'd leave at 7, work at 8, 8.30, worked until 6.37, went to the gym with Chelsea Pierce. Then I might go on a date or I might go have dinner at 10 o'clock, get to bed by 12, you know, one and get six hours of sleep.

Yeah, but here's the thing. You could jump on the R train at any time of the day. if you're taking Metro North home, if you're taking New Jersey transit, like she is to the suburbs, those trains will leave at certain times. Do we find that out that she's doing the long suburb thing? Okay, here's, from what I surmise,

she's either in North Jersey, she's in Westchester or she's in Long Island somewhere. You know what? She has a New York accent. Yeah, that's a mitigating factor. Yeah. And I think, you know, those, and now we're getting totally into the weeds

and this is completely ridiculous. But I do think that. Well, no, it's a double commute. She's got to get on the New York City subway and then you got to get on the path. And you have to transfer. and when you're leaving those trains after a certain time.

Like the R train you could jump on it runs every five minutes, right? It's really slow, but it runs every couple minutes. 10 minutes, 5 minutes. Whatever. But you know, Metro North, do you miss your train?

You're at you. The next train you're getting is an hour later, right? So it's like a whole. Yeah. I think logistically, I don't think her points are that crazy here. As someone who's crying and I get home too late. Here's what I think.

I'm going to give some prescriptive advice. Commuting sucks. What I did was, I very quickly just got the smallest possible. apartment in Manhattan and, you know, split rent. And, you know, it's like get a tiny place and live in the city. That's my best advice. Better to live in a studio, the tiniest possible apartment, but have the shortest commute

because your quality of life will go out. Totally. I understand that. Yeah. Yeah. Literally living in a studio apartment where, like, you're bad in your kitchen or in the same thing, that's totally fine. Because you can, when you're in Manhattan, you're in a major city, you're

going to be out anyway. You're a young person. You go to the gym, et cetera, much better, much better. Or you do what I did. You have a sick loft, but it doesn't have heat on the weekends and you're living illegally in a commercial law. I just think the affordability problem in Manhattan right now is so crazy. Well, that's why I hacked it when I was her age. I have friends of mine that are now 28 years old that make good money that are like, I want to live in a two bedroom, but it, everything in Manhattan in like a decent neighborhood is $6,000 and above. And I have to go to Williamsburg It's crazy. Yeah.

Did you see the other one of the person crying about she had to go serve sushi? But her, she can't get a marketing job because she's up against people who have more experience. And then she says the degrees the experience. No, I didn't. You see the degrees the experience? You didn't see the degrees the experience? No, no, nor do I care. Come on.

What do we? There's everybody can make a video now about anything. Do we really need to ingest everyone's thoughts about the world? Like, come on. But you know, just the nature of these guys. The woman is driving to like serve sushi and she's like, my first job, I make more as a server than I do at my first job. And then she's like, and I got a degree and I went $80,000 in depth with marketing. I'm like, ooh, there's the mistake.

All right, everybody. We'll see you next time on This Weekend Startups. Go check out the new website. This Weekendstarbs.com. We're playing with some AI. You'll enjoy it. And, yeah, shout out, producer, Nick. Welcome new guy to the team.

And we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.