This Week in Startups - The Alef Model A and the future of flying cars with Alef CEO Jim Dukhovny | E1929

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… 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 http://www.vanta.com/twist LinkedIn Ads. To redeem a $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups Zendesk. The best customer experiences are built with Zendesk. Qualifying startups can join their Startup program and get Zendesk products free, for six months! Visit http://www.zendesk.com/twist today to get started. * Todays show: Alef’s Jim Dukhovny joins Jason to discuss different approaches to flying car tech (1:16), Alef’s vehicle design (9:17), commercial aspects (22:39), and more! * Timestamps: (00:00) Alef’s Jim Dukhovny joins Jason (1:16) Alef’s mission and the different approaches to VTOL and flying car technologies (8:25) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (9:17) Alef’s approach to vehicle design and use of existing technologies in a new format (12:10) Technical details of Alef’s vehicle design, including propulsion systems and structural innovations (14:27) Challenges of designing flying vehicles that function both as cars and aircraft (21:11) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (22:39) Commercial aspects, including pricing, customer pre-orders, and manufacturing plans (26:13) Regulatory and certification challenges and the potential timeline for bringing the product to market (32:46) Zendesk - Get six months free at http://www.zendesk.com/twist (34:16) Ballistic parachute systems in drones, planes, and Alef’s vehicles (38:53) The long-term vision for autonomous flying cars * Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtzuL3WSiGY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Gzdo107SmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBCUQlF3MMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxaFFuN1vpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4buS7avd4 * Follow Jim: X: https://twitter.com/AlefAeronautics LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimdukhovny Check out Alef: https://alef.aero * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Thank you to our partners: (8:25) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at http://www.vanta.com/twist (21:11) LinkedIn Ads - Get a $100 LinkedIn ad credit at http://www.linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups (32:46) Zendesk - Get six months free at http://www.zendesk.com/twist * Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

If you tell me today to put in our car, which we have today physically, a human and fly the human autonomously somewhere, we can't already do it. The technology is completely that. We have all the software, we have all the hardware, but we don't do it because there's absolutely no past to certification. Zero. So technology-wise, it's completely not dependent on us because we can literally fly today. This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta.

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Qualifying startups can join their startup program and get Zendesk products free for six months. Visit Zendesk.com slash startups today to get started. All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. We've been tracking VTOLs, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles for some time on this program, you probably are well aware of Joby and seen some of these vehicles that are currently in testing and that people believe we might actually be able to take a ride in sometime in the next couple of years. But it's been a couple of years for a couple of decades. Now, another category

is flying cars. You may have seen in popular science, you can look them up, all kinds of fantastical moments in time where people dreamed that you could drive a car down a road, and then when you get stuck in traffic, magically, just float above the traffic. Most of these vehicles had retractable wings. So in practicality, you weren't going to actually be able to drive down the freeway, get in traffic, and then just vertically take off. You would drive the car to maybe an airstrip and then pull out the wings. So they weren't truly flying cars. When I saw today's startup, I said, huh, we're getting closer. And I started double-clicking on the technology, and I was

pretty impressed. So Jim Duchovny is with us today. He's from Aleph. Al-F is the first letter of many alphabets, like version, Arabic, Hebrew, Syrian, many, many alphabets. That's actually the first letter of the alphabet. Alif, got it. Spelled A-L-E-F. So you heard my little intro. There are V-Toles in the world, like Joby. Those are super impressive and Larry Page invested in a bunch of companies like Kitty Hawk, etc. And people have really been pursuing this concept of, you know, vertical takeoff and landing vehicles. And they're taking a little while, but they're pretty stable and they're getting

close from my understanding. I know some of the investors actually and Joby and some of the other ones. So you have a slightly different profile on a slightly different technology. Maybe you could explain to us how what you're doing is so radically different than, say, Joby. I would say it's a little bit the other way around. So we had a concept of flying cars, as you correctly mentioned, 400 years, right? Henry Ford attempted it. Many people attempted throughout the history. Then, Evital's came out.

Evie Tals, electrical, vertigo took off and landing. electric helicopters, they came out because people could not do the flying cars. So there's a reason we didn't have flying cars. The laws of physics actually tells you you cannot have it. You need big wings. You need the correct shape for the flying. The car is actually the opposite shape of a good, stable aeronautic shape. So from the laws of physics, actually, flying cars are pretty crazy and almost impossible.

So people created Evital's. Evitols were called flying taxis, right? We did have flying taxis in 70s and 80s, actually here in Silicon Valley. So this is not something new. They were helicopters. They were not electric. They didn't have that new technology, which Evito's have, but it's not a new concept. Again, all of this happened because we could not come up with something

which was on everybody's mind, which is a flying car, right? Which is a physical car with a vertical takeoff. Now, here is the kind of fundamental. I wouldn't say problem. I don't want to use the word problem because I'm incredibly impressed by what Tivitol is. Incredibly impressed with Jobi Archer and everybody else. What they're paving for the electric aviation,

or the short range aviation, which did not exist before. So all of it is absolutely incredibly impressive. There's several kind of like fundamental issues with this. So, number one is infrastructure. In order for that to scale, you need a huge number of heliparts or whatever you want to call them. You need that infrastructure. Otherwise, your typical commute from point A, which is your house or your apartment, to point B, which is your work, actually will be longer using EVITO than today's traditional cars, which are stuck in traffic. And the reason for it is because A, you need to get from point A to the helipot, from helipot to helipot to helipot to the point B.

So that actually doesn't solve your commute problem. It solves short range aviation problem or for some mileage, it actually makes sense, right? Not for the general commute. So that's problem number one. Again, like I said, scaling that, if you want to get anywhere close to the number of cars in any kind of city, we'll need to wait for about 100 years to make all these helipods to be built. Another problem, it's fundamentally expensive. Why it's fundamental problem is because think about the helipod, right?

They have to be built in a city. That helipot has to pay the property tax. That helipat has to have like some kind of a maintenance on it. Some people looking after it. It consumes energy, some kind of energy and so on. all of this cost will be passed to the consumer. So there are issues. Also, there is safety issues.

So think about open propeller airplanes slash helicopter, flying inside the cities. And if anything, let's say that helipot is busy, let's say like helipot can handle like three or six vehicles at the same time. Let's say it's busy and it has an electric charge. It has to land someone. at that point it's going to kill people on the ground. So there are issues with this solution. There's a good reason people wanted a flying car. And again, it's not saying we're better than anybody or definitely we're not.

Of course not. It's well known that these are larger than a normal car. They have huge batteries. They're designed to go 45 minutes typically. And they need to have a range of typically 50% further because of FAA regulations than their intended trip. So if it's a 20-minute trip, they really need to tell the FAA, hey, we've got like 40 minutes. I think it's maybe double as the rule.

So there's a lot of rules that are emerging, and you're correct. They need to land somewhere. They need to take off from somewhere. And you're right, A to B is A to B, not A to B to C to D, which is what you would do. I mean, they seem incredibly convenient for going from JFK Airport into Manhattan because that's an hour-long drive or an hour and a half if it's like a crazy traffic day in Manhattan. And yeah, you can reasonably get from either of the heliports to somewhere, but you do have to go find it.

Now, with your technology, you would park it in your driveway. And at some point, you would lift off and fly somewhere and then land in a parking lot, etc. So listen, a strong sales team can make all the difference for a B2B startup. But if you're going to hire sharks, you need to let them hunt. and you can't slow them down with compliance hurdles like SOC2. What is SOC2? Well, any company that stores customer data in the cloud needs to be SOC2 compliant.

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for GDPR, HIPAA, and more. So here's your call to action. Stop slowing your sales team down and use Vanta. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's Vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock two. Maybe we could show the technology and show this vehicle, and then I've got questions about physics. Because you did bring up, you know,

hey, do these things actually, can this actually work, I guess, is the question. So let's take a look at this. All right. So now we're watching this. It's showing what looks like a really slick car with webbing, I guess, on the top or a grid that allows air to flow through. This is all carbon fiber. So tell us how does this work?

Where are the propellers? Right. So number one and the biggest questions probably is you're looking at CGI. You're not looking at the real thing. There are real things in our press kit. So you may show it a little bit later. mostly we are preparing. So the shape which you're seeing right now

was like redesigned about a year and a half ago. We've been in business for about eight years. It looked like a sports car. It looked like a prototype, like a normal prototype, full-size prototype, which were flying and everything.

Sometimes ago, we asked one of the famous car designers Hirash Rosagi from Sweden to actually design it to look like a car, to look like a sports car, to look better. the exterior, just designing exterior. And as you were describing in Jason,

you actually correctly try to describe it. Yes, it actually looks like a sports car because Hirash was the person who designed Bugatti. He designed Lotus. He worked on some famous cars. This is why he did the shape. Now what you're looking at. So first of all, as you correctly point out,

there's no wings and we'll get to that in a second. There are different modes of driving and flying. So let's talk about this. Number one, you have a car shape, right? Now, take the engine, which used to be in the front, take everything which used to be a trunk, and take it completely out. No engine, no trunk.

Correct. So you still need to drive and you still need some luggage case. So where you would put it? We put four smaller motors in each wheel. Again, it's nothing new. There are a number of cars today, which actually uses the same technology. which makes it lighter and which makes it has it like also differential drive.

But now you have the space up front in the back. You need the space in order to put their propulsion. It's called the DEP Distribute Electric Propulsion, 8 independent motor speed controller, propeller, battery systems. And the reason they're I'm saying they're independent. It's actually important because that gives you a differential thrust. B, it gives you a huge redundancy. The second thing we did is we opened the type.

up, what we created, what is called mesh. Important thing about mesh on one hand, it provides the structure. On the other hand, it allows the airflow. I mean, you need the airflow for the lift. That's what gives you the airflow, right? So this is the mesh. Now, you're still faced with the most important question is, like, when you're looking at this, you're seeing the car shape.

Car shape is probably one of the worst shapes for flying because it's actually shaped to push you down the airflow, not to push you up. Moreover, you need wings. And as you correctly pointed out, there were TerraFuge or mobile. There were many companies with expendable wings. The problem with expendable wings is you're adding weight. Not only it's funky looking, this is fine because you can hide it. Like, for example, Ex-Peng is hiding it right now.

But you now don't have enough power to lift vertically. I mean, you can actually lift vertical. Let me rephrase it. But your range of flying maybe 30 seconds. to two minutes. Because you spend, because you're too heavy now, you have all this expendable wings. You spend all your power for the vertical takeoff,

so you don't have enough power to fly forward. So we needed to solve the problem, and that's where I'm saying we were facing the laws of physics, of wings which weighed zero pounds, zero extra pounds, which is, as you understand, is impossible from the laws of physics. So my co-founders, actually, I'm not a technical co-founder,

my co-founders, Constantine Oleg and Pabell, did something so simple that actually all your great minds for 100 years did not think about it because it is super simple. They just took the car as it is, and they just turned it 90 degrees. That's all it was.

So it's like the car is flying as if it was flipped on its side? Correct. When you do that, the size of the car become wings. So if you look at it from the top as you look in here, again, this is a CGI, that's not the real thing. It's actually the airfoil is a correct airfoil. So when you fly like that, it becomes a regular biplane.

It's just a regular biplane. There's nothing new about it. So if you think about the whole thing together, at any given point of time, there's nothing new which we invented. We just put whole bunch of many things which existed in the world together. You drive, the takeoff, the transition, the biplane, all of the, of it as existing technologies put together. Now, when you fly a biplane, and I'm no expert here, we understand it has two wings, the engines, but it also has a tail and a rudder, and it has the point of the engine and the

point. So how much of that is necessary also to have stability in flight? Because this, when it flips on its side, it looks like science fiction. And it doesn't seem to me like that would be super stable, but you tell me, I know you've lifted these cars straight up. Have you been able to tilt them sideways? and fly them in that direction? Yeah.

For many years, yes. Full size for many years we have been flying it. Again, there's a reason we're not showing. The reason we're not showing is because the previous one doesn't look like a sports car. And apparently right now, you know, like we are all over the news. For people in 2024, it's important how things look like, not only how they function. So even though we can show the functionality, it's actually important to look. So we're changing the look.

We actually have this right now. It has like drive and vertical takeoff. The previous version did everything for several years. Now, when we do that... So you have a version of this that you've actually flown, that just looks different than this really slick-looking one, and have you flown it with a person in it, or is it like a smaller-scale model?

It's not smaller-scale model. It's a full-scale model. It's actually the same scale. It's the same airfoil, so it's exactly the same. It's just it doesn't have all those slick lines and all of the things with Hirschri design. So now let me address the stability because it's an important question with yourself. So it is actually pretty stable.

It is pretty stable. So first of all, because there's a differential thrust, there are elements there. There are many control surfaces. Obviously, what makes it possible, and that's actually the difference between us and, for example, Henry Ford, is software. What makes it possible is not hardware, it's software. is that software, it's millisecond reactions,

it's controlling all the surfaces, all this transition, all this transition is incredibly complicated functionality, right, when you do the transition. It's incredibly functionality. A lot of things have to work in unison. A lot of things have to work perfectly together to make that transition work.

And that's software which does it. No human will ever be able to do that perfectly. Yeah, we know this because quadcopters the ones that people go by and, you know, DGIs, etc., they will, if they're hit, and you'll see videos online of people hitting them with broomsticks, they automatically adjust, or if you were to lose one or two of them, they adjust, or if there's wind or they hit an obstacle, they self-correct, yes? Correct.

Yes, yes. It's actually similar, it's incredibly similar, like, almost to the point the same. We don't reinvent where we don't need to. it's the same technology as drones use. It's kind of incorrect. So as far as the software, it's actually a good analogy, but it's incorrect to look at it as a drone. In different modes, so on the ground, it's a car.

When it takes off, it's a rotorcraft. When it does transition, when it flies forward, it's biplane. It also uses a lot from the drone technology too. So it's all these technologies put together. Like I mentioned, it's not that we invented, anything big. We took existing technologies and we pulled them together. What will the weight be of this vehicle and then how many passengers, it looks like it's a coop, looks like it fits one person, maybe two at the start, which is reasonable given

it can fly. So when do you think this is going to come out? You started taking deposits for it. And what's the version one that's available to the public? How many people will fly in it? Okay, there were like three different questions. Let me answer one of them and then we'll come back to others. How many people? Usual answer to how many people is one and a half. The reason is one and a half. It's either two of me or one football player, let's put it in this.

So it all depends on your size and the weight. There is a certain room inside. It's pretty big room. It's pretty, like for example, if I'm flying alone, I have more than enough room there. Yeah. If we're going to put two people, it's okay. If you're going to put like a linebacker or anything, that may be a problem here.

So cozy like you would be in a Mazda Biazza or a Corvette, any other two-seat roads or tied vehicle. Right. It all depends. That being said, it's a first version. Obviously, we're still working through the Kings. We're planning to have a four-person cope at some point, right? So we're still working in it. As of right now, one person is definitely just said that two people who wait like I am also probably okay.

And what will they retail for? When do you think it's going to be available to the public? So right now we're open pre-sales. Actually, we didn't expect that many pre-sales when we opened. We just wanted to hear some people. Right now, actually, just bypassed 3,000 pre-orders in one year, which is as far as I search the internet is by far. Very good. Yeah.

So, and yes, it's a crazy number for us. We don't know how to manufacture that many we're going to start slow and then try to run by. That being said, right now, we're focused on delivering the first one, right? Just the first one. And as we deliver the first one, we're going to start thinking about how to make a lot of them, right? There are technology, again, there's nothing we have to invent.

I mean, there are existing productions like aircraft productions. automotive productions, which we can plug in and which can work with. So the sentence of when goes like this, usually people hear just the last word, but I'm trying to make sure that people have every single word in that sentence. If everything goes wrong, we plan to, if all the resources are going to be there, if we're going to have funding and off everything, if the laws, if the regulations, at least stay the same and will not, get worse, we plan to start production of the first one by the end of 2025.

Got it. So this has still got a lot of work left to do. A lot of disclaimers in there, obviously, because there are things outside of your control. The FAA has to approve this. You have to get funding and execution, obviously. You have to be able to build this, etc. But you feel confident that the technology is there. Navigating the B-to-B maze can feel really tough. You're trying to hit the mark with all those top-tier executives. You want them to pay attention to your enterprise product. But where can you find all those big fish, the whales?

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No spaces, no dashes. Terms and conditions apply because they're giving you a hundee. What do you think the retail prices is going to be 150K,000k? where do you see this? Right. If you're going to compare to Jobb. And Archer, we should go for a million. We're actually right now put 300K for that just because the cost is kind of like kind of similar to that.

That being sad, it's because it's a handmade, nothing is optimized. As you know, like the first ones, it's like for early adopters. This is a premium. Same thing as the Tesla Roadster was 100. 65K, I think, for the first 100 that they made. It's something similar. At the end of the day, which is not going to be tomorrow, not in five years, it's very, very end of the road, like, long time.

If we can get to Honda Toyota numbers, or even half of a hundred Toyota numbers, if we can get an optimized production, again, close to Tesla Honda Toyota Ford, anything like that, the price should be 30, or 30K or less. The reason for it is obvious because fundamentally, it's actually simpler than Ford Focus Toyota Carole.

So fundamentally is that. But together, their volume needs to happen. The optimization needs to happen. A lot of work needs to happen to get the price really down to make it affordable for everybody.

That's a goal. We're not making something to lift one or two cars in the air and have like one or two. cross-person bypass. How many batteries do you have to put in this, just generally speaking? Because when you look at the car, I didn't see the battery packs.

Obviously, they're huge in a Tesla. You would think they would need to be huge here. You need a lot of battery power to get lift off, correct? So they're about one-third of the weight of the whole car. It's not, I mean, there's different ways actually putting the batteries. You can put the battery. But in any case, first of all, it's a distributed battery also. It's a redundancy, right?

You need redundancy everywhere, including the batteries, making sure that if one battery fails, it's independent of other seven. They take up a lot of space. They are pricey, but we're, I mean, there are different configurations. It's not a battery, we don't have any kind of like proprietary battery technologies. The way we use the battery is different. So just to tell you that if you fly like this, like everybody does, like we already got to come off and forward, versus if you fly in the biplane mode, we get out of the same battery about 7x more. Ah, because you're gliding as opposed to just like a helicopter.

So because it's a biplane format, you don't need a lot of power. You just need to get to a certain elevation and then get a certain amount of speed and you're gliding. Right. So here's the, you know, I should say, here's the video of the. original OG version, which is, you know, quite charming looking at what we showed here briefly. But this was, I guess, your prototype. And yeah, there it is flying. This was, this is not CGI, correct?

This is an actual prototype flying. That's one of their latest, one of their latest. It's amazing. It's fantastic. I mean, we know that the quadcopter technology scales up to the size of a car or more. That's been proven. And it's been proven it's stable. And so I guess the last piece is, what is the FAA's view of this, do you think?

Because I know that they've been working in good faith with a lot of these quadcopter companies like Joby, et cetera. So they really want to see this happen. And then the next piece, I think, is, well, you're driving on the road and then where can you take off from? If it's your private land and I'm driving from, you know, if I've got a farm or something out in Texas, I can totally fly it around my farm. But what do you think flying from my farm into the city would look like? And how do you see the world evolving over time? Because I don't think they're going to let you take off on the 405 immediately.

Okay, so let's do this. This is like two completely separate questions, which you asked us with the second one. Where you will be able to take off, like especially, by the way, important thing for both of your questions here is which jurisdictions are you applying? to. Whether it's United States, where it's Canada, where it's Europe, where it's Asia, answers to this question would be different. I actually, again, and now this is complete, my predictions coming out of nowhere, I'm like not, don't know if it's going to happen or not. I think United States would be probably one of the most conservative ones and probably will be

behind everybody else on timing when it's going to release, which is maybe a good thing, which is maybe a good thing. FAA is known for incredible safety record. That's what they do well. The way they do it is they make it a hard, enforceable process. That's how it works. So I would expect, and again, this is a complete guess. It's a complete guess.

I would expect the United States to be later than countries outside. I would, all of those quirks need to be worked out. Moreover, it's also different, if you call it, branches of government or however you want to call. In the scenarios you were describing, there is a city government, there is a state government, there is a federal government, there's a private land. There's all kinds of considerations here. All of it need to be worked together. and as you know in some cases,

it's actually there's some great areas and some branches of government don't work well together, unfortunately. Yeah, United States is going to be tough. I mean, I think this is why the Middle East is probably one of the great destinations to do this because they're super pro-innovation. They can make a top-down decision

if, you know, somebody in the UAE or in Saudi or in Qatar decide, hey, we want to have this. Somebody can say, okay, we're going to just do an accelerated exemption to just do this on this route. And you probably have people who would be willing to pay for it

to get from Dubai to Abu Dhabi in five, ten minutes as opposed to, you know. So that's where I think you'll see this actually take off, so to speak. So I've made research and what we did, I'm not going to kind of give up

several semi-secretes, though like everything is almost public, but I actually think that, at least for us, the earliest adopters would be Europe in Canada. Really? Explain why you think that. Yeah, I'm curious. That I cannot explain. I mean, I cannot explain it publicly. Sorry. Oh, okay, no problem. There are because I can hint on it. There are some laws, existing laws, nothing new, which, and it's not a big door, it's existing laws which already exist.

we have to make sure that we adapt towards certain existing laws and we fit into their infrastructure. They already have something in existence, which we have to adapt to and plug into that. In the United States, it's tougher. Yeah, for sure, we've had a lot of bad experiences with aviation and one tiny little aviation era makes, sets back the entire industry decades.

We had a very famous instance where the Pan Am building used to have these Chinooks. I'm sure you know this history. But from JFK, you would go from the Pan Am building, which is above Grand Central. They had these double-bladed, you know, like military style, you know, those, I guess they call them Chinooks.

So two blades fit a lot of people, fit a lot of bags. And you would go to Grand Central Station in the 50s and into the 60s, go have a meal at the top, go up, get in your helicopter, zip out to JFK, get on your flight to Paris.

It was quite compelling until one of the struts broke on that one of those helicopters, it tipped over and one of the blades flew off and killed somebody on the street and then that was the end of landing on top of buildings in New York City

at least and some other locations, I think, filed suit. You know about this, I'm sure. Yeah, this is exactly why all this new technology with Evitol and everything like that is good. Because it is safer. It's actually addressing that.

If you compare whatever the helicopter you see in this picture with anybody like any like Jobi Archer, anybody like including us and so on, this is a much, much safer technology. It has so much the level of safety between that helicopter, which you see, and Jobi Archer also and everybody else, it's not even comparable. Yeah, I remember this actually. This was 1977, actually. It's really hard to have a quadcopter fall or break like this

or fall out of the sky because you have eight rotors, 16 rotors, you have the technology. They were much more graceful under pressure, correct? Right. So not only have a level of redundancy, which in this case, it will actually be saved, right? So there's a rotor brook, like it's like this. So in this case, you have like many, many more rotors.

That's number one. They're independent. That's number two. They are protected. In our case, at least, they are all inside. As you can see, there's no any outside orders at all. So everything is contained inside. Don't you love that warm, fuzzy feeling when a business appreciates you?

And then they treat you like you're their most important customer. You know, VV, VIP. I love that. And that's why I love Zendesk, because they're going to let you do that for your customer. They offer a suite of tools made just for startups. Now, of course, big companies use it too, but they are really focused on startups. So you can start building relationships with your customer through amazing support experiences. And without growing your headcount, there's less money in the ecosystem.

Everybody's got to be efficient right now. And it's so easy to set up. It's made to scale as you grow. So if you've got 100 customers or 100,000, it's going to work just perfectly. And they give you all these great metrics so your reporting's easy. This keeps you and your business agile and your investor ready. the best investors are going to ask you about your customer support, how you're doing it, what comes up. So here's one of their great customers at Zendesk. It's called Openly.com. And they are an insurance

startup and all their agents answer chats and calls in 30 seconds or less. That's so fast. And when you get that kind of response time, you are going to delight your customers. They're all going to feel like VIPs. And openly is achieving a 96% customer satisfaction. So guess what? Openly started on the Zendes for Startups program, but they've grown so much with the support of Zendesk that they recently raised a hundred million in funding. So congrats to openly.com. Hey, you got a little plug there in the Zendesk ad. Well done.

So here's your call to action. It's very simple. Apply for the Zendesk for startups program and get six months free. Yes, six months free of Zendesk. And get ready to scale with the best in customer support. Go to Zendesk.com slash startups. Zendesk.com slash startups. There is one and another advantage which we have over most of the Evitals, actually.

We're incredibly alive. It's very likely. what the advantage it gives us is you can actually deploy ballistic parachutes at pretty low altitude which makes it like

the whole vehicle parachute even at low altitudes would actually work okay right? It will actually be a crush it will be like a safe planning and everything like that even though the probability

so if you take a helicopter you have to multiply the probability of anything bad happening to at least eight right? Yeah. Number two, add to that ballistic parachutes, add all the, everything which software does it. That's also redundant, right? So all of it, again, like, a good example you had was the drones, right?

Think about return to home, outer land, like all the kind of preventions which they have in there, right? So the level, if you're going to calculate the probability of something bad, calculate the probability you have to start doing multiples and multiples and multiples on top of existing helicopters or like Sessna or anything like that. Yeah, the Cirrus, as for people who don't know,

I'll show a quick video here. If you're not watching the video, go to this week in startups on YouTube and you get to see all this great additional material. But here is a Cirrus. If you don't know that plane, my friend used to fly one and I've flown in it many times,

has a ballistic parachute. These parachutes, you have to use them under very specific conditions, slowing down the plane, or, yeah, in your case, the flying car, they have to be slowed down because if you just pop them at speed, they'll rip off because of the speed. But if you have an engine failure, you could press it like this person did. And this was a ditch into the ocean that was caught on a coast guard. I don't know if you've ever seen this video with a Cirrus. Some people call this the dentist killer of airplanes. But you can see here, he's having engine problems and the engine installing. And then he just deploys the power

it pops open and the plane eventually gets level and yeah, here it is, boom. See, this issue here. In this case, the parachute deployed this way. It needed a time too. So if he were like lower altitude, that would be bad, right? The parachute deployed behind it. In our case, first of all, it's smaller several parachutes. Again, you have redundancy that, right?

Yeah. Moreover, it's, yeah, so that wasn't right. Right. That was not the right way to deploy the parachute. That was not the right, well, it's heavy. It's an airplane. It's many things here. And that's actually softened his landing too. Even though. Yeah, this is a pretty amazing one. You know, when these planes land with the parachute, they're done, by the way. And they hit the ground. They break apart. You will save your life, but it's not going to save the plane. The plane is done. If you can pull up video of drones, And again, it's maybe such an example because we're somewhere between the drone and an airplane and a helicopter. But you can see a lot of videos where on a drone, like a smaller, like medium-sized drone, it's actually saved completely 100% by those small parachutes. Oh, really?

Yeah, I've never actually seen the ballistic drone. So look at the drones. There are smaller parachutes. And that's, by the way, another issue is like everything we do is between drones and something bigger and we're kind of in this middle place here. That's something separate issue which we solved. In our case, the technology again closer to the drone technology. Remember what I'm saying?

We're taking something which already exist and multiplying it on top of whatever we put together. Wow, this is incredible. I've never seen the ballistic parachute on a drone. But this is the future, right? You put multiple these on your car and at any point in time, and three of them could pop out and easily land it in an emergency situation. Right. Again, in this case, you see like one in the middle and it goes like this.

In our case, because it's a car, think about four corners, at least four corners. Right? Yeah, fantastic. That gives you that. So it can be array of them. You have to not tell the weight versus the safety, but this is what you do then. How much will it take you to commercialize a project like this? It's going to cost $100 million, $250 million?

What does it take to do something on this scale in 2024? So one thing is, again, this is again where we different from Evital's, right? We have a lot of advantages in this case. So several things have to happen. Like, we have to deliver the first one. I have to deliver the first one. Obviously, that's going to be another either serious raise or IPO or anything, which is going to happen at this point.

And then we have to have funding. I'm really reluctant to give the number for one reason. Biggest chunk of that number is certification by far. And whether it's certification in U.S., anywhere else or so on, that also will depend on the strategy of how we want to go. And the goal is United States, right? United States is where in Silicon Valley, we're here, this is what we know, like, this is what we do, where we manufacture and the whole thing. It all depends on where with jurisdictions, what's going to happen. It's a keep in mind, it's a moving target.

It's a moving target, right? As you correctly pointed out, FAA and NASA is actually doing incredible jobs. and to all of us of the industry, I cannot speak to everybody, but I sometimes go to conferences. We did not expect for them to move that fast. Nobody did. They have a reputation for being very conservative for a good reason, and they are actually moving at pretty okay speed, which again was big surprise to many of us. So it's actually moving in the positive directions for us, right?

So because it's a moving target, it's really hard to estimate. That being said, I can speak of numbers as of today. Again, if you compare to Evito's like Job or Narcher, we're at least 100 to 500 times spending less than they are. Again, that's a huge multiple. There are ways we're doing. I mean, we found a ways to be like a more cost efficient and everything. But again, we're solving a different problem. So it may not be fair to compare to that.

I great to admire what Joe Band is doing, great to admire what Adam is doing. I'm like learning from that. Yeah, and you have a different approach, and it's going to be absolutely fantastic when you figure this out, whether it takes you five years or 15 years, it's going to revolutionize, you know,

how cities work, and I wish you great success with it. I'm super rooting for you as, I want to see this before the end of my life. I want to be able to fly to work before the end of my days on the planet. And I don't know how many decades I have left, hopefully a three or four of them.

And it feels like we were promised flying cars, and thanks to you and your team and the other great teams out there working on this, it's going to happen. It's only a matter of when. And with all this great technology and AI, these things are going to have such a great time, you know, benefiting from all these other technologies.

I mean, do you anticipate people would be flying it or that it would be given a route and it would just be autopilot from soup to nuts. So one thing is, so first of all you mentioned, 5, 10, 15. I think it's actually, at least first ones will be sooner. Again, like I said, hopefully the first at the end, 25, 26. First people will start when it makes it affordable for you and me. That's a different question. I cannot afford one yet.

That's a separate question there. But you should see them actually pretty fast. Do you think you're going to have people have pilots licensed to fly there? these or they'll be automated and you just tell it the destination or it just says, hey, here are the places you can land this thing, which one are you going to, at least at the start? Yeah. Yes. So short term and a long term.

Short term, no way. Short term, it's very conservative similar to what is already there with existing lows. So short term, as you know, there's no way to certify anything autonomous with a human inside. That's impossible, not on anybody list anywhere in the world. That's impossible. Now, long time. So you have to be a pilot in the short term. Got it.

There are actually quirks. In some cases, you don't have to be a pilot. But the thing is in the long term, here is a very kind of funny slash thing. The technology is there already. We can't fly autonomously. If you tell me today to put in our car, which we have today physically, a human and fly the human autonomously somewhere, we can't already do it. But we don't do it.

I mean, the technology is completely that. We have all the software, we have all the hardware, but we don't do it because there's absolutely no past certification, zero. So technology-wise, it completely not dependent on us because we can literally fly today. Got it. So just like Walmart can send packages using a quadcopter and they're allowed, depending on the area and the local regulations. But if you put a human in it, no bueno.

know, they have to be a pilot right now. Absolutely. It'll change over time. When people start feeling safe in these things, just like self-driving, and we're well on the path to that. I mean, people are going to quickly realize that this will certainly be much safer than civilian aviation has been. You know, this is where a lot of people have a lot of friends who take pilot and lessons

that people make a little bit of money and all of a sudden they think they're Harrison Ford. They need to be Indiana Jones. But, yeah, it does seem like they're already autopilot is what's operating. commercial airlines for 90% of the flight. So it's only a matter of time. But that being said, you touched on the right point. It will be probably a slow adoption, which is good for everybody, right?

Yeah. I expect, right now, people looking at flying cars the same way people were riding horses and they looked at the cars. That scared everybody. That's actually my best analogy which I use all the time, horses versus cars. People who used to ride horses all the time, cars presented the problems, right? And here's a funny thing. What those people thought about cars were actually true. They were bad. They're like, they're like hitting things. They're like, I mean, cars is

what it is. It's a benefit versus inconvenience or anything like that if you want to look at it. So the adoption will probably be slower and I hope people will start seeing more benefit than the risks. And again, the safety is the number one concern here. The key to the human adoption, to the mass adoption of that, is safety. It needs to be demonstrated to be at least safer than anything. And when I say safer in our case, I'm even saying safer than a car. It needs to be safer than a car, again, because we have a... Which, to be honest, is a lower benchmark than people realize because cars, you know, people drink and drive, they text and drive.

and there's pedestrians and a lot of things on the surface of the planet Earth that you can crash into. Being up in the air, there's less things to crash into, and there'll be massive automation and safety features in these things. Something counterintuitive in the air, you actually safer than on the ground, at least in our case. The reason for it is think about where most of the crashes happen. So it's when two or more vehicles try to occupy the same space when the crashes happen, right? Yes. And the key word in that sentence is space. In the air, you have much more room to maneuver.

Moreover, think about where the most damage happens. It's actually not one car hitting the other car. It's car hitting the curb or a tree or something secondary. Yeah. Again, something you don't have in a space, right? Yeah. Yeah, there's no trees up there to hit. Correct.

And then the worst case scenario where you actually in some really bad situations, and people think, okay, yes, but. like if I hit the car, I hit the tree, you're still like this, but if that I'm falling down. No, the fact that you're higher is actually good and not better. Because it gives you room to recover. Yes. It gives you time for ballistic parachutes and you're going to land very, very slowly. So it's not only going to save the human, is going to save the car, is going to save everything.

So if you start thinking about the actual accidents and where the damage is happening and how you're going to recover from that, that is actually safer than cars on the ground. If you guys want to learn more, go to A-L-E-F-T-R-O-A-E-R-O. And you can put a deposit down and join this crazy, crazy awesome future. Go ahead and put a pre-order down.

If you want to get the priority queue, $1,500. If you want to pre-order regular, $150 bucks. This is the kind of moonshot I'm here for. Good luck to you and your team. And we are rooting for you. Flying cars. whoo cannot wait.

Thank you so much for coming on the program and we'll see you all next time. Bye-bye.