This Week in Startups - TWiST News: Tesla Robotaxis, Electric RVs, and How Startups are Helping Secure Elections | E2025

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Beehiiv. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and ad network features—all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at ⁠https://www.beehiiv.com/twist Cloud Devs. Building the best remote team is tough, but you don’t have to do it alone. Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. * Todays show: Alex Wilhelm joins Jason to dive into Tesla’s Robotaxi event, highlighting Tesla's bold plans for a self-driving, bus-style vehicle (4:33). Then, Lightship RV co-founders Toby Kraus and Ben Parker talk about the future of electric RVs (25:04). Finally, Voatz CEO Nimit Sawhney shares how blockchain is being used to secure elections (51:35). * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show (4:33) The Tesla Robotaxi event (6:46) The potential impact of Tesla's bus platform (11:59) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (13:29) ChatGPT 4 with Canvas demonstration (18:23) Predictions on the future of self-driving cars (23:36) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at ⁠https://www.beehiiv.com/twist (25:04) Lightship RV co-founders Toby Kraus and Ben Parker join the show (27:55) Description and features of Lightship RV (33:58) Cloud Devs - Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. (35:05) Financing strategy and market potential for Lightship (39:00) Impact of market trends on Lightship (41:19) Lightship's unique selling points, competition, and market strategy (51:35) Voatz CEO Nimit Sawhney joins the show (54:48) Voatz's progress, voting process, and blockchain integration (1:02:25) Election fraud concerns and attack vectors (1:06:02) Voatz's business model and sales cycle (1:08:11) Discussion on Dominion Voting Systems and election security (1:10:15) The debate over voter ID requirements and voting transparency (1:13:38) Upcoming topics: Solar energy advancements (1:14:28) Twist 500 nominations and submission guidelines * Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com * Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Check out: https://lightshiprv.com https://voatz.com * Follow Toby: X: https://x.com/kraus_toby LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobykraus * Follow Ben: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjaminparker1203/ * Follow Nimit: X: https://x.com/yenhwas * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Thank you to our partners: (11:59) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST (23:36) Beehiiv - Get 30 days free and 20% off your first 3 months at ⁠https://www.beehiiv.com/twist (33:58) Cloud Devs - Visit https://www.clouddevs.com/twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. * Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland * Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916

All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups. I'm Jason Kalinkatis. He's Alex Wilhelm, and we have a huge, huge docket today. We're going to start off with the Tesla Robotaxi reactions. Then I'm going to show you how to build a model with chat GPT and this incredible new feature called Canvas that I've been playing with. It came out last week, Alex, and it's going to blow your mind. And then I understand we have two live guests today, a twofer. Yes, we have the founders of LightShift.

RV. They're building the L-1 and all-electric trailer. That is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen in some time. Jason, you saw us on Twitter. We're obsessed. We're going to talk about it. And then we have the co-founder and CEO of a company called VOTS V-O-A-T-Z. That's Nimitz-Soni. And we're going to talk about election security and the startups that are working to make democracy a little bit easier flowing. This week in startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com. Twist for a free trial.

When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Beehive. Power your newsletters with AI tools, referral programs, and add network features, all in one platform. Get 30 days free and 20% off your first three months at beehive.com slash twist. And cloud devs. Building the best remote team is tough, but you don't have to do it.

alone. Visit clouddeves.com slash twist for an unbeatable offer on hiring elite Latam talent today. Last week, finally, after a delay, Tesla sat down and said, hey, everybody, we're going to talk about robo-taxies, big self-driving fleets, and the feature of the economics of driving. Yeah, it was a big announcement on Thursday, followed by, I guess Elon had a big Sunday and SpaceX, caught a giant rocket with a pair of chopsticks. Unbelievable week. Pretty good 72 hours for my pal. But let's go to the Robotaxy one.

This was lukewarm in terms of reception. The markets didn't like it because it lacked specifics, as they said. And Uber actually conversely and Lyft went up because I think people felt like, okay, as cool as what Elon showed is, it's going to take a little while. So let's go through it. There was the cyber taxi, which will begin production. I think he sort of set 2027, which, would be when these things hit the streets,

maybe a little bit earlier, but here's what it looks like. Let's start it there, Alex. What were your thoughts aesthetically and then conceptually with the Robo Taxi? Okay, so first of all, I thought the Wii robot branding of the event was simply an homage to the I robot movie.

Like, it's not I, it's we. It's all of us, we. But it turns out they pulled actually a little bit more from the aesthetics of that film than I thought. So people are comparing the cybercats, to the car that I think it's Will Smith drives in that. And the robo van, the large kind of like multi-person bus type thing that Tesla showed off,

also has some overlap with that movie. Works for me. I'm a science fiction guy. So aesthetically, I'm in. I was surprised that the robo taxi, the cyber cab, was a two-seater, Jason. I thought it might be more just for capacity's sake. But I am encouraged that big companies are putting more weight and money behind self-driving cars on mass, because that is what I want.

So I would say I'm bullish about it, but I also understand criticisms that this does feel a little bit far away and not quite as nailed down as some investors that might have expected. I think the two-seater is inspired. I wish this was the model two and I could buy it. That's what I heard from a lot of people.

And in the biography that they did on Elon a couple of years ago, they talked about this big debate internally should it have a steering wheel and pedals or should they just go for it and kind of burn the boats, and it looks like they went with the burn the boats. I tell you, if that was, if that has steering wheel,

I would have ordered two immediately, because I love the idea of a, of a two-seater that's cheap, I could zip around, and most rides in the United States, the overwhelming, are one or two people in the car. We all know that. So for a fleet,

you want to go with two, because that means you can produce more of them cheaper, and they take up less space on roads. So, you know, there's a million reasons to do. it that way. I was super bummed. You couldn't buy it. If you could buy that, I think he would have sold one to two million. I think he would have sold one million of them if you could put the full deposit down. As even like, if they said $10,000 deposit, I think a million people would

order that car. So I wonder if at some point that will be available for purchase. I like the design too because it's kind of somewhere between the Model 3, which I aesthetically find pleasing my Daily Drivers, the Model Y, and the cyber truck, which I also like, because it's futuristic, on the Minority Report and, like, is it a rip-off or whatever? Minority Report obviously was inspired by the Delorean for their car, and then somebody showed a bunch of 1930s, 1940s, whatever, trains, and it's kind of like Minority Report ripped off those designs or was inspired by them. So, and then there's only so many ways to make C3PO. I would say that, you know,

If you're making a humanoid robot, it's going to look like C3PO, and I think both of them have that. So I thought that was aesthetically, you know, that aesthetic thing. Like, it's a rip off of minority report was like, well, I think everybody's been inspired by the same source material. Right. It's the old, like, did Apple, sorry, did Microsoft steal graphical user interfaces from Apple? No, Apple stole it from Xerox and on down the chain. Why, though, do you think Tesla's not going to go ahead and just call this the model two, two seats, ship it with a steering wheel? because I agree with you that it would be a hit.

And I have my own guess, but I'm curious why you think the company is moving towards Robotaxies versus selling the model two. It's a great question. I haven't talked to Elon about it. I don't know the thinking other than at some point, you have to make a commitment to take the steering wheel out

and build for production without those in there. So I guess, you know, sometimes you want to, this is just me taking a guess. I think sometimes you want to force your team to do the hard thing and take off the the training wheels kind of right

and also regulators like regulators are going to have to get used to no side mirrors no steering wheel at some point and there's a long list

of things that they're going to need to figure out to get these into production but before we build our model and I'll show you

GPT with Canvas in a moment I think like the next thing is the bus and so the bus to me was super inspiring because as I tweeted

and this is what resulted in the RV company we're going to talk to on the second half of the show, I thought this was the stole the show. And the reason I think this stole the show is because this is a platform. This reminds me of a shipping container. We've been talking about shipping containers on the show. And this to me is a sled.

I think this is like a skiff, if you know like what they used to call boats, S-K-I-F-F, I think is how you pronounce it. Not to be confused with skiff.com, the travel website. I'm an investor in. My, you know,

shout out to Raphat. But this thing, you know, he, it's beautifully designed for a night out or, you know, a bus.

But imagine this at a bathroom, a bed, a desk. This is a mobile home. If this was a mobile home, it would be a mobile home with enough battery power

for perhaps a month of usage if it wasn't moving around. And if it's got that big roof, you could actually put solar on the roof. So the reason solar arrays don't exist. on top of cars is because, obviously, it's not enough to make a difference. You could add like one or two miles or something de minimis and, you know, maybe eventually

10. But this, you know, if it did have solar arrays on the roof or ones that opened up wide, you know, like they do in space, you could actually flop these around. And I gave a couple of scenarios, hey, people are fleeing Florida because of a hurricane. You could, if Airbnb owned a fleet of these or if they owned it and Joe Jebby is on the board of Tesla and he's working on an ADU company, imagine a million of these. or 10,000 of these going to Walmart parking lots autonomously in the middle of the night, and then people fleeing a hurricane situation, terrorist attack, I don't know, you know, pick feet,

or, you know, opportunistically, it's Coachella, it's the Super Bowl, and you need extra housing, or, you know, you have a ski resort, and there's always this issue with ski resorts with housing. You don't need it in the summer, you do need it in the winter. You could ship a hundred of these in, put a bunk bed in them or two, and then you'd have housing with 100 of these for 200 to 400 people. And then there's also obviously transportation of goods and services. Imagine an Amazon truck where the Amazon doesn't need a driver. It just needs somebody to be in the back, you know, with a safety harness on taking the packages.

And when it gets through a donation, jumping out, ringing the bell, putting the package, taking the picture, and leaving. So this has got massive application. I think that this thing could change the world. So it sounds like what you're really excited about is the, the skateboard element of this thing with the self-driving technology because the cab is highly variable

based on do you want seats? Do you want a bathroom? Do you want beds? Do you want this as that cargo, whatever? But I love the idea of there being several million self-driving multi-purpose vehicles in and around our nation, just going around doing cool stuff and making life better.

Because I would attend a heavy metal festival in the UK if I could stay in a luxury thing. I'm not going to go in the mud and the tents. I mean, I'm too old for that now. So that hits me. But another thing you didn't mention, I'm shocked because you have kids is, can you imagine you and some other parents putting together your own private bus for your kids to get to school? I mean, wow, I didn't think of that.

And, you know, when you know that you have a really game-changing product, when you can do things like you're describing. So, yeah, I do think that you nailed it. If you could purchase these or program these and it was a platform like Sprinter vans, there's an entire genre called van life. And this is adjacent to fire. And this alternative lifestyle, alternative economic lifestyle.

We could call this in our themes. But, you know, like sort of opting out of capitalism or opting into fierce capitalism, whatever you want to call it, man, you could do some really interesting things, couldn't you? You could, very simply,

you know, send these to a beach and, you know, with your family, you could work off the beach for the entire summer. So you have two kids now. Congratulations. Imagine you could take one of these to the Cape or two of them to the Cape. One's your office, one's for the kids, or three of them. And, you know, somebody owns a $5 million home on two or three acres.

And they just parcel out, put three of these in the backyard. And, you know, now you and your family can join your in-laws or whatever. So just a million uses for this. I think it's absolutely fabulous. The robots are obviously making progress. There was a little back and forth of where they were motorized. operated. Obviously, if you're going to put, I have no inside information on any of this, but, and I couldn't make the event sadly because I had to travel earlier in the week. But the

robots, obviously, you do need to have remote monitoring of robots and robotaxies until they're perfect. So it doesn't surprise me that they were being remote controlled. And in fact, that's how you train these. The best way to train these is to have a human with gloves on and doing like essentially AR, and have it make, I don't know, pancakes. And then, after you've made 100 pancakes, the robot knows pancakes. That's the scary, amazing part of all this. All right, Squarespace is the place to build beautiful websites. You know that.

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Longest running partner on this week in startups, and we really do appreciate that. And Jason, we're going to be talking a lot about Robotaxies clearly over the next couple years, but you had a thought experiment you wanted to run. And this run actually ran headfirst into your, I'm not going to lie, absolute love affair with Chad GPT lately. You've been raving. I have been, and I want to show you canvas here because on Wednesday, we're going to do a model. So one of the things we're going to try to do here on the show, we've got a little extra production resources, is we are going to follow some of these threads, you know, over multiple episodes. So we're going to follow the thread that we've been.

Is self-driving, you know, deployment going to happen or not? and how long is it going to take? How much is it going to cost? And in order to do this, I started using chat GPT because, you know, it just worked. So here you'll see my screen, and this is chat GPT 40 with Canvas. And so when you use chat GPT 4.0 with Canvas, if you say use Canvas, the chat room moves to the left hand side. Do you see this on the left here?

And here's my initial prompt. Build a detailed model, for those of you who are watching or just listening. I said to build a detail model estimating the cost of creating a Robotaxy fleet for all car trips in the USA, including Waymo Cruise as a case study of the model, should account for number one, total car trips in the USA, two, Uber and Lyft trips, three, fleet efficiency, estimate how many trips a single Robotaxy complete per day, assume 20 to 30 trips, factoring in time for charging, cleaning, and downtime for maintenance fleet operation, determine how many days a year a robo taxi can operate, assume six hours a day for charging, cleaning, and five hours. days annually for major maintenance, required fleet size. You get the idea. So I gave it all these qualifiers. And here it is. It's now given down a breakdown. And it says here, total car trips in the USA, the federal highway administration estimates $1.1 billion. And that's $400 billion annually. So daily car trips, annual car trips. It puts it there. Then it says Uber and Lyft trips. Uber and Lyft account for approximately $6.9 billion trips annual in the U.S. combined.

but they don't have the daily there. So what I could do here is I could, and this says this implies that they represent around 1.7. So I could just highlight this section here and I could say, whoops, sorry, I can highlight a section here and this is what Canva does that's unique

is when you highlight it, it gives you chat GPT, a little pop-up. So I click and I say, include daily trips and a citation for this information, information. And then I hit, you know, the query. And what it will do is it will go do this query and it will rewrite. You see it rewriting it? It rewriting that section. And so daily Uber Lyft trips 18.9 million sources Uber's 2022, annual work lifts 22 statistics, right? So this is where things get really interesting. Here you can see, you know, how many trips per day, operation per day, the required fleet. fleet size. And required fleet size, I think, is a super interesting one. You're going to need 44 million cars based on these rough estimates to replace all cars in the United States, right? Then you could say,

well, how many public transit rides are there a day? They say 34 million rides. I think that's incredibly low and I think it's wrong. But we can say here, let's say 20% of them got replaced by taxis, by robotaxies. That adds another 7 million rides a day. And then here's the cost. And this is where it it's super interesting. If it's a $30,000 car, you know, what Elon said, his cars will cost.

You need 53 million of those cars for $1.6 trillion to replace the fleet in the United States. And then you have 100,000 vehicle costs for Waymo or Cruz.

That's $5 trillion. There's a lot of money. And you can do very interesting things here. Like if you didn't believe this public rides a day, I could highlight it again, ask chat GPT.

I don't think this is write how many individuals ride public transit per day in the USA and give me stats on the New York City subway per day. So just to check the work kind of situation. And this is what Canva does really nicely. It's one document. So we've moved from, we've now moved from a chat room

Alex to one document being edited and cleaned up. This is a pretty big deal, I think. And this is, I think Claude had something like this already, but you can see how this will make you bionic in your work. And any thoughts there? You know, I've so many thoughts. So first of all, on the number of cars that we need, I know we're going to get into this more later.

I know this is just a tease, but it turns out the average pace for cars sold in the U.S. right now is about 16.2 million. So it's only three or four years of total car sales to get to this self-driving number, which is less than I would have thought, to be honest. So that's actually optimistic to me. Two, this is super cool. And it's the end of homework.

Like, I mean, there's no way you're going to get an eighth grader to not use this and get good at it. I don't see a way around that. This must be, this is, it's a report maker where you can edit individual sections live with intelligent AI and nearly perfect data, critical thing he's going to go down, but oh my gosh, look at this. It's awesome. Add a section on how many cars Tesla can make per year and how many years it would take to build a fleet to service the USA.

And so it just added another section, you know, of, I attempted to add a section. I don't know why it didn't do it. But anyway, I had done that yesterday. And, you know, if they were making 2 million cars, is a year right now or 1.8 or something, you can kind of really start to understand how long this is going to take

to, and I have even put in regulation here. So here it's putting in Tesla's production in how long it would take if they're doing $2 million per year. It's, you know, it looks like it failed to do it, so I'd have to do a new one. It's interesting to watch it thing. So if you're listening to the podcast on audio right now,

first of all, we love you. That's great. no words at all, but you might actually want to pull up the YouTube of this one just to watch the last two minutes because this is an interesting example of kind of current state of the art. But Jason, one question for me, why not use Chachy-B-T-0-1? Does that not work with Canvas yet? It doesn't. Yeah. And it doesn't have the most, it doesn't have the ability to search the web. So although it does in advance reasoning, you know, it doesn't do it. So I guess they've got to put these things together and glue it together. But you know, here's, interesting. Assuming Tesla dedicates 50% of their production to robotaxies and grows at 30%. I didn't even ask it to do that. It's like showing how many years it would take. Year 1, 1 million, year 2, 1.3, year 3, 1.69. It would take approximately 11 to 13 years for Tesla to accumulate a fleet of 50 million robo taxis, which I think they could do. And I think that's actually what's going to happen. And I think Toyota, Waymo, Cruz, all these other folks are going to be doing the same thing. And what we will see is the wholesale replacement of all cars in the world over 30 years, I would say, with robo automated taxis and then the retirement of all those old cars. And that's going to be absolutely wonderful for society. YouTube.com and search for this week in startups and you can subscribe and watch the video of us doing all this modeling. We're going to have a model finished and we'll share it with the audience.

But anyway, this makes me super bullish on both Waymo, Cruise, Uber, Tesla, BWI, ID, et cetera, because this is not going to be win or take all. That's my prediction. And if you look at the model as incredible at production as Tesla is and as incredible as their self-driving is. And then Waymos is obviously and crews are actually active and making it happen in the real world already. These things take time to build, maintain, and to get those fleets out there is going

to be a multi-decade process. And of course, regulators are going to have a say in this. and, you know, when we had a person get dragged and it wasn't the fault of crews, they've been off the road for over a year, I believe. So, you know, just keep in mind, every time this happens, you're going to have a year of a jurisdiction

or a country saying, not ready. So I think it's completely possible these things get taken off the road completely in a city like or a state like California because of Waymo, a cruise, or a Tesla kills somebody. The second that happens, it'll be a one-year pause. And you're going to see that happen in multiple jurisdictions.

In China, maybe they won't because they value life slightly differently in that jurisdiction. But it's going to be a stop and go kind of situation, is my prediction. What are your thoughts? I'm actually more bullish than you on that part of it. I think that the fact that we have Waymo's operating around the clock for pay in San Francisco, which is a place that I have walked on nearly every street. And so I know how wild that city. is the trolleys, the people, the tourists, the buses, the ups and downs, the blind corners,

the twisty roads. The fact that Waymo is right now as we record this doing paid self-driving rides there, to me implies the technology, even in difficult jurisdictions, both regulatory-wise and also geographically, I think this is going to be faster. The thing that I think is going to take a long time is getting people to give up their cars. So I think urban centers spreads out, but I'm more bullish on the regulation not getting in the here. We switch to Beehive and it has been huge for this week in startups. We have this Twist 500 newsletter I've been working on this entire platform where we're trying to find the 500

most important private companies. So twist500.com and we've been using Beehive for this email newsletter. Beehive, B-H-I-I-V. It's a service that's built for growth. And when you're doing an email list or a podcast, you want growth. And they've baked it into it. Beehive was co-founded by one of the minds behind Morning Brew. You know that incredible newsletter. Well, you can get access to the tools that helped build Morning Brew to millions of readers. And if you're interested in making a little money with your newsletter, Beehive can do that too because Beehive has an ad network. So it's a no-brainer for folks who want to drive revenue and want to grow. There's a million platforms. There's a million tools out there. But a tool that solves those two problems,

growth and revenue, that's the winning tool in my... mind. That's why we moved over to it. They have an AI post builder. They got a referral program. The list goes on and on. It's super affordable at $39 per month, but we got a great deal for you now. 30-day free trial and 20% off your first three months. Just head over to B-Hive.com slash twist for 20% off your first three months. Beehive. B-H-I-I-V-com slash twist. Hit the rewind button, write the URL down. Sign up now and get that discount. Great job to the Beehive team. We really love the product. Jason, let's go back to your point about the robob van and the idea of solar and the idea of expandable solar because we happen to have the two guys from Lightship RV on the show

today. And they are building something that I think you're going to love because once you get inside, it's a lot of what you were talking about. So please, welcome to the show. It's Ben Parker and Toby Krause, the co-founders over at Lightship RV. Hey, guys. Hey, Jason, Alex. How's going? What's up, guys? Nice to meet you both. Tell us, uh, tell us, uh, and show us a little bit about what you're building. Remember, 90% of the audience is going to be listening. So we have to describe what they see. Yeah, okay.

Well, I guess for those who are viewing, maybe I can talk, and Toby can do a pirouette inside of our prototype. Oh, yeah. Oh, he's in the prototype. There it is. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I sure am.

Exactly. So here's a quick background. We're lightship is America's first, all electric. RV manufacturer. A little bit of the back story is actually that Toby and I were both at Tesla, about five years, five or six years apiece. I was there as a battery engineer from around 2015 to 2020, worked on the Model 3 battery from its early days and actually the origins of the cyber truck battery as well, did a few years living out of a suitcase in Reno, again, the first gig factory ramped up, which was fun and crazy, all in one. Toby can speak more to his background. He led the

finance team and did amazing things for Tesla there, kind of our earlier generation as well, and we're 2009 to 2015. And where Lightship came to be was I had a pet project once I was back out of the factory working at the headquarters again in Palo Alto. My idea was to try to electrify all the food trucks in the Bay Area because there's a circuit of food trucks that come to the headquarters and you're always kind of yelling over the generator to put in your order and the irony of having power walls and the rest on the other side of the wall from inside of the building just killed me. And I felt like these trucks should and can go electric. And one thing led to another, I would tell people about the electric food truck project and RVs would often come up in conversation because there are similar needs between electrifying all the appliances on a food truck just as just as, you know, a rolling vacation home and RV.

and when COVID hit, I took the plunge, rented a 30-foot Winnebago motor home lived out of it that first summer of COVID and covered about 6,000 miles around the whole American West. It was a pretty amazing experience. I talked to a ton of our viewers on the road and was really getting into the lifestyle of it. We can talk more about the opportunity. Let's show it. I mean, people want to see it. There's a big build-up, but I mean, people want to see this thing. It's gorgeous and it's got some very unique features. We're as biased as they come, but we think it is the perfect travel trailer for the electric age. Okay, show it. Let's go.

Let's see it. This might be the Instagram video you taught. Somebody had cut and pasted this, I think, to X. So I saw it on X when I was talking about, you know, the cyber bus. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so here's what we're doing. So we're building a towable RV. And if you know anything about RVs,

At some point, they might go autonomous, but right now, 90% of them, you tow with a truck or an SUV. And so that's really the target market for us to start. And we're reinventing it from scratch, right? Like, this is meant to be a vehicle that is built for the age of electrification. And what you're seeing here is sort of just that. Like, if you can start from a clean sheet of paper, what are you going to do? You're going to make it hyper-efficient. When you're towing it, you can see it.

We call it road mode. So, okay. So what we're seeing on the screen is a gray trailer that you would hitch to your cyber truck or your F-150. It's got glass windows. And just like if you've ever been in an RV, you can expand them out when you have those celebrity trailers and they get wider at Burning Man or on a movie set. Here, it's becoming vertical and becoming very tall.

So the whole thing raises up. What is the height when it's parked? where it's in drive mode, I guess, versus when it's parked and you're in living it mode. What's the height differential? It goes from six and a half feet to about 10 feet tall. Oh, wow, so almost double. It grows, yeah.

It's pretty cool. Okay, and it looks like it's all Windows 360 almost around it. Talk about that design decision. Yeah, and this, you can almost actually get a little bit of a better concept for it. I'm sitting in our prototype we call it the alpha right here, and you can see my ring light, but this is in our factory. And yeah, it's, it is wide open. We're in the factory right now. And, and so, you know, for us, like, it's really about building a product that's, you know, you're taking this to, to a natural environment. And most RVs are built kind of like a cave, right? Like, you didn't show up to, you know, Rocky Mountain National Park in a submarine. You showed up to, like, experience the, the mountains. And, uh, and we really want to, connect you to that. So if you're going to start from scratch, we said, like, we're going to do it completely differently and we're going to like just build the entire, what we call the top of the

vehicle, the canopy, um, in glass. I mean, it is stunning. And, uh, it looks like it's a very large. How big is this on the inside and then Alex? Any questions you might have? Oh, yeah. It's a, so it's a, it's a, you know, full size camper. So it's a, you know, four to six person, about a 27-foot vehicle. So it's pretty big. And on the inside, it's really designed to have all the modern amenities of kind of

like a studio apartment. Another thing you'll find in your typical RV is it's like everything you'd have in your house, but it's really small. So you like multiple bedrooms, a bathroom. And then if you talk to somebody, your RVs a lot, they're like, yeah, we don't really use the kitchen because it's small and cramped and we don't really like it.

And we don't ever use the bathroom. And so we're like, hey, we're going to do this you know, very differently and really design a space that's wide open, sort of like multi-use and something you'd really want to use. So this is where I begin to get worried, because if I showed my spouse this, she would immediately fall in love with it because she loves the idea of going out. She loves the old kind of windstream trailers, the silver ones that are so beautiful. Airstream, thank you.

This has a lot of vibes like that. The reason why I'm not going to show to her is that back in 2003, TechRunch said that this was going to cost between like 125 and 150. Is that still the rough price range for it? Yeah, that's right. That is sort of where we're starting. And, you know, Airstream is a really iconic brand, super popular. It's the one that, like, you know, as a heritage brand, people really know it.

And we, you know, as we, you know, think about, like, our story, like, and this, I think was not something we invented as something Tesla did well, but when you are a hardware company, building a new brand and a consumer market, you really do need to start at a premium price point where you can sort of like, you know, build a company through the technology and move down. And for us, that is a high sticker price and we don't pretend to say that it isn't. But that actually is really where you're going to start at for an airstream as well. And that's where we're going to. Yeah, no, I didn't mean to say that you guys are unfairly high price.

You're offering a lot here. I mean, just the fact that there's the solar wings that come out to expand the on top grid. That's awesome. Yeah, we want to be able to, like, you know, power everything you need when you're out there, you know, having fun with your family and friends. And so, yeah, we get about two kilowatts of solar just on the roof alone. And we have an 80 kilowatt hour battery. So it's like six Tesla power walls. It's significant.

And that how much can you charge per day from the solar? I'm curious because that was something we had in our previous discussion talking about the cyber bus. which doesn't have solar on it, because obviously they have, you guys built out a huge supercharging network, so it probably doesn't need to have solar. But if you're out there, you know, in the wilderness,

you probably would want solar. And this could be like an off-rid living. So, you know, while 100K, 100K, 150K might seem like a lot, when you compare it to buying an ADU and having to do all this ADU work of, you know, putting it in, this is like an instant ADU. Yeah. I think it depends on where you are, but if you have really good sun, assume maybe a 20% charge in a day. So if you leave it out for a week, you'll go zero to full.

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Just go to clouddevs.com slash twist to pay what's fair for your next five-star hire. When, when, when, when can I buy one? Because I want to buy it now. Like, literally I want one in the first 10. And I don't like to buy the first 10 of anything because I know that you got pinks in it or whatever, but I got a ranch.

Man, if I put this on a ranch and we've got an extra bedroom and a place to go work, I mean, this solves a lot of problems for me in a very short period of time. So when can I buy one? When are you going to have these ready? They're bespoke to start? Heck yeah.

You can put your reservation in right after we're done recording. And then we're building our first production units behind me right now. We'll have some done at the end of the year and be delivering them early next year. Holy cow. And how much you, because you guys watched Elon's playbook at Tesla and you work there, tell me about the playbook of funding a startup.

When I bought the 16th Roadster, 150K down for the first 100 reservations, when I bought my signature, the Model S, I think they did 1,000 signatures. I have the first one. I put 150K down. And those were actually turned out to be really good trades because those are collector's editions now and they're worth more than I pay for them. But this was a financing strategy. people don't know this when Elon almost went bankrupt twice with Tesla. This is how they funded the

company was on those deposits. So how are you doing that? You have a signature 100 where you put a full deposit down and then how much have you raised for this, you know, incredibly intensive, capital intensive project? Great questions. I love thinking about some of the early days in history. Ben Mish, I love the finance team. My first job there was working on Tesla's IPO and so I got to be involved in all sorts of... I hope you held some shares, Toby. You still have your shares? I do.

I've kept a bunch of... Great. So you're funding this company yourself. No. I didn't keep enough of shares for that. I'm keeping a symbolic number to pass onto my kids. I like it. Yeah, so I'd say we're maybe a little less creative in our financing, you know, strategy

than Tesla back in the early days. So we've gotten some really awesome, you know, venture capital investors. We've raised about $60 million. And that's really how we're... we're funding the business, we certainly will have, you know, a more sizable deposit as we begin configuring what we call the founders series. So similar to Tesla, I think, model S they call like the signature series. We will have that and we'll have a deposit associated, but not really to fund the business. To fund the business, we're going about it in a little

bit more traditional way. But, I mean, to your point, like this is, it's a, it's a capital intensive business. It's not as capital intensive as automotive. The, you know, the scale is slightly different. So, you know, Tesla to do a car program, this is, you know, back 10 years ago, it's like a billion dollars. These days, a car program is a couple billion dollars. In RV program, you know, we mentioned Airstream there. You know, they invested in a whole new plant. This is about a decade ago. It's like 50 million bucks. So it's, it's a little bit of a different scale. But it's hardware. And, I mean, hardware is, you know, hard. You don't have to hear that from me.

And in a lot of ways, it's not a traditional venture-pack company. It's a big, complex product. But, yeah, it's also like a part of Americana. I think, and this is something that you're seeing now is in an electric vehicle world, we're super stoked. We're EV people through and through. You know, we've been working on it for 15 years now. But in the broader movement, if you've been paying attention,

the last year has been a little bit mixed. And I think what's happening there is because we're really entering the mainstream markets, right? Like you're starting to see products enter categories that are not necessarily just if you're really adopter markets. And that for us, we're stoked. Like we are selling a product to people who might not have any of you in their driveway. They have like a Dodge Ram 1500.

And that is how we will make a difference. So I want to talk about the market a little bit because Toby, one thing I realized prepping for the segment today is that the RV market went through a period of really rapid growth and it since come down a little bit. So let's pull up the chart that shows RV shipments in the U.S. recently. You guys founded the company. I think it was back in 2021. Yeah? Yep.

Yep, that's right. Yeah. And that was the peak year for RV sales in the U.S. They were about 600,000 sold. And I think it was about 544,000 of those were the kind of tow behind trailers that we're talking about here. Since then, things have come down. interest rates went up. I know that the RV market is sensitive to that.

I'm just curious, how do you guys feel about the company versus the market today versus back in 2021 and things were absolutely popping off? I mean, we feel great. It's no question is it a cyclical industry like automotive, right? But we're still talking about one of the largest vehicle segments in the United States next to cars. It might be tied with motorcycles or something like that, but it is, it's massive. So a big year, it's 600,000.

It's a bad year. It's like 300,000 units. By comparison, cars are like 12 to 14 million. And then like other really big, the next biggest vehicle categories that are on people's mind, they're like semi-trucks or something like that. That's like 200,000 units.

So this is sort of massive scale on an up market or a down market. And we're just getting started, right? Like, you know, we're going to be scaling up to low thousands of units. So certainly like there's some cyclical. here, but we're, this is one of the benefits of being a startup, right? We're going from zero to one. We don't have like a market cap and, you know, public company investors that we have to explain things to. But, uh, I think you're going to induce purchases. Like, I think that this is such a

unique product in the same way Tesla was. There's a million people who want this, who wouldn't pull the trigger on a traditional RV, but are technological enthusiasts. They're not price sensitive, and they'll look at this as an ADU, an extra office for their remote work at home, part of their Airbnb, or they're going to start their own little retreat center like we have here in the Hill country outside of Austin. Well, Jason, even beyond that, too, you see there's, there's like huge overlap between the people who are early adopting EV pickup trucks and folks who are in the market for something like a light shape because there's, I mean, basically all of those EV trucks are awesome.

cyber truck, F-150 lightning, the Rivian, they're all really cool. They all have an Achilles heel around towing range. And so, you know, the reason that it does the telescoping motion, the reason that it looks like a bullet when you're pulling it down the road is all about drag efficiency and aerodynamics. Because if you're not, our approach to solving this range, this towing range issue with EV trucks is twofold. One, you have to be really passively efficient. So we spent an enormous amount of time, even before we were doing any industrial design just on getting the aerodynamics right. This thing is, for comparison,

it is as drag efficient going down the road at cruising speed as a Model 3, which is a tiny passenger sedan, and this is a 26-foot-long, eight-and-a-half-foot-wide trailer that weighs double a model 3. So that drag efficiency was everything. We then went two-fold and added, this is totally non-standard for a trailer. We added an EV battery, roughly the size of a, a Model 3 battery plus a motor on board and so that drive unit

propels the rear axle of the trailer so this is a self propelling trailer which is to say that the trailer is helping itself or it's helping the truck. How does that work? That's fascinating. We agree. I think it's a very new way to build trailers. Somehow when

you're pulling it, it knows it's being pulled and it says instead of being in neutral I'm going to add a little bit and it somehow intelligently knows the speed it's going so it doesn't impact the driver. Let me tell you. So it's a sensor suite.

There are a few inputs to a control system that we've developed and run on a piece of custom hardware. The main thing is a force sensor that goes between the truck and the trailer in the hitch in the connection point. And so if you know the force between the two, like imagine the trailer is trying to drag the truck back. Now you can tell the trailer motor to spin up and assist. and then the same thing works in reverse.

So if you're slowing down or if you're coming downhill, now you can sense a compressive force between the two, tell the motor to go into Regen, and the trailer continues to float on the hitch. So it's an awesome towing experience, and there's also next to zero range loss. Ballpark, where are you at with pre-orders, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands?

Just give us an idea. Like, where's this project at? We try not to disclose our pre-order amount. Over a thousand. It's got to be over a thousand, because I want a hundred right now. It's significant and we'll hook you up. Okay.

What's the down payment you're asking for? You're the finance guy. So Toby, how do you think about down payments and getting to the front of the line and all that? So right now it's still just refundable orders and it's 500 bucks. So you can you can put in 20. We are when we begin our sort of customer deliveries, we'll start flipping it over as you mentioned. to sort of more significant payments. So we're talking about

probably like 10% or so of the sticker price. But yeah, you could get your reservation in today. Okay. Can I tow it behind my Subaru Outback? This is probably not. Dang it. Because if if you slapped a Starlink on one of these, took the

front, took the bed out, put it in the desk, my wife could just tow me around and I can have my entire setup and then I will be willing to go like the woods, you know? Like I can totally see my family loving this thing. Well, thinking about the craziest, you know, talking about EVs earlier, the craziest instantiation of something like this in the future is platooning, where you're like platooning with a pod behind you that follows your tow vehicle. Come back to the present because we got to build a company that we can scale now. The main thing you have to think about.

The term platooning means it is not hitched. It's just following you on an autumn as a full self-driving. That's the audacious thought. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, I'll take three in that case. I'll have my own freaking, like, Will Helm, your family, congratulations, gentlemen, you you created a train.

Yes, but Jason, it's a very fancy train that's very cool with blinky lights, and that's why I want one. I mean, this was a big part of the self-driving vision, you know, 20 years ago when they were doing the DARPA challenges was that you would daisy chain a bunch of trucks into the right-hand

lane, left-hand lane, whatever, cars, and that would, you know, you know, for resistance reasons and efficiency, and safety, I don't know if that's still in the cards right now, but it seems like we're going to, yeah, just have them blow with traffic. But yeah, it's a really interesting idea.

Just to answer your question quickly, the main thing to think about is how much weight can my car support? So, of course, we're going to make a bunch of different trailer types over time that are right-sized for different tow vehicles. Right now you want to have a truck or a truck or a big SUV. Okay. And then just one last question, guys, before we let you go.

Pebble is another company kind of similar to you guys. They're building an all-electric travel trailer. They're theoretically going into production. I think they said at the end of this year. So are you going to buy them? Are you going to crush them? How do you think about the competition

inside of your relatively new niche? I think it's cool that we got some people, you know, following on our heels. Like, you know, that's never a bad thing, especially like this is a massive market. Our products are pretty different, actually. Theirs is much smaller single axle camper and we kind of went with like the full size you know, premium vehicle.

But we don't need to crush Pebble. I don't think they need to crush us. Like I think we can we can both succeed. It's a big market. So yeah, we're excited that they're out there and hopefully, hopefully doing good things too. And this is going to be amazing. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Yeah.

Thank you guys. We really appreciate it. Awesome. I'm going to definitely order one of those. I know. I haven't seen you this jazzed in some time. I mean, I have a lot of acreage now. And where's the ranch? It's out in like the hill country,

dripping springs kind of outside of Austin, 30 minutes or so outside of Austin. It's just fantastic. And you just, I could park these any number of places. And it would be just absolutely fantastic. And it's obviously got air conditioning and an HVAC in it. It's got the solar.

So, you know, half of like the issues you have when you own a ranch is getting water, electricity, and internet across the ranch. And so I'm learning all of that. It's bizarre, but like, as but one example, when you're running electricity on a ranch, like, if you try to run electricity to two different places on your ranch, that could be very expensive to do. Or you can order another electrical from your electric company. They put it on a different part in the ranch and they pay for it. And then you have just like two electrical bills or three

electrical bills to different parts of your ranch as if it was like different lots. And so and then water obviously is super complicated. So like do you, if you've got a large enough ranch, uh, is it easier to do plumbing from one side of the ranch to the other or just drill another well and have redundancy in your wells? All of these like really fun, interesting things that you can do with your ranch life. So I think distributed power is really going to be a huge unlock for a lot of, you know, these more rural sparse settings and Starlink's already got, you know, distributed broadband covered universally. So this is, this is the other piece to solve. Right now I have three different power sources, diesel generator, propane, uh, and electrical from the city. So I have three different

and I'm putting in solar and battery. So I'll have four different electrical sources. Then we have three different two well, two different wells, 300 feet, 700 feet, and then city water. So three waters. And right Now, two internets, spectrum and Starlink. And then there's a third one you can get on this very fancy router I have where you can actually get an AT&T 5G card, put it into a router, and then it will do a series of failover. So we lost internet from Spectrum. Nobody in the house knew, and I got a text.

Oh, my God, spectrum's down. And I was like, oh, I got a check. And they're like, no, internet's not down. And I looked and the router successfully felled over to Starling. And I was like, wow, this is the future. Like every home will have a Starlink as their backup. And I hear people are doing Starlink as their backup now and not activating the service. They just buy it.

They put it on a shelf where they install it. And then if they do have an outage that's more than an hour or two, then they will, you know, turn it on. So there's going to be like an interesting, you know, redundancy and obviously electrical redundancy and all the stuff. For when the Civil War happens in January 6th. Hopefully not. Well, dark. Yeah. Yeah.

It went dark. It's definitely a dark turn. Your sphere of redundancy. Let's not have a Civil War, folks. Let's be cool. All right, boys. We'll talk to you soon. Toby and Ben,

when you ship, come back on and I'll have you by the ranch when you deliver mine and we'll have a little party here. All right. Well done. You'll have a little ranch water. Oh, yeah, a little ranch water.

Oh, that's nice with that. Now, you can't use the all-in tequila, all-in.com slash tequila for ranch water. Okay, it's a premium tequila. You got to get a more, you know, yeah. But I do like that ranch water. I have to say,

Bill Gurley turned me onto that ranch water. And people who don't know, ranch water is just a topa chica with a lime or a lemon and then just a little tequila in it. So you literally take a couple of sips out of the topa chica and then you pour the tequila in and you drink it out of the glass bottle. It sneaks up on you. It does sneak up on you. Where is your factory? Is it El Segundo or? We're in Colorado here.

Oh, sweet. Yep, Brinkfield, Colorado. That's actually a good location. for shipping, right? Because you'll get all Texas, Southern California, Northern California, and then Arizona and all those places. You've got all those people who love to do that circuit. All right, boys. Thanks, guys.

These guys. Thanks. Bye. Okay. One of the things we're trying to do here is look at the biggest issues, Alex, that are happening in our country and the world. And then you and I and our production team trying to get smarter ourselves on topic so we can speak with more authority on them while educating the audience through individuals who are builders in the world, as we just saw with that incredible RV company. And that was just awesome, hi, Alex, to get them on the program so fast. Absolutely.

I love talking to people who are building stuff. One of the best parts of being a journalist in the technology startup space has been getting to talk to an endless number of founders because they always leave you with infectious enthusiasm. Yes. I've never gotten tired of it. Okay. Well, and one of the big issues we have today, and you and I have been talking about this, and this is not a political program, although all in talks about politics. You can get your politics fixed there. Election security is something we all care about as Americans, and I think globally. And so this seems to be a huge topic, right? Are our elections secure? And today, I want to talk a little bit about that. So maybe you could queue up our next guest. And we'll start talking about election interference. are people actually do, and we're going to do this over a couple of episodes. So we'll start today with, you know, one founder who you're about to meet. But we're going to talk over the next

couple of episodes of this week in startups about the technology, the challenges, and, you know, even maybe some of the politics of this without having, you know, any particular horse in the race here. I think we can, what can we agree on, Alex? What can Americans agree on if you were going to tee this out? Yeah. So the question is, what is the state of election security? Clearly, we're heading towards a massive election here in the United States. Jason made a joke about that in the previous segment. So according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, or ODNI, on the presidential side, Russia and Iran are looking to influence the election and on down-ballot races, Russia, Iran, and China. So many countries would love to tinker with our elections. This is not

usually done through actually changing votes, but more disinformation, misinformation, misinformation, that sort of thing. But we do also have a very decentralized structure to elections here in the U.S. We have different state, municipal, and federal elections. That creates many different systems. Now, on one hand, that's great because we can try many things at once. On the other hand, decentralization doesn't mean that everyone has the best cybersecurity at all times. So one thing we have done is prepare a list of a couple of startups that we think are really cool

that are working on the issue of election security through different means. clear ballot to democracy live, Vodem, which might be struggling, and then also votes, V-O-A-T-Z. And I'm very happy to say that we have the co-founder and CEO of votes with us today. Nimit, Sonny, Nimit, thanks for coming on the show.

Really appreciate it. Thanks, Alex, for having me here. So I want to start with how much progress of votes has made. You guys talked about having taken part in 130 successful live elections in six countries from the state, municipal, and federal level.

How active is votes in the upcoming U.S. election cycle? So our system has so far been used in six U.S. states. It's primarily available to a group of voters who are called as Uokawa voters. So these are U.S. military,

any U.S. citizen living overseas, voters with disabilities, and now in some jurisdictions first responders as well. So as far as the U.S. is concerned, it's currently only available to a smaller group of voters. But internationally,

for example, in Canada, 15 cities have selected us there. Everybody is allowed to use it for their municipal elections. And then recently we just completed the federal elections in Mexico. Almost 10 million overseas Mexicans were eligible to use a system. But you guys talk about, you know, basically making voting secure and possible in a mobile setting with, you know, biometrics and real-time ID verification and so forth. So to me, my question to me is just,

Why isn't this more widespread? Why is it currently conserved for first responders, military overseas and so forth, versus me at my house? Why can't I use technology to avoid having to go and, you know, actually pull a lever and so forth? So it's primarily a regulatory hurdle. As you might think, there is the perception that if you were to use online voting or digital voting on a wide-scrim scale, that somehow it's going to be a massive, compromise and the whole process is going to fall apart.

So that's one reason. There's a lot of fear mongering. And the other thing is because of that fear mongering, and as you know in the US, the states conduct the elections, it's not the federal government. And so state laws are like 10, 20 years behind the technology norm. So that's why it's so slow, you know, it's an hardwood process. And we've managed to get laws change in a few jurisdictions,

but it's hard, long, you know, long work, yeah. Walk us through how this works. So I'm a military member. I'm stationed in Afghanistan or, you know, in Japan somewhere. And I get my ballot, how? And then how do you collect the information and ensure that I wasn't hacked by the Russians or, you know, a Democratic operative, a Republican operative who says, you know what, I'm going to go just intercept these votes and, you know,

walk us through how the product works. You download an app, you get a special link, and then how do the biometrics work? Walk us through. The best case scenario. Sure, Jason. So the first process is you register as an absentee voter. So that's a normal process.

You would do with your county or city elections clerk. and there you have an option to choose mobile or digital instead of getting a postal batter. So once the county approves your application, then you receive an invitation to download the WhatsApp. So this is a smartphone application. You can get it on your iPhone or Android. You start the process by, you know, verifying yourself.

So you have to take a picture of a government issued photo ID, US passport, driver's license, state ID. And then you take a live video. selfie. So make sure you are, you know, it's a liveliness check. It checks whether, you know, you're trying to impersonate somebody. So you basically do a Zoom. And is that with an operator or some other human being who says, you know, hey, Alex, Wilhelm, you know, we're doing your vote. Can you just confirm your social security number or something like that? Or it's just the app asks you a couple questions. How does that work? So the app does that automatically in the default case. So you

take a picture of your ID in the app, front and back, it's called two sides. Then you do a live video selfie in the app. And for most people, that's sufficient. It matches your selfie to the photo in your ID. It'll then check your ID with the state databases and the state order registration system. That takes anyway from a few seconds to a few minutes. And if everything is good, you get approved. Your documents are deleted for privacy reasons.

and then your hardware identifier is mapped in. And then you receive your ballot on the phone, can mark it, submit it. And then what happens is this is unique to US elections. You also have to sign on the screen. So your signature is also matched with a signature on record on the state voter registration system. And then once you submit the ballot,

you get a receipt which you can use to audit your ballot on the blockchain. And then at the county or the city side, another cool thing happens, actually prints out a paper ballot on election day, which is as if you would have handmarked in person or if you had submitted a postal ballot. And then that's used to tabulate just like any other ballot on election night. So every order gets the option to audit. You know for sure your ballot reached on time, wasn't tampered with, and actually counted. So that's the best case scenario for these groups of workers. I want you to double click on the blockchain element about this,

because one of the cool things about votes and one of the reasons why Nimit, I wanted to have you on the show is it feels like the blockchain element of the votes technology isn't the main selling point. You guys aren't a blockchain first company. You're a voting company, but you're using the blockchain. So which chain are you using? And then also, you know, are governments savvy enough to actually know, know what that means and favor it?

Yeah. So blockchain serves a very specific purpose in our solution. So once the ballot is submitted, it then makes sure that a ballot cannot be tampered with by anybody, us, the government, third party hackers, anybody. So that's the process. It doesn't have a role to play prior to the part when you submit the ballot. So that's one thing to keep in mind. I'm sure people ask, how can this be hacked?

And how is this different than, let's say, the average or even the weakest in-person voting or absentee voting, it seems to me, and this is not political in any way, that if a political operative were to go to a nursing home, you know, this is always the scenario people talk about. and, you know, there's 10 people who are kind of out of it, God forbid, they're suffering from Alzheimer's or whatever, collect their ballots, put the votes, they vote, you know, down one party line, and then mail them in. That obviously has happened, I'm sure, in some small number in the world,

and I'm sure it probably hasn't been enough of them, where I hope, but in your research in this space, that seems to be an attack vector. Am I correct that that's the attack vector, that would be the easiest one to do, take a bunch of old people who are out of it, intercept their mail-in votes, or even register them, if they're not registered, intercept it, and then vote for your preferred candidate in a local or even a federal election. Am I correct that that's the easiest attack vector,

or are there other ones that are even easier? Yes, as far as traditional postal or mail-voting, concern, that's indeed the most common or most obvious attack vector. How often does that happen? Well, there isn't authoritative, conclusive data available for every jurisdiction, but your sense is correct. It does happen. Nothing is, you know, foolproof. But as far as the data we've seen, it doesn't happen at levels or quantities that's large enough to sway or swing in election. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Have people been arrested for doing that?

Because my understanding is interfering in an election or taking other people's votes is a very serious crime. So the person who is going to do that would have the ability, I don't know, Alex, I'm going to make up a number here. If you worked at a giant apartment complex or place you could probably get dozens. And if you did that with dozens and you got hot, faking, let's say, three dozen votes, 36 votes, you would be facing a really serious criminal charge. So there is a major cost here. And the benefit would be 36 votes. And I'm not sure there's any election that ever came down to dozens of votes at a federal level for sure. But am I crazy here, Alex, in terms of my handicapping of this. And again, I'm sure both sides have done

shenanigans like this and individual lone wolves have done it. I'm having a hard time, Alex, conceptualizing a widespread strategy here of stealing votes. I'm not counting influencing votes like going over grab my shoulder and saying, hey, you want to vote for this party because this person's going to save your social security. Fact check me here. Steel man me. So the things that I found prepped me for the segment because I was really curious how much fraud is there and how much fraud do people think there is. And the amount of fraud that I could find from to pick one example of this, not the one you're talking about, but one that I think about a law, which is non-citizens voting, it turns out, as far as we can tell,

it's incredibly low level. And so I agree with you that you could go to an apartment building or a senior citizen's, you know, care home or whatever and go about this. But I think the problem is, it would take so much effort to do that for so few votes, especially given with gerrymandering and, you know, the electoral college, often individual votes aren't super impactful. So I just don't think it happens that much, but the thing that I'm cool about with votes and other startups is making the process less opaque, perhaps through the blockchain, perhaps with something else, to increase trust. I feel like the trust issue is the real crisis versus stamping out the last teeny bit of voter fraud that we're aware of. It is just helping people understand what's

going on. So, for example, the Heritage Institute said in a post, non-citizens don't illegally vote in detectable numbers. Cool. Heritage, by the way, right-leaning, to pick that for that reason. But according to a Maris poll from this year, 58% of Americans say they are either very concerned or concerned that voter fraud will occur. So we have more fear than fraud. And that's why I'm hoping we can just get the fear down and then stamp out the rest of the fraud at the same time. Nimitt, does that make sense? Or am I totally talking off base here? No, absolutely.

Fear is the main sort of source of problems when it comes to elections, whether it's in person or even digital, even with online or digital. voting, there's a massive amount of fear mongering. And just the analog to what Jason just said, it's equally hard to compromise an online election based on the new technologies that are available. You're better of actually creating fear and misinformation than actually being able to compromise a vote. So I'm curious though about the business here, because you guys have raised money, you're out in the market. It just strikes me that selling to governments to help them do better at their job is going to be a tough road to host. So Nimit, what's the sales cycle like here for votes?

Yeah, it's super hard. When we started really, really small, 2018, first election was in the state of West Virginia, midterms, two counties, 20 military voters. So since then, we've come a long way, but it's a hard sell. But then it's a hard problem. I think it's worth solving. We saw that no one else was tackling it in a manner that we could. think we should and the elections industry needs to catch up with the rest of the industry,

rest of the economy. And so that's our hope. And I think there's enough optimism. I mean, governments around the world are waking up to this, look at Estonia, where nearly half of the country votes online and they're sitting right next to a big country who's always trying to, you know, break their government, hack their elections. so it's possible. And there's no reason why America with all its power and might can do it. Well, I actually think I have a couple of reasons why America with all its power and might can't do it because we get in our own way. But that's actually a segue to my last question for you in a bit before we let you go.

Is there been an increased urgency at the state level inside the United States for what you guys are building? Because it does seem that the fear is pretty much an all-time high right now. So I'm hoping that that's converting into action. There is urgency for this small group of voters, I mentioned, because traditionally they haven't been voting or their mail ballots arrive late. Or some jurisdictions actually allow them to vote by email or fax where you lose your privacy. It's not exactly a safer way to submit your ballot. So definitely for this small group, there has been a lot of movement. A lot of states have updated their laws to get new technology in.

but for the wider country, the normal citizens, it's still not there yet. We had Fox News, was reporting on the Dominion voting machines. I know you're not doing voting machines. And they want a huge judgment against Fox for this whole thing. What is the repercussions of these voting machines and their,

the ability to hack those. Is any of that in any way real to use a word and this Dominion voting scandal or is it all just fear and uncertainty and doubt fud being spread by

folks like Fox or something? Yeah, it's mostly Fudd because the traditional voting machines they don't connect to the internet. So there's no way to getting from there. The only place where you could actually compromise them when they're actually being programmed,

which happens before the election begins, and that's done in usually a very controlled manner by each individual county or the state. So it's hard to break in. You would have to have a massive insider compromise in the state or the county governments to compromise those machines. So I would say that's mostly fide.

And even if they were, I mean, they are new voting machines. being designed now, which use data diodes, where you can actually connect out or connect in, but it's one-way traffic. And so even in that sense in the future, you'll see technology that's pretty foolproof. But for what we use right now, it's all fud. Well, that's, I mean, I'm glad it's fun versus reality, Jason. You know, it's better to be afraid than dying. I mean, I would like to see us, you know, after this election is done, really focus on this issue to take it off the table.

And, you know, I think there's a small set of things we can all agree on. Like, we want everybody's vote counted. Maybe everybody should get the day off to vote. And it should be a federal holiday. That doesn't seem like a big deal. Maybe it should be like voting occurs over three days. And one of them is the official day. And there's one day, you know, there's two days before that you can, you know, sort of drop your ballot off.

And I think ID sounds like a reasonable thing. like this idea that you need ID to get it on an airplane or to, I don't know, rent a piece of equipment or like to buy something at the store. You sometimes have to show ID, but to vote, you don't have to show ID. And so how do you think about ID as we wrap up here in Emmett? And I really appreciate the candid thoughts and the work you're doing. Tell me about ID and why this is a controversial issue or is it? Because it seems like a bunch of people are fighting for people to be able to vote without showing an ID. An ID does not seem to be hard to get in the United States. I've done it for my daughters, for me, you can get all kinds of ideas. And that's for kids

who are under 18. This just does not seem too hard to get an ID. Yeah, it's, it's mostly a political argument. I mean, if you look at maybe 10, 15 years ago, there was actually a problem with getting IDs in some places. Now you're right. There isn't. And if for some reason, you know, you're an elderly person or otherwise can afford an ID. There are non-profits now which will get you an ID for free. So absolutely no reason to not have an ID in today's US. So the argument against IDs is mostly political. On our system, IDs are mandatory.

So for everybody to have an ID and not even one voter has objected. I think people know the fact, you want to get on a plane, you want to get into a government building. You need an ID. So why not? Why not for voting? So it's a moot argument, and I think it will eventually die off. Right now, it's stuck in politics.

And one thing I'd like to add to your list, I think receipts. I think you talked about this lack of trust. Yeah, how come we don't have receipts? That's so dumb. I mean, do some places have receipts? Yes, we do give a receipt. But let's say even in the traditional method of voting, if you were to give every vote of a receipt, and then allow them to audit their ballot.

Maybe it's on a blockchain, maybe a different system. That would remove so much of the doubt. And that's a simple thing we can implement, which would solve a lot of this mistrust which exists right now. So I would add that to your list. I mean, it seems like a simple punch list. Nimit, thank you for your hard work.

The domain, it's a V-O-A-T-Z, and is it Votes.com? Yes. Okay. Appreciate the work you're doing to secure elections. Thank you for having me. Thank you. So thanks to our guest today. I have seen some news about solar in Australia going greater than 50% of the power used in the country.

They seem to have the biggest investment in solar. And Texas also is installing the most solar. And I'm here now in Texas as a citizen of Texas this year. So I wanted to start, just like we're doing. in this election thing, maybe talking about solar a bit, because I feel like this is an underrepresented, underreported story. And so we'll be talking about Australia and their solar on Monday, or Wednesday or Monday. And so the production team's working on. If you have any information about that, you can DM Alex or I, or you can email tips at this weekend startups.com.

On the solar fund, especially if you know a cool solar startup, either a financing company, a new technology company, a new way to store solar energy. We are always looking to expand the Twist 500, and we are going to be taking a look at solar, so lots more to come there. But Jason, I feel like this was an optimistic show. We did very well. I think we did great.

I love having the dynamism of the gas and kind of doing the quick hits with them, as opposed to like an hour and, you know, 15 minute interview. Just getting like, you know, the best of on a topical thing from the founder's perspective is like, I think something we can do very innovative here on the show. And for Twist500.com slash,

nominate. So if you want to do that, you can do Twist500.com slash nominate. We'll have the nomination forum up in the next day or so. And if you want to nominate somebody, we just want to have like a pretty good dossier on them. You'll increase your chances by telling us how much revenue. If you nominate yourself, you can nominate yourself. We just want to know like, hey, revenue year over year for a couple of years and funding and those basic things to consider your nomination. And of course, It's tips at this week in startups.com. We'll see you all on Wednesday on this week in startups thanks to our partners. And thanks to Alex,

he's X.com slash Alex First Name Club. Yes, sir. And he's X.com slash Jason First Name Club. We'll see you. We'll see you guys in two days. Bye. Okay. Bye.