Coco CEO Daniel Singer on beating Starship in complex cities by partnering with Uber, DoorDash, and focusing ruthlessly on cost per mile

latest? Doing fantastic. How are you? Uh, doing well. Uh well while while Jord's way uh would you mind kicking it off with just a little bit of intro on yourself and uh and what you're working on? Totally. Well Juan blessed to be in the capital of capital. Couldn't imagine a better place to be today. Yes.

Uh I've been building various uh consumer tech stuff for you better part of the last decade. Uh kind of most recently attendees with the company I started many years ago sold that. Uh, I think there was a quote from Shaw Shank Redemption of you better get building or you better get busy dying.

Something like that if I remember correctly, but uh reconnected with the folks at Coco a year ago, Zach and Brad and uh the whole amazing team there and you know was sitting there and and you know realizing like you I grew up in LA uh kept seeing all these robots going all over the place and all these different cities and just figured how to get involved.

So you know we're we're Coco. for bringing uh you know sidewalk delivery robots to all the biggest cities uh and markets across the world. Uh I've had a lot of exciting success there and uh yeah that's what we're up to. Can you compare and contrast your approach to Starship? We just talked to the founder of Starship.

Uh but every time there's there's like this race for a new technology uh you it looks similar on the surface and then you dig in and you usually realize that the companies are taking very different approaches. How would you explain what Koko is doing differently?

Yeah, so I I think you know, first off, you know, huge respect to the Starship team. Yeah. Uh I I actually think I ran into them at an investor's office like 10 years ago, random when they were starting the company. So um I I think the biggest differences right are kind of where we operate, right?

I think Starship has had tremendous success uh on college campuses and kind of, you know, various other parts of of other markets, but you know, solving the complex city problem, right? like the if you look at the delivery market, right?

Uh you've had kind of even if you think back five 10 years ago, right, delivery costs were kind of an order of magnitude lower both on the back end and kind of what consumers are paying. Uh you you have a fundamentally inflationary cost structure.

Um but all that problem of of most of the delivery volume is in the kind of big urban cities. Um and so I think we've really just drilled on our execution of handling the kind of complex situations there. Uh there's a bunch of different regulatory hurdles. um dealing with even distribution, right?

We're we're kind of the only company that's partnered with Uber, Door Dash, and a bunch of other partners that we're kind of announcing soon. Um being able to have that kind of broad-based reach. Um you know, I think is super important because you can actually get the volume. Customers can use you in those cities.

You don't have to go through a first-party app necessarily. Um so those I think would be the biggest kind of on the surface differences. What What do you take away from the Whimo strategy? They were out in uh was it Phoenix, Arizona or is they were out in Arizona for a while I believe.

Uh in like the easiest mode for self-driving like huge streets, no weather. And then their second market was like the hardest place to drive in the world, San Francisco. There's hills, there's random people on the street, there's bikes.

And uh I think like the telling that some people would give would be like if you can solve San Francisco, you can solve kind of anything. Maybe not Boston in the winter, but uh is that the story you tell or is there something else and and and what are you pulling from their strategy overall seeing what Whimo's done?

Yeah, I I mean just on the commentary of kind of hardest cities to drive, I would love to see Whimos in Riad, Saudi Arabia there, it is it is bananas to take car rides there. Um but what what I think is interesting is we've always compared it the kind of Whimo and the Tesla strategy, right?

the the Whimo because I think yes they operate in San Francisco which is you know lived there for many years non-trivial to drive in but the cost structure of you know how much does that vehicle cost right the amortizing that capex against all the vehicles right if you have this really expensive Spencer suite you have really like cost optimized uh the vehicle and it's hard to when you're kind of reliant on a lot of these sensors and kind of advanced computing um it makes it difficult to really get it to be substantially cheaper over time um and to deploy a bunch you want to deploy a bunch of these, right?

Like the the question I've always asked is why doesn't Whimo deploy, you know, you have Google's budget, right? Why wouldn't you go deploy, you know, a thousand of these, tens of thousands of these, right? Um we've always viewed it more in the Tesla approach, right?

Of like if you can make kind of camerabased uh autonomy and kind of driving work. Um you can have substantially simpler cost structure, right? Um you're able to and with that simpler cost structure, you can deploy far more vehicles in far more places.

And if you've seen the latest kind of Tesla self-driving, you know, full self-driving version, uh it's an incredible driver, right?

Um and so I think that's the kind of biggest delta in the strategy that you'll see in kind of some of our competitors is like and you everyone on the team is incredibly ruthlessly cost optimized of how do we get this additional, you know, three cents a mile, etc. , right? Um yeah, that's kind of the Yeah. Yeah.

So what does that mean practically? Is that just hey we're staying away from LAR because LA liar is expensive or is it like we got to build a gigafactory and just drive down the cost of mass manufacturing these like Tesla is kind of the story of they did both.

Um but what other decisions have you made to drive that cost per mile down as low as possible? I think it's both. And then there's a really interesting thing, right? Everyone thinks of the comparable of like, well, it costs, you know, a human X dollars to do this and and with a robot it's it's it's cheaper, right?

But that's only one half of the equation, right? The delivery business is a logistics business. And it's it's all in that 98th 99th percentile, right? If every single time you mess up an order, right, human or or or a robot or otherwise, um that is incredibly expensive, right?

To to to the merchant, which might have, you know, a food cost deducted. uh to the delivery operator who kind of has to refund the order back to the consumer. Um, so being able to be more reliable is kind of the other half of the cost structure.

And I think what really impressed me uh kind of when getting involved was, you know, the the focus on reliability and kind of making that work. And that, you know, obviously involves, you know, the the robots for were kind of human operated entirely for a long time.

And as you kind of roll out autonomy, right, you're able to do that peace meal while kind of maintaining that high quality service bar. I think that's like the one thing, you know, we know from a lot of our partners is like really exceeding uh on kind of quality of service.

So, it's both cost, which we we nail, but then also quality of service as well. Do you guys have any projections on when you think uh uh autonomous delivery will be the default, right? There's like all these new systems coming in, Coco, Zipline.

And we're going to have lots of solutions whether you want to order something from, you know, Walmart 30 minutes away with uh Zipline or you want to get a burrito. Have you seen uh Pipe Dream or Yeah, there's Pipe Dream. Like we're going to put it in the ground the pipes in the ground.

There's lots of lots of ways that we're going to get stuff, which is what Americans love.

Y um but but at what point what's your kind of like internal pacing around when you think these systems can be so ubiquitous that when you use a delivery app you just sort of assume that it's going to be uh coming through uh some type of like autonomous uh platform. I mean I think it looks really lopsided, right?

Like if you're if you're on the west coast, like if you're in LA, like if you talk to people in Santa Monica, like this is their norm. Like to a lot of people, they get predominantly robot deliver, right? Uh if you look at other markets we're not in, you know, it's not. I think it's the same for self-driving cars. Yeah.

Um I mean my answer is is is as fast as humanly possible. Like I think that's metered in years uh if not sooner. But I think it's really market specific, right? Like uh you know if you're in the big cities I think you know hopefully for us right in the in the span of a year maybe two.

Um but you know I I I tend to be aggressive on that front but I think it really depends on on kind of which markets you're in um as that kind of rolls out. Uh but yeah, I think I think this proliferation of all these solutions is incredible, right?

And I think, you know, for rural environments, I spend a lot of time out in Wyoming, Zipline's going to be amazing, right?

Uh but especially in the urban environments where the real like there's a huge push, right, of like there there's a real business problem uh for a lot of delivery providers of like we need to solve this. Um I I think that that makes a lot of sense. Can you talk about anthropomorphic design?

Uh how do you make the robots friendly and seem like they're going to be fighting alongside us when we're fighting the AGI Terminators? uh versus cuz I imagine if it goes poorly. I'm going to want a Coco in the foxhole with me.

Uh it's a cute I mean it's a cute even the name like you know Starship cool name but very different than Coco. I think that's deliberate. Uh what else are you thinking? Where does this go?

We were talking about maybe like do you throw an LLM with a voice uh mode on it and you can just talk to it as it's driving past you? Maybe ask it the weather, ask it the time or ask it for the news. Uh where where does this go long term? So I I I think a few things. one, right?

I think actions matter a lot more than words, right? What someone says to you versus how they behave towards you. And like, you know, we have this idea of this cone of courtesy, right? And and really being courteous to other, you know, sidewalk users, bicycle users, whatever the surface might be, right?

Um, and I think what's interesting is you've seen, right, like I saw that the kind of previous interview, there really is, you know, basically almost no incidence of of vandalism or kind of people interfering with the robots because there is this like almost adoration. the name was very purposeful, right?

Um, and you the second most popular dog name in the US, at least at the time, right? And I think kind of thinking through that of like how something behaves towards you and ends up building the brand more than like what it talks to you.

Um, but then I think like there's always been this kind of sweet jovial culture at the company that really just flows out through to the robots. Uh, I think there's a lot more stuff you're going to be seeing soon. uh in that vein.

Uh I think been really focused on let's get the economics and the operating model right, but there's a ton of really fun stuff coming there that I can't quite sure yet, but we we will talk. Can can you talk about your guys's partnership with uh OpenAI at all?

I don't know how much you can speak to it, but um that was a cool announcement. Yeah. What do you do with that? Yeah. Yeah. What's up with this this whole AI thing? I I heard it was cool. I heard there was this model that came out yesterday that people were doing some cool stuff with.

Uh if you have not tried 03, it's amazing. But no, I mean they're fantastic partners. Uh I can't speak to too much about what we're doing with them. Um but it's very exciting and and you know, we'd love to talk more about it at later date.

Yeah, it's it's a cool partnership because you're not immediately worried about them uh just building the same thing that you're doing.

It's kind of like a bigger, you know, jump to to go and say, you know, OpenAI is going to start building delivery robot networks than uh, you know, somebody building a a coding uh platform. Unfortunately, I got shot down at our our weekly business review.

I saw, you know, we should get into the kind of VS Code fork business, but then shut down unfortunately. Good business. It's a great business, especially today. Yeah, it's fantastic. Um, uh, what what else is on your mind uh, broadly in in venture right now? What are you what are you seeing?

I know you do quite a quite a lot of investing historically. Um, what's been exciting? I was at this conference uh this this weekend and and I I I want to share probably the funniest bit uh that I heard from I was talking to a guy manages kind of tens of billions of dollars and we were talking about SPVS.

He just go never say that word again. It's dirty word sounds bad. He's like you should call it a co-investment vehicle and I was like that's a great idea. Uh, and so I think we should try and promulgate co-investment vehicles over SPVS. Uh, it's it's better. It's like the the scene from the social network.

Um, yeah, I mean that the lot of I think what's going on behind the scenes uh in the industry is really exciting. Um, especially on the kind of delivery side. Um, there there's a couple announcements that I'll be back very short to talk about, but Fantastic. Yeah. Uh, very cool.

When uh what's the vibe in Jackson right now? Is ski season wrapping up or is uh when when even is is spring break? Is that right now? It's it's we've got mud season which is uh you know all the snow melts and it turns a really delicious color of brown uh and muddy and gets all over everything.

So I'm actually But you're still out there, right? No, I'm I'm in New York right now. Uh so you will you will see the seasonal migration of all the all the Jackson people. But uh it's fantastic place.

Uh there there's actually an article in the journal this morning about how uh tech bros are starting to dress up like uh like cowboys. I thought they were going to say suits. I was hoping for suits. This is terrible. All the work I put into this getting nowhere.

I I almost thought about wearing a a denim like I mean this is like Chris Saka's dream, right? Everyone dresses like a cowboy. He's been doing that for 25 years. So, but I wonder if you have to find a new bit, right? Once everyone starts doing it. Like does that always bring suits bring suits to Jackson? All right.

Yeah. Yeah. Do it. I should I would love for you guys to come visit and wear suits and we can we can record the looks that everyone gives. Yeah. Yeah. People don't ski in suits enough, right? It's like skiing's a serious endeavor. You should dress. Yes, exactly.

Partnered with Zena to make like a ski suit and it's like like a Goreex ski made to measure. That' probably sell really well on Instagram. I think we got another business. Uh, put together one of those co-investment vehicles for us. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

It's going to need at least uh at least 100 mil to get that off the ground with the tariffs. Exactly. Uh, actually, that's that's an interesting question. Um, speaking broadly, how how do you see how have you seen the robotics industry kind of responding? Yeah.

Um, I mean, I'm sure a lot of stuff made in America, but supply chain, right? Yeah. But especially with um especially with with instant delivery where where econ it's really an economic equation which is like is it reliable and is it cheaper than human um based delivery?

uh how do you think the industry is like responding still shell shock or um yeah I mean I can speak only you know internally and I can kind of give you some of the things I've heard across the street but sure you know internally we have thousands of vehicles already kind of like in the US built and we're kind of actively deploying more and more of those so you know from from our standpoint it was kind of like okay like this doesn't actually disrupt us that much right now but I think you know the speaking it broadly to the supply chain right you have um you know a lot of the consumer electronic supply chain is is like primarily in Asia with not a whole ton of like alternatives and so I think it'll be really interesting to see like as the administration kind of rolls out the kind of other branches this of this policy do you start to see some carrots to kind of move that over um you know a big thing that I think is uh was discussed this weekend that was interesting was you know what happens if you just drop capital gains uh on kind of investing in kind of these key sectors of the economy that we want to bring manufacturing back to the US on I think you know don't have the US sovereign wealth fund to try and pick winners I think we get into a little bit there but is a great yeah yeah I was thinking about this for uh all the venture capital firms that have been adventuring all over uh the eastern hemisphere you give them a cap gains uh boost in American investing you're going to see billions flow into national yeah they already they already eliminated capital gains uh for in some in some form.

Yeah. But uh but uh but that would be a cool. They didn't say how. Yeah. They didn't say how. Um awesome, Daniel. Well, thank you for coming on. Come back on. I know you guys have uh some big news. Thanks for having me. Coming down the pipeline. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Great to see you. Bye. See you guys. Cheers.

Uh, next up we have uh Adam uh coming in from the Chamber of Pop Progress talking