Also, a Rivian spinout, raises capital at $1B+ valuation to electrify e-bikes and pedal quads with Amazon and DoorDash as partners

there.

That's very exciting. Well, congratulations on the funding round. I'm sure we'll see you. We'll just book it now. You just tell us and and uh

same time next month. Thanks.

Uh we'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

Thanks, guys.

Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have Chris Yu from also.

How are you doing, Chris?

For taking the time.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Welcome to the show. Uh, since this is your first time, please introduce yourself.

Yeah, my name is Chris Euan. I'm the uh co-founder and president of Also.

Okay, break it down for us. What is also? give us some of the corporate lineage, the strategy, the product, it just sort of everything.

Yeah. So, um, actually before 2022, R.J. and I met and we immediately hit it off on this one topic. And so, that turned into me joining Rivian at the time

with the explicit mission to create a startup within a startup. an entire thesis that we had and that's this has turned into also with the spin out last year is that

you know if you look at the vast majority of trips that happen for the movement of people and goods around the world they happen in smaller than car things but nearly none of them have been electrified yet and so it's really taken the Rivian or Tesla playbook and applying it to these smaller form factors

okay uh smaller form factors that means everything from hoverboard to a horse and carriage what are we thinking

we're focusing on wheels but yeah Okay. Uh but yeah. Yeah. What uh narrow down the product for me, the the go to market uh the uh the the the quad and the pedal assisted electric bike. Uh are there timelines, shapes, sizes, ranges? Like how do you think about narrowing down the product set because it is a really wide and diverse category?

Totally. Yeah. So we think of it as uh in a way two phases of the business. Um phase one of the business is how do we create a vertically integrated softwaredefined EV platform

but optimized for small form factors and we've applied that to our first products. We call them uh EVs that you can pedal

and we announced those back in October. So one is a consumer ebike and the other is a pedal quad which we partnered with Amazon um to deploy soon.

That's really exciting. Um but if you look globally again today things move around in things like uh two wheelers like scooters, boa boas, tuk tucks, micro cars, K trucks. There's just these rich diverse set of form factors and again none of them have been electrified and all of them are ripe for um a really kind of tech forward platform which is what we're building.

Um but importantly today we announced a partnership with Door Dash and that kind of underpins phase two of the business which is

Thank you. Um yeah so if you look at the world becoming more and more autonomous and even as that happens um some fundamental constraints don't change meaning these trips are all happening in dense urban suburban environments congestion is always going to be an issue cost per mile is always going to be a factor

and so we believe really strongly that even in a fully autonomous autonomous world um small form factors make sense uh for a lot of these trips and that's really what this um partnership is about. talk to me about uh I mean I I love R.J. Rivian is an incredible company. Uh obviously a a younger company in many ways than other EV makers that might be more vertically integrated. So, I'm I'm wondering like how much is it that you're taking the supply chain knowledge, the expertise, the best practices, the connections and setting up sort of an entirely new supply chain that's distinct versus you're just going to be able to buy stuff from Rivian or license it or there's going to be more of a business relationship other than just funding.

It's all of the above. We RJ and I talk about us as kind of like sibling companies, if you will.

Um, so I think uh I mean there's a few aspects. one is uh we share the latest and greatest from a technical architecture standpoint. So if you look at how also vehicles are built um they're very very similar um in terms of how a Rivian is built.

There are some commodities that um are shared. So battery cells we our first products actually use the same cell that are in Rivian R1 and that helps a lot from a scale

I'm sure

standpoint but there are other areas where we are taking a decidedly different path um because our products are different from a car truck or SUV. So supply chain that you mentioned, that's actually one of them. Um, we are fully engineered inhouse, but we partner with contract manufacturers across the world to be able to do assembly and that that's right for smaller scale products.

Yeah. And with cars, you almost always want to manufacture them where they're going. Like that's why even even like the Japanese car makers have facilities in America or Mexico because you just would drive the car as opposed to putting

That's exactly right. I mean if you look at a car I mean the size of tools necessary custom they are tariffs like they all have to like you have to have your own factory in region

but if you look at any product south of a car almost all of them are built with this contract manufacturing model.

Okay talk about the name and the brand Riven has those delightful headlights uh lot of different interesting brand decisions around Riven. What are you taking? What are you thinking and where's the name come from?

That's so great. I love it. Um we naming something is so hard. Um and so R.J. and I battled quite a bit with this, but when we landed on this one, we knew it was the one because if you look at um transportation, it's always been so singular in narrative. It's like it's just cars or it's just not cars.

Yeah.

And for us, the approach is like whether it's a commercial enterprise or a consumer,

it's all of the above most likely. meaning that I want to use my R1 to go on a long weekend trip, but my school drop off with my kid, it's a pain in the butt to sit in the car line. Um, and something smaller probably makes more sense. And so the transformation of electrification of um, uh, transportation is also it requires all of the above in a way.

Um, and on kind of like how we present ourselves from a brand, you know, one one analogy that R.J. and I really um love and use often is it's kind of like we're two characters in the Marvel universe, if you will.

So, it's like we we have the same uh mission, but we can have very different personalities. And so, also has an opportunity to be maybe in a way really expressive and take a little bit more liberties, which you're starting to see in some of our products than um a more grownup vehicle brand may may need to be.

Okay. How do you think about competition with Chinese manufacturers? you know, Rivian Rivian's had the benefit of of not having to compete with all the Chinese manufacturers in the US.

I imagine micromobility, you know, is not going to be having the same kind of export restrictions. Uh, you know, h how do you how do you think about that threat cons, you know, assuming that, you know, they there's Chinese companies out there that for one reason or another will be able to like sell at a loss for some amount of time.

Yeah. the DJI story basically.

Yep, that's a great question. I think there's a couple of ways to think about it. Increasingly as you get to the larger form factors in our portfolio and certainly um as we get into autonomy uh I think a lot of the similar factors that we're seeing in the automotive world in terms of the natural firewalls that are happening

um will exist in our space to some extent as well. Um but just to back up, I think one of the things that gets lost is um there are a tremendous number of products in this kind of like small uh mobility or microobility space that are coming out of China for sure. Um but I think it's without debate that the vast majority of these products are commodity like relatively lowquality white labelled type products.

That being said, there are a small handful that are really really great products and using the latest and greatest tech. And if you look at take apart one of those products and you take apart one of our products architecturally and from a technology capability standpoint, they're actually more the same than not. And I would say also it's probably one of the only brands outside of China that you could say that.

Yeah.

Of within this space. And so just purely from a product uh feature quality and technical capability standpoint, we feel like we're very very competitive.

Okay. Product pitch. The Rivian R1T has a gear tunnel. It fits a snowboard. electric longboard with a handle that flips up like a giant Razor scooter that fits perfectly in the gear tunnel. Am I on to something?

I love it. That That's not the first time we've heard that one.

Really? Okay.

The gear tunnel, it just it just does feel like such a unique feature and it just it just demands some bespoke thing that fits in there. You know, you want like a big speaker, Bluetooth speaker that fits in there or like barbecue or something. It just I want an ecosystem around the gear tunnel even if you know who knows how viable that is. Uh anyway, very fun. Jordy, anything else?

Very cool. Thank you so much.

I'm I'm on the website right now. I'm interested.

You're shopping.

I'm shopping.

I'm shopping.

We'll look you up. Just let us know.

We will be very excited to ride these around. We've been doing uh we've been doing some uh office chair racing in the studio. You can This is apparently a whole

That's what I want. I want an electric office chair.

Oh, there you go. We have uh well we have in-house vertically integrated motors and rovers. We can power we can soup those up.

Adjust me to the left one in.

Yeah, just a little joystick.

Pilot me. You know if if if you're not in the right shot, you're a little bit to the left. Production can just move you.

That's actually you will have one or two customers for this. If you chair

autonomous office chair, hey, you're you have to leave the meeting. Go back to your desk. drive you around. I think we're on to something. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to have a great congratulations on the show. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app loving profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion billion daily active users and grow your business today. What's up,

Brett? Adcock was on the show yesterday. Yes.

He had some interesting comments about

the state of AI. Okay. I disagreed strongly with many of them.

Okay.

But we have to cover uh this video from the Shawn Ryan podcast.

Yes.

Uh it's a new gate.

It's uh they're calling it gate

ad gate.

Ad well maybe that too.

Who knows?

Uh so so he is hanging out with a figure robot.

Okay.

Uh on the Shawn Ryan podcast.

Oh, okay. He went outside for it. I was wondering because like Shawn Ryan normally shoots in that like very cinematic whiskey bar. Uh, but he's outside and

there's like a twominute video where they're hanging out with the robot and then let's pull this up and I want to get your

take. All right, turn around.

So, this is the first time he tells it to turn around.

Two is like we uh we basically

at the end of the video,

it starts turning around and then he says turn around.

And Nema here says the video is the smoking gun that figures robots are teleyoped. Again, I love teley op. Not a problem. But Brett has he always says he's not doing teleop.

You never do teleyop.

I don't know. This is not autonomous. Notice how the robot starts turning around

before Brett says, "All right, turn around."

Yeah, you can skip forward a little bit.

And there's pull up pull up this other video that I'm actually on.

There's another Yeah, there's another video quoting this that shows it on repeat. Uh

let's see.

Now, thing too is like we uh we basically uh the robot almost all fully software. It's by Vic Vic quoted and said, "Yeah." Okay. Yeah. It's definitely not waiting for for the

It's very this one.

All right. It's very subtle, but you can see it's turning around and then he says, "All right, turn around.

Turn around."

Yes. But the steelman here

premonition.

All right, turn around.

The robot knew what was going to happen because personalized super intelligence understands that a turnaround command is coming before Brett even says it. Starts turning around before. So, that would be one possible solution. But yes, um, who knows? Also,

the the the moment from yesterday that stands out to me is uh I said, "Why build a new a separate AI lab focused on personal super intelligence outside of your company that is trying to sell some combination of intelligence in the physical world." And he said, "I really value focus." which I thought was fascinating given that he is diverting his

his personal focus

personal focus.

Yeah. It's like focus within an organization like a specific like the leaders that join that company can focus just on that problem. It was it was an odd uh an odd comment to sort of process. Um yes the uh I mean I don't know I I I haven't watched the full uh the full interview with Sean Ryan. wonder if uh if if he talks about whether or not this particular robot is teleyop because it's totally reasonable that a company would have some teleyopt robots, some autonomous robots and sort of mix and match them based on the particular demo. Obviously, if you're doing some sort of presscripted stunt uh dance or parkour scenario, you might press that and then ideally you would say, "Hey, you know, this this one's teleop here. Here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're using teleop. Here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're fully autonomous, when we're, you know, partially, you know, remote controlled or something like that somewhere in between. Um, I don't know. We'll see. Uh, you know, people will continue to dig in. I mean, all of this, uh, you know, the rubber meets the road when the when the robots are out in the wild. When people get them and they start shipping and people can see, uh, unless you buy one and it's secretly teleop, that would be wild. You're like, "Wow, this is remarkable. I can give it the most complex I can give it the most complex vague instructions and it just does exactly what I done.

If the figure robot can simply open a Diet Coke for John, we're a buyer.

That's that's the goal post.

I don't we don't need it to do everything.

That's the goal post. Just need to do

crack open a sixack of Diet Coke. Uh Tyler, what do you think about uh the figure figure gate? Uh yeah, I mean it's hard to say just from that video, but I think broadly like

um people are probably like too against teleoperation generally.

I agree.

Uh because like you know the lesson from Whimo is that like actually

it's goed

you know part maybe if it's totally like 100% teleop like okay that's not great but if it's like partly like there's someone overseeing it and maybe they're like pretty involved sometimes it can be like extremely valuable like Whimo is a great

product whatever. Yeah. Like even just like deploying robots in dangerous locations if it's fully teleoped that's still like a great thing

hugely valuable

and like clearly uh the way we get fully autonomous robots is by starting out with with partially telep Oh we we we do have we do have one followup to yesterday so we did a little deep dive from the Wall Street Journal on Mark Laneir, the lawyer who successfully argued that meta and YouTube are addictive in the LA court last week and we posted the clip. A lot of people enjoyed learning about him and in particular the fact that he has a menagerie that contains lemurs and llamas as well as a 120 person train. Uh we we love the way he's living his life. were huge fans of Mark Laneir, although do have some disagreement around uh the the legal findings, but uh a lot of people chimed in. Uh XL rotate uh XL Raider said uh by the way, this is the Laneir Theological Library in Houston, which is open to the public for touring. Incredible guy. Shares two amazing images of, you know, what an amazing contribution to the community. And Eric Seufort uh quote tweeted our post and said, "This is true. I grew up down the street from his property and he hosted a high school graduation party for one of my friends. He recently bought an adjoining horse ranch and built a seminary on it. So, a lot of people uh coming out in support of Mark Laneir and uh yeah, I mean just seems like seems like a fantastic lifestyle. Fantastic menagerie and he really re you know everyone's everyone focuses on oh are you flying private? Are you are you post economic? Like menagerie is clearly just a different tier, different ladder. That's where you want to go in life if you're successful. And he's done it. So congrats to him. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com.

A wonderful last few hours of your quarter.

Yes,

it's been an honor.

See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Rolling

flashbang. Bye.