F1 driver Jack Doohan pivots to AI startup Muse, targeting fragmented QSR and F&B operators

What's the only thing faster than the AI market your business on MongoDB? Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we can bring in Jack Duhan. He is the founder and CEO of Muse. Welcome to the show. How you doing, Jack?

Doing well, thanks. How are you guys?

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk. Great to have you on. Great to speak.

Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?

Certainly. No, thanks. Thanks for having me on, boys. Um myself, a bit of a whirlwind last 12 months sort of my whole life. Um been driving towards being a Formula 1 driver. Yeah. Um so, you know, in in in that realm, let's say. And

I was always in the mindset of doing one thing properly or two things averely, right? Um so I always wanted to wanted to build and wanted to do many things but that was full focus. um ended up getting to Formula 1 the end of 2024 for the final round Abu Dhabi um signed for for three years which was um you know obviously a huge huge thing for for me and and from a kid from Australia and then yeah six races into that season sort of sidelined for some circumstances um outside of my control let's say and it was a big it was a big moment for me of realizing not that you're set right you're never you're never set in stone nothing's ever guaranteed Um but I definitely thought with security with the three years and with how things work um that that it was a little bit more stable. So um it was a big reality check. I said okay for what I'm locking into for the next you know for for my life and what I'm carrying you know the next 10 20 years is not going to be from something that's decided by by these political circumstances. Um so then to be honest I had an interest in AI since late 2020. I was teaching myself to code since 2019 on a low basis definitely not I'm not engineering behind the behind Muse at all. So um but just on a from understanding and then um ended up founding Muse sort of at the end of December um doing some small passive tech investments setting up some SPVS and some opportunities but uh yeah it's crazy the distribution that has been gathered now since being actually in this paddic and and around this world. Yeah, I I want to talk about uh tech and business. Uh but I have two questions about uh racing. First, uh I'd love to know a little bit more about your early path. Did you go through the typical uh cart racing, Formula 3? Like walk me through the steps to actually get to F1. Uh a little bit of the history there. And then I I I would love your your view on like the future of the sport, where things are now, what's changed, what you've observed as you've been probably not just competing in F1, but also a fan.

Yeah. No, certainly, you know, started from carding as you mentioned. Um then the sort of in Australia there's you have a ceiling, you know, like I guess like any small like any not small country, we're a big country. We're 25 million million populations compared to the US. um you know very very different um but you always have the goal of of of going to the top of what you're doing and even for the partying the main space was Europe so that's where the world championships were the European championships were so as a kid I always wanted to be

over here um ended up moving over um on my own when I was 13 just before I was 14 years old did a year of carting um was then picked up by the Red Bull um for

on your own that means like you said see you to your parents or what did that look Like

it was the first seven days was with my father and then I was on my then I was on my own with like people that my that was sort of connected into this into the in the European region. Um and then

still that's that's wild.

That's crazy.

It was it was weird. I you know I think when I when I came over I was wearing shorts when I was in Europe and the guys who were mentoring me said I look too you know I look too Australian. Um I remember

I remember I walked in I was 13y old kid. I walked in the go-kart track and it was the first time in I was in Europe and there was a Scottish guy who was mentoring me and I walked in I high-fived a couple kids and I sat down into my into my awning and he looks at me and he goes, "What was that?" And I I said, "What do you mean?" And he's like, "You know, you're you're you're happy you're high-fiving. What was that?" I said, "Oh, they're just my friends." He looks at me and he goes, "The only friend you need is me. There's no other friend, you know, like you know, if you're gonna

There's no friends out there

on the track."

Honest honestly. And I went I just came from Australia where we're racing and then we come off on our scooters, we're running around, we're having fun, you know, and then you know racing and obviously it's it's fully competitive but it wasn't to that aspect. So it was a big wake up and uh and the the realm to get there and then climbed up um Formula 4, Formula 3, um Formula 2 and then was a reserve driver in 2024 for the Alpine team and then mid year um July signed for the three years. That's great.

Uh where how how important was uh the sim during that time? Did it become more important, you know, throughout that early part of your racing career when you're kind of moving up the ranks?

Uh or was it important the entire time?

It's it's important the entire time. I guess like the simulators we have obviously at home or or to an extent on a junior level are very obviously on a low cal on low caliber. Um, when you're a reserve driver, you're you're doing the sim overnight on on your Saturdays. So, you're typically at the track on a Friday. You do the first free practice session, the free practice session 2, and then you'll fly back to the factory, do the simulator from, let's say, 6:00 p.m. until 3:00 a.m. Um, so all of the things they wanted to try throughout Friday that they weren't able to then try

overnight because they have curfew. So, they obviously can't then the engineers can't keep working towards. So, you're working it overnight and then I'd get in, you know, a transfer, head straight to the airport and then head back to the track to sort of um deliver this and and more in a driver's perspective rather than just engineering um engineering feedback that's been delivered. So,

it's very rare.

So, you're so you're not flying you're not flying commercial in that situation, right?

No, unfortunately. Unfortunately, yeah. um like a 65.

I mean, it's just crazy cuz it's it seems like a pretty tight window, you know? You're you're going

to the factory, getting on the sim, getting off, headed straight to the airport, but then I imagine you're arriving shortly before the race on Sunday, right?

Yeah. It just means not great um or let's say preferable flat times and uh and and options of um of of sleep. But, uh, it's it's weird like you dread it and then you get to like like your 12, your midnight, your 1:00 a.m. it's tough and then you sort of then push through your coffees deep. You're you're also doing some cool things. Um, and uh, and you enjoy it, you know, definitely after a while and uh, it's not, you know, doesn't become, you know, you get some bad time zones like when you're doing, you're in the UK and you're doing for Australia or you're in, well, the Sims always in UK doing Mexico, some weird places where you're having to do some very um, strange time

Brian Johnson's nightmare.

So,

literally no good therapy there. So uh I mean throughout this whole process you're also uh learning about technology I'm sure meeting people thinking about the company uh what is your uh workflow like? What is your free time? Does it track with seasons? Does it track with certain days of the week? Do you have downtime where it just doesn't make sense to put any more time on the track or in the simulator? And so you do have free time. Like what is the work life balance like as you're sort of grinding up the ranks? I imagine it's pretty full tilt, but you obviously had a little bit of time to think about what was next.

Yeah, exactly. I like to think about it now because I went from that being being my full my full life. Um, and you had very little time off in the sense of every one of your spare days was a marketing day or was a media day or as a partnership day. And then if you did have then a free day than it was more time on the sim or doing more correlation and not doing it effectively, you'll be going back to maybe a race six six races ago and and redoing things with what you have now and how that's changed. And then when you had time off though it was off, right? It was fully just like you know you were completely done. Um where now I'm I'm reserved driver for this year doing 10 races. Um it's you know what will be what will be with what might might happen but I'm very limited on the control that I have on getting back into the car.

Sure.

Um so I'm not you know I'm not they only have x amount of time with simulators. I'm not on the sim. I'm currently not testing. So when I'm here or if I'm off and as I guess you are when you're in this world it's never fully off, right? Even if you are on the weekends or away you're constantly um still taking that 2 a.m. call. You're still you know working through things. there's still communication going on. So, it was quite a difference. You didn't have any flatout commitments of these partnership gi, you know, you're constantly doing something.

Is is part of what uh attracted you to entrepreneurship is um like I feel like the the challenge in Formula 1, uh there's only, you know, in entrepreneurship you're getting like nos all the time and and you're and you're sometimes you get an opportunity, sometimes you don't. Uh but in Formula 1, you're like almost entirely reliant. There's like a set number of teams on the grid. There's a lot of stuff that's out of your control. Whereas in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of stuff that's out of control. But if you get a no from one customer or one investor or a hire you want to make, there's always like another one and you can keep working towards where I feel like as an athlete, it can be very frustrating where you're like, I'm doing everything that I possibly can and yet I'm relying on these external parties in order to push my career forward. Does that does that resonate at all?

Yeah, massively. I think even even once you're a Formula 1 driver and you can be in a you can be in an airtight situation, your your seat is always for sale in essence, right? Like uh you know, maybe not depending there might not be any buyers that are able to to compete with with the ticket size that you're sitting on, but there's never any certainty, right? At the end of the day, you're an employee. You're you're still contracted. Um you can be fired. Um yes, that can happen in entrepreneur stakes if you're CEO, founder. depends on your structure, how you, you know, what stage things are at. Um, but I definitely wanted to be, like I said, more in in control. Um, and I've been through, you know, although I'm young, I'm not I'm not super young anymore any anymore. Um, but still young and been through um quite a lot of of let's say networking and navigating different realms, whether it is, you know, whether it's, you know, trying to source a client and know in a specific region. Um, for instance, the old CEO of the Alpine from LA team didn't really read the media. didn't watch the news but he just specifically had a little newspaper for his local town in Italy that he always read each morning. So I ensured that you know what I was doing in my testing and my work that was getting correlated was made sure that it was published in that specific newspaper because I knew

right

and it's the same thing if you're trying to you know target a market um in Mina or in India the Philippines um that are overlooked on the west you know by by let's say west innovation or or the technology and looking at things from a different perspective I think these are all like aspects that I've learned that sort of tried to target have a scope on things that I wouldn't have known at all.

So, uh tell us more about Muse and tell me specifically like why this company like what was the what was the opportunity discovery moment? Yeah, I think um you know what I wanted to do was solving like a little bit of the fragmentation issue um for your you know non let's say high enterprise um institutions but that they have everything aggregated have have these things that are together in order to then implement and optimize AI.

Um so I didn't really know where that was. it was quite horizontal um of of that factor um you know especially targeting um your like I said um your let's say lower served countries whether that's South America Brazil um India Philippines or things that are more fragmented Indonesia and our first contract um came actually in the food and beverage space with Oakberry um which is an asai asai company

and uh it was an extreme like eye opener of how many systems that they run on how you know how they don't communicate how things are just not you know tracked obviously over three full days because your inputters your your tracking sources are 17 18 year old kids whether it's a oak barrier or whether it's a QSR your your employees that you're managing and that you're relying on to track all this reliable data that you end up will be having automated or optimized was done by someone who doesn't really want to be there who is checking in you know at the latest point and is checking out at the earliest point um and things are not being done with you know, with with let's say top level accuracy. Um, so that's where we wanted to really tighten down and thought if we're going to try to do many other things, um, especially in this realm, it's so important to find that trust. And so we really wanted to niche down and capture one vertical properly. Um, and uh, as you know, as we could dive into it, you just get further and further into the rabbit hole of finding your niche, right? And and getting into the area where you really want to solve. Um and it went from okay supporting on agents for you know your POS systems, your inventory, your waste, your um your invoicing um and then finding that none of this can be optimized until these are communicating because each QSR system is using between 16 to 80 different software systems you know can be very very large that all third parties um and none of them obviously are coerced none of them communicate all this data is fragmented so no AI agent let's say or AI is going to be wrong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. Um, and your big institutions, your Burger King, your Restaurant Brands International, McDonald's are very tech forward. They have their own agents, but they're only accessing menu queries, um, maybe staff training. Um, and because in order to aggregate all that data, it would mean, you know, shutting some part of their system down to do it.

Is it hard to get uh, companies to pay for this? I feel like a lot of the traction in SMB restaurant uh it's driven by the POSOS system like toast because you just take a small cut of the credit card fee and it's sort of like this invisible cost that then can scale really dynamically. But if you're going in and you're saying I'm going to sell a solution like how are you justifying actually getting someone to open up and put down a credit card or pay uh for a recurring service which I imagine is the business model.

Yeah, definitely. You know it's it's not easy on the aspect if you think you come in and you're trying to sell something that is oh this is better than what you currently have right by going to replace X they get pitched how many tech you know tech software has daily emails come through that what we have is better than what you have um use and and not them we have a great AI agent for FnB false you know fast no one no one's got a good AI agent until operating on the data um but what we're trying to operate is it's like headless as default right it's an underlying layer um that is almost like super good. So uh in essence AI cloud systems um whether you want to call it a company brain where it's unifying all their current systems into one um aggregated location which then if they're not optimizing AI as long as we have at least three months of that data um you know up towards three years then we're able to you know really act and and create for that or if it's your your larger companies who have already an agent with Burger King BK assistant or others then you're feeding this let's say aggregated and and orchestrated data to this agent which before they're all individual third party softwares and now they're in one hub which can be orchestrated. They're all communicating together and you're actually going to get that optimization.

Got it.

Um so it's much easier to sell like that than actually saying this platform is going to replace what you have let's say.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well,

uh last question please. How's how's the grid reacting to the luch?

The luch

the far Ferrari luche the new electric vehicle from Ferrari just locked in. He's like luch

$4,000 US.

Uh it's a steal for a second. Something like that. Um

it does sound like that. Um, no. I think, uh, look, um, I'm with um, and we we have a, you know, a relationship with, we're running a Ferrari engine, so I think it's amazing. It looks terrific.

It's unbelievable. Um,

couldn't agree more.

Um, cannot bless it more. I'm sure we'll chat about that more, Jordy. But guys, um, I'm sure that's my time, so it's great to

Yeah. So great to meet you. I love I love uh I love the energy and the focus and uh

uh let's do it again soon.

Yeah, we'll talk to you.

Awesome. Have a good one.

Cheers.

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You heard it from Jack.

Uh I think our next guest is joining in just a minute. But uh in the meantime, we can talk about the AI executive order. This was signed today by the president. And Dean Ball has some uh some context here. He says, "Wow, this EO is almost exactly similar to the leaked text from the EO uh the president chose not to sign because it was too regulatory. The only major difference is that the voluntary pre-eployment review process is now only 30 days rather than 90 days. That's a concession, but a very small one compared to what I would have expected based on the president's remarks about the earlier draft. So, uh, if you haven't been following along, uh, AI companies will be able to voluntarily submit their new models to the US government for review. Now, they will, the government will get back to them in 30 days as opposed to 90 days, evaluate them, and make a call or give advice or give some sort of commentary. Every word that comes from the government is a potential lawsuit in the future. and so or will show up in a potential lawsuit. And so you can expect uh a lot of thought and care given to whatever the uh whatever the government responds to. A lot of government applications from the FDA previously uh the the the response would be uh no comment and no comment is tacid approval. the the FDA with some products with uh a lot of uh uh nutritional supplements and uh food ingredients, they don't necessarily want to say this is FDA approved because that's a very high bar. There's a lot of regulatory and and risk and legal uh ramifications from approving something, but they can decline to uh to comment. They can decline to to uh to not permit the company to move forward. And I would expect that even a small uh uh even a small result like we sent them their model, they reviewed it for 30 days and they didn't say it was bad uh will be a good signal for AI labs that submit through this process. So but Dean Ball continues. He says this is a fair fairly major win for the safety contingent within the admin and a significant loss for the Sachs accelerationist wing and is surprising to me. I continue to think this EO is a mistake. the clear the this is clearly teeing up the infrastructure for a model licensing regime and the fact that the administration is classifying the new detail the the details of how this voluntary system work will work is egregious. So everyone wants to know what are they going to be evaluating? Are they going to be doing you know ARGI tests or some other benchmark or humanity's last exam or just red teaming it or just talking to it? Who knows? Uh it's classified. Everyone is interested to know. Dean Ball certainly interested to know, but we don't know yet. But maybe in the future. Uh the public, he continues, the public and the employees of the labs have a right to know how this works. It is very frustrating when you're interacting with the federal government and you don't know their rubric for grading you. That is one of the most frustrating pieces of going back and forth with the regulatory body. It's best when there's a very clear test for the DMV. You show up. If you know the answers to the questions, you get a driver's license. if you don't if they were like, "We test you on a mystery rubric. That would be very frustrating for anyone looking for a driver's license." He continues, "Uh, most lab staff don't have clearances, but some do." Uh, but if the literal regulatory thresholds that trigger pre-eployment review or classified researchers themselves won't know whether they are what they are training is regulated by this EO, all for the benefit that is barely articulable. Uh, what exactly is the intelligence community going to do in 30 days to make the model safer? I don't know, they could there's a lot of tests you could run in 30 days. Uh, you know, try and hack this thing, try and design a bioweapon. These are things people are worried about. In 30 days, you can certainly get these models to attempt those and see how they respect uh see how they respond. So, he says it's not a huge mistake, but a small