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Garry Tan
CEO, YCombinator

YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips, Threads hits 500M Users

📅 Jun 16, 2026 TBPN 173 MIN 5919 VIEWS 706 SEGMENTS · 16 SPEAKERS
00:04:38 SpaceX Rips 00:11:33 Andrew Lee, co-founder of Firebase (acquired by Google in 2014), discusses his latest venture, Tasklet, an AI agent platform that integrates with various work tools to automate workflows. He highlights Tasklet's rapid growth, achieving a $7 million run rate, and its ability to dynamically generate integrations using AI, enabling connections to both public and internal APIs. Lee also mentions a recent $20 million funding round and emphasizes Tasklet's competitive positioning against major AI labs. 00:21:47 Stamatis Floratos is the co-founder and CEO of Eden Robotic...

Questions asked in this interview

12
  1. 12:58... of pulling that string and around about this time last year, we had this really good agent inside our email client and we had a bunch of users being like, 'Hey, I love your product, but could you just get rid of all this inbox crap, right?
  2. 18:28It spent like $60 running this thing, right?
  3. 21:52Hey guys, all good. How about yourselves?
  4. 1:28:21That's clearly something that's very aligned with the broad trend, but what's happening there in terms of token path thought?
  5. 1:32:08They basically sell executed contracts effectively, but it hasn't maybe been as popular as I think a lot of people had imagined at least so far. But what are you seeing?
  6. 1:35:05Is there momentum there or is that something that you think is farther off?
  7. 1:39:47Can you give us the lore on the Paul Buoykite $100 billion question?
  8. 1:42:12Take us through it. How's the day?
  9. 1:42:38What's stopping them from going critical in the parking lot?
  10. 1:48:38Do you push back or do you agree?
  11. 1:55:39Are you a hundred billion dollar little tech company? Like where's the line?
  12. 2:00:57More people wanting to do startups or are people coming from big tech?
John Coogan 0:03 ↗
Let's just roll. We are surrounded by general. Hold your position. Come on. Get up. Trust the experts here. Five. We are experts. Founder Mel. 5. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. UAV online. Blaze. Double blaze. Triple blades. Double kill. Fire. Wrong. Cup is team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong. Right. Clearing order inbound. Get up. They're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. Track one. Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. Marky clearing order inbound. Five good. I see more and more journalists on the horizon. Founder.
You're watching TVN. Today's Tuesday, June 16th, 2026. We are live from the TV ultra template technology fortress finance capital. Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use, corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, sorry about the delay. We had a little bit of a technical issue. Glad everyone's here. Thank you for tuning in. It's YC Demo Day.
Jordi Hays 3:55 ↗
Thank you for never doubting.
John Coogan 3:56 ↗
Never doubt us ever.
Jordi Hays 3:59 ↗
No, it's okay. Every once in a while, you can...
John Coogan 4:02 ↗
You can doubt us a little bit.
Pop off in the comments. Pop off in the chat. But, uh, we have YC Demo Day. We have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven YC founders joining. Then three YC partners. And then we're going around the horn talking to some other folks. Threads just hit 500 million monthly active users. We're having Connor Hayes back on the show for that. Luke Burgis is here. Burgis is here with his new book, uh, The One and the 99. And so we'll go through that. Not a lot of time for the news, but we'll take you through it anyway. Um,
Jordi Hays 4:32 ↗
And in the middle of guests, we'll jump in for a little news. Exactly.
John Coogan 4:36 ↗
We love Exactly.
We love the news. The big news, uh, big news...
Jordi Hays 4:41 ↗
Is that SpaceX ran...
John Coogan 4:44 ↗
Like absolute...
Crazy after hours last night. Uh, I kept getting push notifications and thinking that that can't be right. And then I would double click and check a little bit and I would say...
Jordi Hays 4:57 ↗
Yeah, the headlines are crazy. Uh...
John Coogan 4:59 ↗
So yeah. So the big one is...
Jordi Hays 5:01 ↗
There's so many of just like it's passing this company, passing this company, passing that company, and you're like, whoa, this is a crazy, crazy time. So SpaceX sitting comfortably in the top five company.
John Coogan 5:14 ↗
You got Nvidia at 5 trillion, Alphabet and Apple right around four, four and a half.
Jordi Hays 5:19 ↗
Then Microsoft and SpaceX neck and neck, just shy of $3 trillion.
John Coogan 5:24 ↗
Uh, and it basically makes their, their Cursor acquisition free. They paid 60 billion in new stock for the company and their market cap, SpaceX's market cap, uh, more than quadrupled and added more than 4x the price of a Cursor acquisition.
Jordi Hays 5:39 ↗
I believe they had until Q4 to actually pull trigger on the Cursor deal, like they built in a window. Now,
John Coogan 5:46 ↗
Um, I bet you, I bet you there was some terms that weren't public...
Jordi Hays 5:52 ↗
That Cursor would have wanted to make sure that they got in as quickly as possible.
John Coogan 5:58 ↗
Sure. Done really well.
Uh, who knows where SpaceX will net out. I mean, I thought, I thought we'd be at 2.4 trillion by, by the middle, by basically the last hour of trading on Friday. Yeah. Uh, I was incorrect at the time, but, uh, uh, it's obviously, you know, continued to run. Um, and, uh, there was another scenario where SpaceX could have effectively acquired Cursor at an even higher, um, uh, at an even higher valuation. But, uh, I think it's a great, fantastic outcome for the Cursor team. Obviously, uh, you know, OpenAI, its big Cursor investor, Thrive, A16Z, uh, Codeu, uh, and, and others that, um, that I'm unfortunately forgetting. But, uh,
Jordi Hays 6:44 ↗
What was saying about this? He said it's the biggest, the biggest VC-backed. In the past five days, we've seen the biggest VC-backed IPO ever and the biggest VC-backed strategic sale ever. We've never had an M&A of a VC-backed company, young startup, north of 50 billion. Like 60 billion is so, so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, three trillion for that company, but 60 billion is beyond a home run. Yeah.
John Coogan 7:18 ↗
And it happened in an M&A, which is crazy.
Jordi Hays 7:21 ↗
And yeah, there's, I would assume a large number of the retail investors investing in SpaceX were not necessarily even that familiar with Cursor up until today.
John Coogan 7:32 ↗
I did see that. If you're waking up, if you're waking up today, you're like, 'Wait, SpaceX just acquired one of the hottest AI companies in the world with billions of dollars in revenue. Like, this is so bullish.' Obviously, a lot of the more institutional investors or people, uh, that, that had been following the company, um, privately were well aware that, that they had the option to do this, that they would almost certainly take it.
Jordi Hays 7:57 ↗
Yeah. But the takes are all over the timeline. Quinn Thompson says, 'This is brilliant corporate finance. Use your newly printed low-flat retail inflated currency to acquire real businesses ahead of the lockup expiring. Probably the most creative, accretive way to sell as much equity as possible into IPO pump. I wonder what acquisition is next.' That's very interesting. Nick Carter fights back, fires back and says, 'You'd think the people buying the equity would also be aware of this.' And that's a good point. But, um, the question is like, are there more acquisitions in the pipeline because Tesla has not done a lot of acquisitions? Elon's always been a build not buy operator or founder.
John Coogan 8:38 ↗
Tesla itself.
Jordi Hays 8:40 ↗
Yeah, that's a very different scenario. What I'm talking about is like there, there are companies, Meta is very inquisitive, Google, Apple. Apple's like on the smaller side, but they still do deals more frequently. Uh, it would be very interesting if we're seeing, you know, one deal a month and he's sort of putting together the pieces of buying up Neolabs and compute capacity and Neo clouds and rolling everything up. That would just be a completely different operating philosophy. But given where the stock is, given how smooth this deal went and where the, where the market cap of SpaceX is, it's not the craziest thing. It would be a big pivot in his, uh, in his strategy, though. Uh, Business Insider has a deep dive on Cursor's wild ride. Michael Truel didn't pay himself for years. Uh, interestingly, Cursor once made up 40 to 50% of Anthropic's revenue. That is a crazy, you know, gyration in the market. Just shows you how quickly things are changing. Went from, you know, it's all Cursor, that, that business is just funneling to Cursor. Cursor is the front door to this business. Then it's like, oh, it's all these hyperscalers that are spending a billion dollars, half a billion dollars a month. And so the, the whole, the whole landscape is changing. Nothing, nothing tells that more than Anthropic telling Cursor that Claude Code was just a research effort. Uh, this goes back to the Dylan Field, like, were they consistently candid or maybe they really just did think, hey, yeah, this is just a research effort. Like, you do you, and then realized later like, whoa, whoa, we, well, we need to be a player in this. We cannot be in the middle of this, uh, situation. So we got to do our own thing, owning the end customer relationship.
John Coogan 10:15 ↗
Yeah. Uh, and so wild, wild ride.
Jordi Hays 10:18 ↗
Yeah. Similar, similar to, I, I think the messaging to Figma, Canva around design tool.
John Coogan 10:26 ↗
Yeah. It's tricky. Every AI company is, it's a general use technology. They're using it for everything. There's, there's, you know, questions about like, will you maintain value if you're in the token path? Do you need to be like, do not build a company that depends on the models getting better? But if the models get really, really good, like, what can't they do? And so, uh, constantly we see every company competing with every other company as, you know, every hyperscaler has an LLM at this point and every SaaS product has other products because they can launch features faster. And so the, the competition is heating up across all these different companies.
Jordi Hays 11:01 ↗
Next time we have Michael on the show.
John Coogan 11:02 ↗
Yeah.
Jordi Hays 11:02 ↗
We got to ask how he paid the bills for all those years.
John Coogan 11:06 ↗
Doing, crashing on couches or something?
Jordi Hays 11:08 ↗
Got to ask.
John Coogan 11:09 ↗
I don't know. Um, taking out massive loans against the company maybe. Who knows?
Let me tell you about MongoDB. 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.
Jordi Hays 11:24 ↗
Snap also has some big news today. We're going to get to it.
John Coogan 11:28 ↗
We'll get to that after our first interview with Andrew Lee from Tasklit. He's the founder and CEO. Andrew, welcome to the show. Thank you for the patience and joining us on such a busy day. How is Demo Day going? How are you?
Andrew Lee 11:43 ↗
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I want to be upfront. I can neither confirm nor deny the SpaceX acquisition rumors.
John Coogan 11:49 ↗
Okay. They're flying around. They're flying around Demo Day.
Jordi Hays 11:52 ↗
Elon's probably there. Demo Day, shaking hands, trying to scoop up, roll up the entire batch maybe. Who knows? He's got the stuff to do it.
Andrew Lee 12:00 ↗
No comment. Demo Day is great. We're, we're, we're having a good time. There's a thousand people here. There's 200 companies.
John Coogan 12:06 ↗
Wow.
Andrew Lee 12:06 ↗
Uh, it's, it's a good time.
John Coogan 12:07 ↗
Amazing.
Did you, did you pitch already, or is that ahead of you still?
Andrew Lee 12:11 ↗
Not, not yet. We're in, we're in group four, which is going to be this afternoon. And it's actually my co-founder who's going to be up on, up on stage giving the talk.
John Coogan 12:19 ↗
Cool.
Andrew Lee 12:19 ↗
I'll just be the pretty face over on the side.
John Coogan 12:21 ↗
Okay. Well, uh, give us some backstory on yourself and tell us about the business.
Andrew Lee 12:26 ↗
Yeah. So, uh, as background, I was, uh, the thing I'm probably best known for is I was one of the founders of Firebase. So, this is my second time through YC. I did, uh, the summer 2011 batch. Um, we sold that company to Google in 2014.
John Coogan 12:40 ↗
Yeah.
Andrew Lee 12:40 ↗
I was there for about three years. Um, this, this company has been a very interesting story. We actually started in 2020 as a better Gmail. Like, we tried to build a new email experience, raised a bunch of money, hired a team.
John Coogan 12:53 ↗
So you quit Google to try to, to try to eat Gmail alive.
Andrew Lee 12:58 ↗
Yeah. I, I had already left Google a couple years before, but I saw them shut down Inbox and I was like, man, what are these, this is a huge, huge product. Like, what are these guys doing? We should do a better job. Um, this is a terrible idea. Don't do it. Don't invest in it. Um, but just as we were getting ready to shut that thing down, LLMs got good and we're like, 'Holy crap, we can take all of this data that you have and we can feed into a language model and we can like draft emails for you and we can do interesting types of search and we can do categorization.' So, we started kind of pulling that string and around about this time last year, we had this really good agent inside our email client and we had a bunch of users being like, 'Hey, I love your product, but could you just get rid of all this inbox crap, right? Like the UI is getting in the way.'
And so, we spun it out and we had a, it's a totally new product, totally new codebase and this is Tasklit. And we launched that in October and that's gone super, super well. And that's, you know, that's why we're in YC. Um, that, and that's gone. You know, at the beginning of the year we were at about a third of a million run rate. We're at a $7 million run rate now. So, it's like a nice...
Garry Tan 14:01 ↗
Nice fast ramp. And is that the bar now? Like, is there, you know, are you meeting other companies in the batch that have been able to ramp that quickly?
Andrew Lee 14:13 ↗
I think we have the highest revenue of the batch.
Garry Tan 14:16 ↗
There we go. Let's go. Well, why don't we go hit the gong and then we can... Boom. That's for you.
Andrew Lee 14:26 ↗
Love that.
Garry Tan 14:28 ↗
This feels like... So, we were looking at our little summary here. AI agents that connect across work tools, run 24/7, and take ownership of recurring workflows. Does big tech hate you? Like, because I feel like the whole point is walled gardens. That's what creates value accrual. That's what keeps the value accruing to the work tools that, you know, big company CEOs love and extract a lot of value from. And you're coming in here and digging a hole under the wall of the garden and throwing a ladder over the top and digging a hole right through the walled garden.
Andrew Lee 15:09 ↗
Absolutely.
Garry Tan 15:10 ↗
How do you maintain those integrations if the actual platform is maybe like hostile? We've seen reporting about this where different companies have tried to sort of integrate across and then they've wound up with sharp elbows. I think a lot of them have figured it out. But like, how do you think about working cooperatively with the work tools that you integrate with?
Andrew Lee 15:32 ↗
Totally. So AI has totally changed the game. You know, two years ago if you wanted to integrate with a bunch of stuff you had to like handcode a bunch of integrations and there were, you know, companies like n8n and Zapier that just did that and that was their moat. And our secret sauce is that we can dynamically generate the integrations with AI like when you need them. So we have a bunch of, you know, canned integrations. Some of them we've handcoded and made them like really, really nice, but even if you ask for an integration we don't have, the AI can generate one for you. And this is super powerful, not just because it lets you go outside the walled garden, but because it lets you connect to things that like might not be public at all. So, if you're a company, a lot of times you have internal APIs and you're like, 'Hey, I want to have some integration that hooks up to like Notion and HubSpot and Gmail, but then also like my random bespoke like internal API.' And you can't do that with, you know, any of the products from big tech. You can't do that with, you know, Claude or OpenAI, but our product, yeah, sure, you can integrate, you know, via API with this thing, with MCP with this thing, with a pre-built connector with this other thing, and they can all work together.
Garry Tan 16:33 ↗
Mhm. What's the state of search these days? I feel like we've seen incredible progress in AI and agents. And then when I have the same frustration that you had when you were thinking about working on email, I'll type in some keyword, you know, like YC, and I will get some cookie, some string that's stuffed in a receipt from some coffee shop and it has nothing to do with Y Combinator. The context isn't there. Apple Intelligence is rolling out, it takes like five days just to index everything into some sort of RAG database. Like, why are we falling behind there? Is that key to your strategy or is it something that it's a problem for someone else to work on?
Andrew Lee 17:18 ↗
So I think agents again have totally changed the game here. So in Shortwave, our email client, the way we did search was the, you know, the vector database approach, right? We embedded all your emails, we stuck them in a vector database, we had this interesting search stack, and the goal there was to have like the search results be good. And it turns out if you have a really smart model and you have an agent, you don't actually care that much if the search results are good as long as you can run lots of searches. So what we found in Tasklit is we don't need to like ingest all your email and index it. We can hook up to the regular APIs and just run a whole bunch of queries in parallel, look at the results, adapt, iterate, just keep refining. And so the results are almost as good without any infrastructure. So it's a lot cheaper. You can connect to more stuff. So I think if you use Tasklit, you can kind of hook it up to anything and you'll get surprisingly good search results without any special backend.
Garry Tan 18:08 ↗
But I imagine that that's sort of slow right now. And for a company like Google to roll that out to a billion users, you know, for free immediately, that's going to be really expensive. So that's still a ways out. They need to actually chop through that. But we could expect that search will get faster and better over the next couple years.
Andrew Lee 18:28 ↗
Yeah, I think that is the big drawback. Like as an example, for prep for Demo Day, I wanted to make sure that I chatted with the folks that were here that had reached out to me. And I've had people reaching out over a period of months. And so I took Fable 5 back when that was still a thing. And I pointed that at my Gmail and I said, 'Go find everyone who has cold emailed me in the last months who might be at Demo Day and like give me a spreadsheet with those folks.' And stack rank them, right? Like I want to know who should I talk to first and so on. And it spent like half an hour. It spent like $60 running this thing, right? But at the end of it I had this spreadsheet of like a hundred plus folks that was like carefully researched and ordered, and it found everyone. There was no one I could think of that it didn't find in that process. So if you're willing to spend 60 bucks, if it's worth it to you, like, great.
Garry Tan 19:17 ↗
I love it. Last question. Are you capital constrained? Like I'm assuming you have a bunch of offers, maybe you already finished your fundraise, but why even raise? It feels like you guys seem to be making... I would imagine with that kind of revenue ramp, it'd be hard to not be making money right now.
Andrew Lee 19:36 ↗
We are not capital constrained. We actually already closed a $20 million round in April with USV and Lightspeed and some other folks. But we're competing directly with Anthropic and OpenAI. They've obviously raised a lot more money and I think we can put it to use. We are raising more money now.
Garry Tan 19:53 ↗
I like just saying the actual reality because there's a lot of founders that would come on and be like, 'Well, actually, like we do something that like, you know,' and it's like, no, everyone is competing all the time and it's better to just accept it and play the game. So...
Andrew Lee 20:08 ↗
100%. And I think Corgi set a new bar with, you know, three weeks from what was it, Series B to C or whatever they did there. So, you know, why wait?
Garry Tan 20:16 ↗
Three days. Do it in three days.
Andrew Lee 20:18 ↗
Three days. I love it. Awesome. Thank you for coming on.
Garry Tan 20:21 ↗
Yeah, great to meet you, Andrew. Congratulations on all. Talk to you soon.
Andrew Lee 20:24 ↗
Talk soon. Have a good one.
Garry Tan 20:26 ↗
Let me tell you all about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest will be sitting in that same seat, slotting in in just a second. We have... We'll be working on... Eden Robotics... the microphone. Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Good. Alexander says, 'I pay for Starlink. It's a great product.' Cursor is also a great product. Codex is a great product and Claude with Fable is a ridiculous product. That's the main difference between now and 1999. All of this stuff is awesome. So, total white pill, then read the follow-up.
Connor Hayes 21:04 ↗
I don't think you can really compare this to 1999. I think it's actually unprecedented. If AI doesn't work, the global debt bomb explodes and there's a great depression. The 1999 bubble popped and things were generally fine.
Garry Tan 21:16 ↗
Yeah. So it is higher stakes but it's more impactful. So he's... I mean it's a good point to not try and draw too much comparison to 1999 just because it's a technology-driven boom. It is very, very different in terms of the financial structure and also the impact, the revenues, the rollout, the opportunity. All of these things were just in higher stakes territory, I suppose. Anyway, we have our next guest from Eden Robotics in the YC Demo Day stage. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
Stamatis Floratos 21:52 ↗
Hey guys, all good. How about yourselves?
Garry Tan 21:55 ↗
We're doing great. Great. Thank you so much. Introduce yourself and the company.
Stamatis Floratos 21:59 ↗
Yeah, so I'm Stam, CEO and co-founder of Eden Robotics. We're making general-purpose robots for manufacturing, warehousing initially, and everything else right after that.
Garry Tan 22:10 ↗
How general are we going? Humanoid? Are we going wheels? Are we going... semi-humanoids? Semi-humanoid. What does that mean? Centaur. Yeah, centaur. So the body, the legs are... there's four legs like a horse and a human. But yeah, semi-humanoid. What does that actually mean?
Stamatis Floratos 22:28 ↗
So that means it's a wheeled-base robot. So it has wheels. But it has two arms which are placed like a human in our shoulders, same way we have. And it also doesn't have dexterous hands. It has grippers, which, fun fact, can do more than 80% of work in industry.
Garry Tan 22:44 ↗
Interesting. What about the wheels are important to decide? Like a lot of manufacturing facilities have very flat floors, so I imagine you don't need really any stair climbing ability which some wheeled robots can do. But do you need to be omnidirectional? Do you need to change path? Is it just about optimizing battery life? Like what are the trade-offs that you decide when you're building the base?
Stamatis Floratos 23:11 ↗
Yeah. So when you're building a base, really, when you're going with wheeled, it's not going to be as general purpose as legs. Like legs could go anywhere. But it doesn't have to be, and you have a massive gain in both cost and energy. Legs are extremely expensive in terms of energy and also in terms of like simply cost.
Garry Tan 23:31 ↗
And also I imagine you can put way more battery pack on top of like the wheeled base, right? Half our base is just the battery. So half the base is just the battery and then the other half is the compute and that's it. So how long... is there some sort of like sweet spot for once you have a robot that can roll around and do work in a manufacturing plant for 6 hours without needing to recharge? That's the sweet spot. You know how like 300 miles of range was like the sweet spot for electric vehicles and under that you start getting range anxiety.
Stamatis Floratos 24:03 ↗
Yeah. So I think 6 hours is too low. Right now our robot is using a car battery. It can run for 12 hours. But with our own...
Garry Tan 24:12 ↗
Not an electric car battery, just like one of those like bricks. That's a car battery.
Stamatis Floratos 24:16 ↗
Exactly. One of a really big car battery. And with our own battery...
Hugo Frisk 24:21 ↗
Design, it can go for 20 hours and optimize charging for like these four hours and not have to like stop for four and work for 20, but like optimize throughout the time to charge enough.
John Coogan 24:30 ↗
There's a car battery in there. You thinking about putting a V8 in there?
Hugo Frisk 24:32 ↗
Maybe one day.
John Coogan 24:34 ↗
Why not?
Hugo Frisk 24:34 ↗
Probably not.
John Coogan 24:39 ↗
So, one of the, you know, we've had a bunch of robotics founders on. I've been trying to understand what some of the kind of like economic challenges there's going to be to rolling out, you know, humanoid-esque robots. When I see some of these humanoid form factors, I'm thinking like, look how many different motors it has. How much wear is each of the motors going to be taking at any given point? And then like trying to run the numbers on like what is the cost of the unit? What is the depreciation going to look like over the year? How often are you going to have to be repairing different components to actually make it competitive with a human, which you can hire for, let's say, 30 to $40,000 a year depending on minimum wage in a, you know, a certain area or type of role, because like the, you know, aside from humans being like cool and funny, they also go home after work and they feed themselves and they repair, you know, they sort of are repairing themselves while they're sleeping, right? So that's like sort of off-balance sheet sort of like activity that's happening that ultimately benefits the business because somebody goes home, eats, sleeps, and then they come back to work refreshed, ready to go.
Hugo Frisk 25:58 ↗
That's a crazy way to describe human workers. But I get it.
John Coogan 26:03 ↗
But yeah, I'm just like comparing these two things. A robot, it doesn't go home at the end of the day. It might need to be repaired. It might need to be updated, and it doesn't happen unless the company actually pays for it.
Hugo Frisk 26:18 ↗
So the biggest kind of like hardware risk factor is just the actuators. Really nothing else would require maintenance. Everything else would be able to last a pretty long time. Right now we're at this point where you have actuators that are actually good enough to last like 3 years and last this over usage. It used to be that these actuators would overheat very quickly and you would be able to run for a very short amount of time. And there are some humanoids today, like for example Unitree robots, they're very famous for overheating very, very quickly.
But there are actuators in the market, and we are using such actuators that actually can sustain long hours of operation. We ran it, for example, for 10 hours during Alumni Demo Day. There was no hardware issue when it came to the actuators, and it went pretty reliably. We expect that these kind of actuators would have a useful life of about 3 years. And in the case of the maintenance, so our whole thing, by the way, is we're not selling these robots. So we're selling the labor, and in fact we're not even leasing them on a monthly basis. We're charging per hour. So we're charging $10 per hour, which we actually found that customers love that idea much more than they love the lease idea because they have no mental framework, right? They have the mental framework of a human worker. And so how the maintenance would go is if a customer has a robot somehow breaks, there's a problem with it.
John Coogan 27:41 ↗
And sorry, is it per hour that the robot is actually running?
Hugo Frisk 27:45 ↗
Yes. So it's per hour.
John Coogan 27:47 ↗
So you're not just saying, I'm going to charge you 24 hours a day for this period. It's like they're only paying if they're getting actual.
Garry Tan 27:53 ↗
It's like a Waymo. You're used to paying 20 bucks to get across town. You pay 20 bucks to get across town.
Hugo Frisk 27:58 ↗
Exactly. We do send minimums obviously because we need to keep the hardware at the facility, but it's just whatever is enough for us to keep the hardware there. Everything else is adapting based on usage.
John Coogan 28:08 ↗
Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming.
Garry Tan 28:11 ↗
Did you, you already get the round done?
Hugo Frisk 28:13 ↗
Not yet, but we're very close.
Garry Tan 28:15 ↗
Good luck. Love it. Good luck.
John Coogan 28:16 ↗
Great to meet you. Come back on soon.
Hugo Frisk 28:18 ↗
Have a great one.
John Coogan 28:18 ↗
Thank you. Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon.
While we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.
Garry Tan 28:34 ↗
Breaking from Semaphore.
John Coogan 28:36 ↗
Yes.
Garry Tan 28:36 ↗
Netflix lost out to Fox in pursuit of Roku.
John Coogan 28:42 ↗
How is that possible? I mean, yeah, it is interesting the lore there. Netflix sort of created Roku. But the real question is like, why would Netflix want to buy Roku? Like the boxes, that just seems like it makes so much less sense. So in terms of lost out, I can imagine it's a platform. They sit as an application.
Garry Tan 29:01 ↗
Yeah.
John Coogan 29:02 ↗
On a platform that represents like 40% of connected streaming hours.
Garry Tan 29:07 ↗
Yeah. I don't know. I'm not surprised they lost out because I would be surprised if Netflix, like when Netflix was bidding for Warner Brothers, that made a lot more sense to me. More library, more studio production for Netflix to distribute. But finding a second distributor when they're already competing in the ads-based model, they're moving towards a cheaper distribution thing. They're already installed by default on most connected TVs.
John Coogan 29:31 ↗
I just think it's a way to expand like overall engagement, watch hours. They're already getting into ads. Why would they not want to have like more basically like more watch hours to monitor?
Garry Tan 29:43 ↗
Maybe, maybe, maybe. It seems like Roku is in way better hands with Fox than Netflix. So it makes sense why the deal broke that way. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest. Hugo Frisk from Tenet Industries is the co-founder and CEO. Hugo, how you doing?
Hugo Frisk 29:58 ↗
What's going on?
John Coogan 29:59 ↗
I'm doing great over here. Yeah, thank you so much for the time. Introduce yourself and the company. How you doing?
Hugo Frisk 30:05 ↗
Yeah, so I'm Hugo. I'm co-founder of Tenet Industries and we're focusing on mass producibility and low cost for the defense system, basically commoditizing it.
John Coogan 30:14 ↗
Mhm.
Hugo Frisk 30:15 ↗
So I'm from the electronics manufacturing industry, and my co-founder, we're three co-founders, but one of them is from the automotive industry. So basically taking this like mass producibility, those concepts and bringing them to the defense industry.
John Coogan 30:30 ↗
How low cost do you want to go? I mean, we're all familiar with like the couple hundred price point for a DJI product. Where do you want to sit?
Hugo Frisk 30:41 ↗
Yeah, that's about it. It depends on the customer really, but yeah, we want to match. Cheaper than China is our slogan.
John Coogan 30:48 ↗
Okay. And then how are you thinking about the actual product? We've been hearing a lot about the fiber optic controlled drones that don't need to deal with wireless jamming or anything like that. Where is the demand for the next generation product, or is it just what we know from a DJI quadrotor? What we saw there, are there any specific demands for the defense context that make it a little bit different than what's already out there?
Hugo Frisk 31:17 ↗
Yeah, the main factor is the range basically. It's range and the lift power. Can you lift, what's the payload weight? So it's all about increasing the range, and the main limiting factor for the range is oftentimes the radio, right? So that's why they're using like these fiber radios or these fiber optic cables because then you get longer range without getting jammed. But unfortunately I think the fiber market, it's kind of only relevant for this bubble in time because to increase the range, which is the main like what customers want, you can do either a better radio, basically you can develop better radios and that's maybe the first step, and the next step is doing autonomy, right? If you have autonomy, then why do you need any contact at all?
John Coogan 32:05 ↗
Sure, yeah. How are you capable of, or do you think it's going to be possible to do on-device autonomy on a drone that size? 2 kg, that's not enough to run some serious GPU, but what is possible these days?
Hugo Frisk 32:19 ↗
No, exactly. You can put an Nvidia Jetson on it, but the Nvidia Jetson is like five times as expensive as the drone itself.
John Coogan 32:26 ↗
Sure.
Hugo Frisk 32:26 ↗
So then it's not really a one-time use kind of deal.
John Coogan 32:29 ↗
Yeah.
Hugo Frisk 32:29 ↗
So but there are these embedded chips for AI. It's just you can't run an LLM model on it. You can do some visual recognition and maybe you can do some like prioritization of different targets. But the main factor here about the autonomy is not really the vision model. That's like a solved problem. This is possible. The main problem there is navigation. And how do you get to the near vicinity to your target? How do you arrive in like navigating for 20 km without a GPS? Because you can't use a GPS on the front line. It's not possible. It's jammed out. It's super easy to jam out GPS and to spoof it. They will say that you're in China or something while you're in Ukraine or you're in Sweden or wherever. So that's the main problem. How do you navigate without the GPS? Because the last mile, which is basically the targeting, that's a solved problem that was solved in the 60s with missiles. I don't get the companies that are pitching that.
John Coogan 33:24 ↗
Yeah.
What is your business model going to look like, or what does it look like today? You're trying to commoditize the category, push pricing down as much as possible, but you know what are your margins going to look like and how do you expect to structure deals with different buyers?
Hugo Frisk 33:42 ↗
So right now it's kind of this pipeline. How do you scale a defense company? Because it's not really possible to get these deals as a new startup, as deals straight to the state, at least not where we're looking in Europe. But so what you want to do is you start with the private companies, you sell to them. So we're selling to these counter-US companies. This month we went from five orders to 350 orders. And then you start selling to this subprime, it's called, like basically you're selling to a company that's selling directly to the government, and those are really interesting because they already have the channels to sell to these governments. And then once you have established like your manufacturing line and your capability and people trust you, then you can sell directly to the governments.
John Coogan 34:35 ↗
Chat asks, how does their drone survive high power microwave machines like Leonidas? Is the answer that it doesn't, but you...
can produce at such scale that you can kind of high power microwave machines rolled out everywhere. But what is your take on microwave as a counter-UAS force right now?
Stamatis Floratos 34:57 ↗
I think microwave is like we've tested with these people having shotguns and shooting down our drones with shotguns, like radar-controlled shotguns basically, and it's a short-range system. It only reaches 100 meters. I don't know about this microwave, how long is the reach there, but I would guess it's pretty small.
John Coogan 35:19 ↗
Yeah.
Stamatis Floratos 35:19 ↗
So then you need a lot of these systems and people don't have that. They don't have these systems every 100 meters.
John Coogan 35:25 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not every military installation or unit is going to have every possible counter-UAS. So it's sort of a game of rock, paper, scissors on the battlefield these days.
Stamatis Floratos 35:35 ↗
Makes sense.
John Coogan 35:35 ↗
And then the other thing is like you said, like just send more.
Stamatis Floratos 35:39 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was saying. It's like you have, you know, your five exquisite systems. Well, we're going to, you know, outproduce.
John Coogan 35:46 ↗
Yeah. Is everything hand-built right now? Are you already working on automation? I imagine that low-cost manufacturability means more on supply chain and design, but what does the actual rollout look like over time?
Stamatis Floratos 36:03 ↗
Yeah. So when we started this, we wanted to produce with robots, still do, but basically our background is this manufacturing background. So we're really good at designing for manufacturing, designing it so it's really easy to assemble. So we designed it. So how would it be easy for a robot to build this?
John Coogan 36:22 ↗
Mhm.
Stamatis Floratos 36:22 ↗
Well, then it needs a few parts and it needs a few screws and no soldering and it needs to be assembled all from one side.
So that was the starting and then it turns out once you do that it's very, very easy to assemble. So it takes two minutes for a human to assemble it.
John Coogan 36:36 ↗
Wow.
Stamatis Floratos 36:37 ↗
So then why do you need a robot?
John Coogan 36:42 ↗
Good point.
Stamatis Floratos 36:42 ↗
Well, your batch mate will have to make a pitch for you.
John Coogan 36:45 ↗
How's investor interest so far? Have you been busy the last couple weeks or are you starting a process now?
Stamatis Floratos 36:51 ↗
Yeah. Yeah, super busy. It's actually my co-founder Emil who's doing that. So he's always on call and I'm doing customer demos and stuff. Yeah.
John Coogan 37:01 ↗
Very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Congrats on all the progress. We'll talk to you soon.
Stamatis Floratos 37:06 ↗
Yeah, no problem. Cheers.
John Coogan 37:07 ↗
Goodbye.
Ryan Peterson says, 'With yesterday's 20% SpaceX pop, Elon made more money than Warren Buffett made in his entire career.'
These headlines are going to get crazy because I mean I see some of them getting community noted, but it's like a single day will move more than like all of Bill Gates's current net worth, that type of thing. Those headlines are going to pop off consistently. The crazy ones is like there's going to be down days. Like there's going to be just random lost more money today than any person in history.
He lost more money than Brazil makes in a trillion years, you know, and because like whenever the big numbers get contextualized, it's always very entertaining. It was up another 14% after hours, though. But the numbers are staggering when you're in the one trillion dollar club.
JB says, 'Is this everyone's first IPO? It's silly now as it approaches Amazon valuation.' Well, we passed that. But the float is low until the lockup of nearly every retail investor on Earth wants to be involved. You're going to get stupid moves. Then the float opens up and all the retail people are stuck for years.
What does that mean?
Just say you haven't seen the mass driver demo, buddy.
Or the next data center. I mean that's the really interesting thing with Cursor. There's all this debate over like they have a deal with Anthropic, they have a deal with Google. Cursor obviously wants compute, but talking to Gavin Baker, it sounds like there might be a lot more terrestrial compute coming online in the very short term, and that is valuable. They're monetizing this very effectively. And so you could see a short-term revenue ramp just driven from sort of the boring NeoCloud stuff that monetizes really well. And then that provides, you know, it's like the Model 3. It's going to be the economic engine that provides the capital for data centers in space, mass driver on the moon, all that stuff needs fuel for the fire. Anyway,
ad lllo has some data. SpaceX the current approximate price to sales is 150x. Amazon is 3.6, Microsoft 9.2. See, people read this as a bear SpaceX take, but imagine if Amazon started trading at SpaceX's price to sales.
Be probably be like a hundred trillion dollar company. Anyway, our next guest might be building the next hundred trillion dollar company. We have Payton Case from Dispatch here building re-entry vehicles. We're returning space manufactured payloads in semiconductors, biotech, and pharma. Welcome to the show, Payton. How you doing? Oh, wait. Sorry. Do I have the wrong person?
Wrong. I think there makes up for the... Oh, we switched around. Efrain Torres, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself for us so we get it correct.
Efrain Torres 39:50 ↗
Yeah. So, hi everyone. My name is Dr. Efrain Torres and we're from Adilante building whole body mobile MRIs for cancer screening.
John Coogan 39:55 ↗
Amazing. There we go.
Are there any downsides to constantly getting MRIs?
Efrain Torres 40:00 ↗
No. So, MRI is non-cancer-causing radiation. CT and X-ray, there's limitations.
John Coogan 40:06 ↗
Got it.
Efrain Torres 40:06 ↗
But MRI, I mean, I've scanned myself thousands of times on this.
John Coogan 40:11 ↗
Okay. So, are you the most scanned person in history?
Efrain Torres 40:15 ↗
No, my professor takes that one. He likes to tell he's the most scanned and published brain in the history, five times a day or something.
John Coogan 40:22 ↗
Yeah, that's how you get it. Yeah.
How mobile are we talking? Are we talking mobile like it can be in a truck that comes to the town and you go like getting your body fat measured in a water tank or are we talking like Fitbit, I clip it to my waistband and I'm constantly getting MRI?
Efrain Torres 40:40 ↗
Yeah. No, we're talking trailer. So, I would buy like a 4350 shows up outside of a clinic.
John Coogan 40:44 ↗
I like the 4350.
Efrain Torres 40:46 ↗
There you go. Right. We did actually calculate it just for that. This whole body screen $250 and there you go.
John Coogan 40:53 ↗
$250. Okay. Okay.
So, what... I'm getting a little feedback right now. Can we deal with that? Thank you. So, yeah. Sorry.
What does a normal MRI cost?
Efrain Torres 41:04 ↗
Yeah. I mean, Prenuvo, if you look at their pricing, they're $2,500 and it can go up to $3,500. So we're on 10 times cheaper than everything on the market.
John Coogan 41:13 ↗
And what is driving that?
Efrain Torres 41:17 ↗
Yeah. So there's two things. The first thing is our technology. Like our system is 80% lighter, consumes 60% less power. It's actually eight times quieter too. And all of this lets us have the operational gains. So we don't sell the systems, we sell scans. So it makes our internal operation cost really low.
John Coogan 41:37 ↗
Interesting.
Efrain Torres 41:38 ↗
And the shelf life of these systems are 10 to 12 years. So we can charge 250 a scan and actually our gross margin actually ends up being 55% because of how long these systems last.
John Coogan 41:48 ↗
Do you have to go through medical device approval with the FDA?
Efrain Torres 41:51 ↗
Yeah. No, we're going through medical device approval next year as a class 2 510(k). It's a fairly straightforward path because of the fact that there's a lot of regulatory precedent. Where there's regulatory risk arises when you're like the first MRI, first therapeutic and things like that.
John Coogan 42:06 ↗
Okay, so what's the backstory on the company and the IP? Did you cook this up with your professor? Is he involved with the business? What's the history?
Efrain Torres 42:15 ↗
Yeah. No, not the professor. He's not involved. So me and my co-founder, we've known each other 10 years, went to grad school together specifically to spin out a startup to disrupt the MRI industry if you think about it. And so we developed an IP in grad school, got that patent issued. Adilante has exclusive rights to it. And yeah, so it's been cooking for a good bit here, but MRI is a hard problem to solve and that's why it's taking us... Yeah, doing well.
John Coogan 42:39 ↗
So, very cool.
So you're going through FDA approval. Can you actually sell the product in some advanced form yet or is it just like demonstration for medical, for like research purposes at this point?
Efrain Torres 42:52 ↗
Yeah. So, I love this question because it goes to one of the creativity of our company. We are deploying this year, but it's of traditional MRIs. The traditional MRIs, we're going to put them in semi-trucks and it's all FDA cleared. We can go to our customers. We have 11 LOIs already, 19.75 million, and start building that distribution channel now.
John Coogan 43:12 ↗
Yeah.
Efrain Torres 43:12 ↗
And over the next year, right, we're going to get five to 10 of these trailers out there, all breaking even. But then come Q1 2028 when our product is cleared, you just switch it and it's like a lever to profitability.
John Coogan 43:23 ↗
That's amazing. Wow. Cool. Congratulations.
Efrain Torres 43:26 ↗
Cool. Thank you.
John Coogan 43:27 ↗
How's the fundraising been going?
Efrain Torres 43:29 ↗
It's been going well. We only have a small amount of allocation left of our non-leads and having a lot of exciting conversations with potential leads.
John Coogan 43:37 ↗
Are you seeing more interest from investors who have invested in health tech, medical tech, FDA approved devices that crowd, or are there tech investors who are sort of exhausted with the AI stuff and want to broaden their horizons?
Efrain Torres 43:55 ↗
Yeah, honestly we're getting a lot of interest from deep tech generalists and just tech because MRI is very well known in the space. Everyone has a story of someone that didn't get an MRI in time whether it be from like a sports injury to something more severe like the cancer wasn't caught in time. And so we've had interest from deep tech investors, generalists, health tech as well.
John Coogan 44:20 ↗
Well, congrats.
Where's the name from? I got to know.
Efrain Torres 44:23 ↗
Yeah. So all credit goes to my wife. So, Adilante stands for a couple things.
John Coogan 44:28 ↗
Our scientific approaches are known as radio frequency adiabatic pulses.
Stamatis Floratos 44:33 ↗
And my parents' saying is 'palante,' which in Spanish is 'keep going forward.' Also tattooed on my forearm here.
John Coogan 44:40 ↗
There we go.
Stamatis Floratos 44:41 ↗
And so 'palante' is very close to 'adelante,' which means 'go forward' in Spanish. And it kind of goes that no matter what happens to us, we're just going to keep on making progress every single day.
John Coogan 44:51 ↗
Very cool. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Stamatis Floratos 44:54 ↗
Logo chest piece.
John Coogan 44:59 ↗
There you go.
Have a great rest of your demo day.
Stamatis Floratos 45:02 ↗
We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.
John Coogan 45:04 ↗
Likewise. Yeah.
Up next we have a good buddy of mine, Russell Smith from Nine Mothers. He's back in YC. I went through YC with him in summer of 2012, 14 years ago.
Jordi Hays 45:20 ↗
Overnight success.
John Coogan 45:22 ↗
There we go. But I'm excited to catch up with Russell Smith, introduce him to everyone.
Jordi Hays 45:27 ↗
Tyler was what, one or two?
John Coogan 45:30 ↗
He was probably seven years old or something. Yeah.
But he was working on AI mission systems for...
Jordi Hays 45:38 ↗
Can we get Tyler in here?
John Coogan 45:39 ↗
Focused on counter-drone protection.
Jordi Hays 45:41 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. In between the next guest, let's slot in some Tyler for sure.
John Coogan 45:45 ↗
Anyway, we have Russ Smith from Nine Mothers in the TBPN Ultra Dome at YC Demo Day. How you doing, Russ?
Russell Smith 45:53 ↗
Hey, good to see you.
John Coogan 45:54 ↗
It's been a long time.
Russell Smith 45:55 ↗
Been way too long.
John Coogan 45:57 ↗
Thank you so much for taking the time. I'm glad we could make this happen. For those who don't know you, introduce yourself. Give us a little bit of the YC history, the entrepreneurial backstory, how long you've been an entrepreneur, and then take us through the current company.
Russell Smith 46:09 ↗
Yeah. I mean, I was an entrepreneur before I did YC, so like in the UK, but got into YC in the same batch as you. That's how we met in summer '12.
John Coogan 46:19 ↗
Yeah.
Russell Smith 46:19 ↗
The batch that basically broke YC at the time and made them change it.
John Coogan 46:24 ↗
70 companies looks... so YC had been like 30. Yeah. Yeah. You can tell it.
Russell Smith 46:30 ↗
Yeah. It scaled and then they decided to change how it worked and it's the genesis of how they do groups now, right? It was basically a free-for-all at the time where the loudest companies or the most intense ones would get the most — well, not deliberately the most attention, but would...
John Coogan 46:47 ↗
Yeah. It's sort of natural.
Russell Smith 46:48 ↗
Yeah. Get the most love, right?
John Coogan 46:49 ↗
It was funny because it was the YC batch that broke YC. Everyone said, 'Oh, YC's over. It's gotten too big.' And then it was like Coinbase, Airbnb — or Coinbase, Instacart, Zapier, a couple other companies that became huge.
Russell Smith 47:04 ↗
Clever.
John Coogan 47:05 ↗
Clever. Yeah. Benchling, like a bunch of great companies that came out of it.
Russell Smith 47:08 ↗
A bunch of decacorns and unicorns in that batch.
John Coogan 47:12 ↗
Soylent as well, right? As in... I remember going to your Tenderloin office and carrying bags of your early product out in little bags.
Russell Smith 47:25 ↗
1,500 bucks a month for three people to live in San Francisco.
John Coogan 47:30 ↗
I remember that. You guys, didn't you move in there when you had like 18 grand or something?
Russell Smith 47:35 ↗
Yeah. I think we had like 20 grand left in the bank.
John Coogan 47:37 ↗
And you were like, 'Good. This will last us like 18 months.'
Russell Smith 47:40 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We paid our rent a year in advance, owned our laptops. We just had to pay internet and food and that was it. It was pretty...
John Coogan 47:47 ↗
Where Soylent came from, right?
Russell Smith 47:49 ↗
Eat that. It's cheaper.
John Coogan 47:50 ↗
Anyway, we're not here to reminisce about the old times. Tell us about Nine Mothers.
Russell Smith 47:54 ↗
Yeah. So we make AI mission systems for the DoD and our first product is counter-drone. And we make a very small robot. So it's 35 pounds. We sell it for about 150k and it's capable of defeating multiple fast-moving drones day or night, kinetically. So yeah, it's basically a gun on a robot and then we build all of the models for day, night, build acoustic sensors, build models for that and then basically capable of shooting down small fast targets.
John Coogan 48:25 ↗
Interesting.
Jordi Hays 48:26 ↗
Can we pull up the video? Because I have no idea what this robot looks like.
John Coogan 48:29 ↗
Yeah, let's pull up the video.
Jordi Hays 48:33 ↗
We'll have the team pull up the video. I'm curious about the decision around acoustic models versus video models. There's so much energy around...
Russell Smith 48:44 ↗
We do all of it.
Jordi Hays 48:45 ↗
You do all of it.
Russell Smith 48:45 ↗
And so the key here is that no sensor is perfect, right? And so multiple sensors gives you more chance at finding something. And then for instance, acoustics is bad on some of the projects we're doing that are around turbines, right? On Chinooks or other vehicles because it gets drowned out. But then radar is bad in some environments and vision is bad in some. And so the fusion, the ability to fuse all that together into a coherent picture and also adapt to new sensors means that we can stop more things, right? And the key here is that this is kind of like the same problem that you saw in Iraq or Afghanistan with IEDs. These are just now flying IEDs. And all the demos you've seen existingly are almost all of slow-moving targets. So like sub-10 m/s, sub-10 m/hour in some cases, drones people are struggling to shoot down. And that's just not reality, right? As in we've been shooting and demoing — as in we shoot faster internally, but demoing 65 mph small drones repeatedly, like, and that's way closer to reality if that makes sense.
John Coogan 49:52 ↗
Where does the name come from, dude?
Russell Smith 49:54 ↗
It's Norse mythology. So we're nerds and then our product names are all around the same mythology.
John Coogan 50:02 ↗
I like naming's hard, but yeah.
Russell Smith 50:05 ↗
That's where it came from. That's the story.
John Coogan 50:07 ↗
That's good. What does it actually shoot? Is it shooting like 5.56, like some commodity round?
Russell Smith 50:12 ↗
We can adapt to anything, as in we can do 5.56. But the thing that works the best is 12 gauge. And so we make our own — we use a gun off the shelf at the moment. We're also developing our own belt-fed shotgun system, like as in the world's first belt-fed, and that will be first firing in the next 3 weeks. We also make ammo, right?
John Coogan 50:35 ↗
You make ammo.
Russell Smith 50:36 ↗
Yeah. It's basically closer to match grade, which is like tighter tolerances and then slightly higher pressure. But owning everything, like the full stack, that means we have better results. It's the short version.
John Coogan 50:48 ↗
So raises and blades for defense, right? I mean, you're obviously a very experienced founder. Where's the company right now? Do you already have a facility set up, a staff hired? Like I imagine that you're pretty far along for YC.
Russell Smith 51:02 ↗
We're a little later on. So we are — we've sold like $1.6 million of stuff to the DoD, as in direct sales of units, not research and dev stuff, like actual sales, delivered units to DoD. And then we're expecting to sell over 100 units this year and a thousand next year. Have multiple believable paths to both. But yeah, aim is to do over 100 mil of rev next year and it's looking completely believable. Should hit 50 this year.
Jordi Hays 51:31 ↗
Super impressive. Question for you. Let's say there's a front line and you set up a — I imagine, you know, let's say US military sets up a bunch of these, drones are flying over. How do you manage friendly fire? Like let's say a drone passes the line, there's actual troops back here and you want to take out the drone, but you're effectively shooting rounds into the air. How?
Russell Smith 52:00 ↗
It's a great question and it's a complicated answer and it depends on the mode the system's in. We can ignore stuff that's flying away from us and only prioritize stuff that's coming towards us. We can also take signals off networks they have if they know which drones are theirs. Really the common thing is that they don't actually have that kind of data and so the operator can choose to not run it full automatic and then choose which targets. But mostly they will shoot them because of blue-on-blue risk if it's not drones they are physically flying in the same group. Right. The problem is, is it a friendly drone that's misidentified you or not? If it's on a network and we know it's not, has it still misidentified you? That's where you get into the problem at this kind of range, right?
John Coogan 52:46 ↗
Well, congratulations on the progress. Really exciting growth. Great to catch up with you. Come back and we'll talk more soon. Have a great one.
Russell Smith 52:56 ↗
Great to catch up.
John Coogan 52:56 ↗
See you soon. Goodbye.
Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Payton Case from Dispatch. I accidentally introduced him a little bit too soon, but we got him sitting down at YC Demo Day.
Payton Case 53:20 ↗
What's going on?
John Coogan 53:21 ↗
How you doing?
Payton Case 53:21 ↗
Yeah, it's good to be here. Good to see you guys.
John Coogan 53:23 ↗
Good to see you, too. Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Tell us what you're building.
Payton Case 53:27 ↗
Yeah, so I'm Payton. I'm the founder of Dispatch Space. We build satellites for manufacturing products in space. And these are for the most advanced materials in the world that can only be made in microgravity and we bring them back down to Earth.
John Coogan 53:40 ↗
What specifically are you building? Because the space economy has gotten so fractured at this point. There's multiple launch providers. There's satellite bus providers. There's Impulse Space. Tom Mueller has an extra propulsion system that you can bolt on. What is the key product that you're focused on for this early stage of the company?
Payton Case 54:02 ↗
Yeah, we build the re-entry vehicles. So the satellite is in space, you've made your product, and now you need to get back down to Earth. You're flying at Mach 25, you're surrounded by a plasma that's 3,000 degrees, and we build the heat shields and satellites that can survive that environment.
Jordi Hays 54:17 ↗
Mhm. Who is doing stuff in space? Like I live in the world of Varda very closely. The elephant in the room is that we are very familiar with because Delian's our friend, and it seems like obviously they're going vertically integrated, building the re-entry vehicle and also doing the contracts with biotech companies and pharmaceutical companies. But it does seem like the industry is expanding. So who are the other buyers that aren't working with Varda that you have an opportunity to work with?
Payton Case 54:49 ↗
Yeah, the biggest players are semiconductors, pharmaceutical and biotech. Varda is very vertical in that pharmaceutical application. We're the biggest bulls on the semiconductor space. We think that the regulatory environment makes it so that you can come to market a lot faster and the applications of growing those gallium nitride and indium aluminumide crystals in space are massive and that's where we're bullish on it.
Jordi Hays 55:14 ↗
Massive. I'm down. Everything that touches semiconductors is massive. You say semiconductor, you're a trillion-dollar company. But the timelines — it feels like we're a decade away from making a chip in space, making a chip on the moon. Like even the big SpaceX bulls are saying, 'Okay, actually doing the mass driver, that's maybe more than 10 years away. Let's focus.' So maybe another question is, what traction are you talking about this Demo Day? What are you...
Payton Case 55:41 ↗
Yeah. So we have a pilot mission that we're flying with a paying customer to grow semiconductor crystals in space. And we're not talking about doing like the lithography or assembly on iPhones in space. It's earlier in the supply chain. So chips come from wafers. Wafers actually come from these cylindrical crystals. And when you grow those in microgravity, you get up to a thousand times fewer defects. So you grow those crystals in space, bring them back down to Earth, and then you cut them into wafers. And that is actually happening now on the ISS. And these companies are looking to scale. They just don't have the vehicles to do it.
John Coogan 56:11 ↗
Oh, very cool.
Jordi Hays 56:12 ↗
How did you make your first dollar?
Payton Case 56:14 ↗
The first dollar was a deposit on the pilot program.
Jordi Hays 56:17 ↗
No, no, no. In life. In life. I want the founder origin.
Payton Case 56:22 ↗
Oh, yeah. It was probably working in a smoothie shop that I totally loved the smoothies of. Wink, wink. I made a few tips and that was about it. But...
Jordi Hays 56:32 ↗
You realized you weren't cut out for the smoothie business. You got to go semis.
John Coogan 56:38 ↗
You were meant to go to the heavens.
Payton Case 56:40 ↗
Yeah. Fabs in space are a little easier than getting tips at a smoothie shop for me.
John Coogan 56:46 ↗
That's amazing. What's the state of the space investors that have attended Demo Day? Are you seeing traction? How's the fundraise going?
Payton Case 56:55 ↗
Yeah, the fundraising is going great. Obviously, IPOs are very useful for us. So that's been a great indicator of where the entire market is going. We're getting close to closing out that round, which is super exciting for us. And really that goal is getting back to work as quickly as possible and using that money to go build great things in space.
John Coogan 57:13 ↗
That's fantastic.
Jordi Hays 57:14 ↗
Dan in the chat said, 'From smoothies to a smooth operator.'
Payton Case 57:17 ↗
I like that.
John Coogan 57:18 ↗
That's great.
Payton Case 57:18 ↗
Well, thank you so much.
John Coogan 57:20 ↗
Great to meet you, Payton. Congrats on all the progress.
Payton Case 57:22 ↗
Have a great one. Thanks so much.
John Coogan 57:23 ↗
We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.
Payton Case 57:25 ↗
Goodbye.
John Coogan 57:26 ↗
Our next guest is Ash from Madron building cooling systems for data centers that are more power — I'm assuming he's working on reducing water consumption in data centers so that almonds can water.
Jordi Hays 57:40 ↗
Yeah. Yeah. This guy's an almond industry plant for sure.
John Coogan 57:44 ↗
Anyway, let me tell you about Railway first. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.
Thank you, Jordi. Let's bring in Ash from Madron. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you for taking the time.
Akshay Trikha 58:03 ↗
What's up? Hey guys, huge fan. So appreciate the opportunity to talk to you guys.
John Coogan 58:07 ↗
Fantastic. Glad to have you on the show. Introduce yourself, introduce the company. I have tons of questions, but let's start with the basics.
Akshay Trikha 58:15 ↗
Sounds good. So I'm Ash, building Madron. We're building hyper-efficient cooling for data centers. So specifically, we've engineered a thermodynamic process that works really well in hot and dry climates, which is where most of the hyperscaling is happening right now. And yeah, we have our demo that's running live at Demo Day today. So we're actually really excited to show people in person. But the big problem really is that data centers are limited today by power and not by chips or land. So cooling and power are two sides of the same coin. If you can save power on cooling, that's more power for your flops. And that's where our real value unlock is. So people can install more GPUs given the same grid permit, which takes years to get. To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, last year in Texas, SemiAnalysis said that there were 150 gigawatts worth of load requests to the Texas grid. Texas grid on a good day, 60 gigawatt, and only 1.5 gigawatt worth of those requests were actually approved by the local utilities. So it's a crazy scrambling time. Like Elon Musk was probably the first person to come up with a method of putting engines on the back of trucks, rolling them onto data centers for power. Boom Supersonic, whose ultimate goal is to be building supersonic jet planes, has had a slight pivot to selling supersonic jet engines and apparently they're crushing it. So it's a crazy time and it's the first time in a long time where a new company can come into the market and build a thermal industrial company.
Jordi Hays 59:29 ↗
So what is the bottleneck for you? Is it figuring out where your system — what data centers your system can fit in? Is it actually just how you have the demand and you're trying to meet it? Like what does your supply chain look like? Like what's standing between you and let's say not this round right now but the next one?
Akshay Trikha 59:47 ↗
Yeah, it's a great question. So we actually scaled our 1 kilowatt prototype 100 times during the batch to a 100 kilowatt prototype. We're going to be deploying our 1 megawatt version very soon. The 100 kilowatt prototype that's actually running live at Demo Day right now is going to be running our first pilot in 2 months. So really it's going to be between the 100 kilowatt and the 1 megawatt prototype, it's going to be figuring out how to elongate it and make it taller. So we've done the really hard work so far, but really it's just building a physical big version of it. So we've talked to hyperscalers. Their feedback is they just want a bigger version because they have such a huge demand. They're not really interested in 100 kilowatts, they're interested in 1 megawatt.
Jordi Hays 1:00:22 ↗
Okay, so 1 megawatt will be enough to get your first real orders, revenues with hyperscaler-type customers?
Akshay Trikha 1:00:30 ↗
Yeah, all the data center campuses would say, 'I'll take 10,000 please because I'm building 10 gigawatt.' I mean basically you chain them together, right?
Jordi Hays 1:00:36 ↗
But this is — I mean we saw in the video, it looks like a shipping container and essentially the input output — the output is just cold water, it takes in water. So you are agnostic to the design of what happens in the data center. I imagine you're not dependent on any particular chip or rack design. But then what energy is actually going into your system?
Akshay Trikha 1:01:00 ↗
Yes, exactly. It's a great question. So the energy is used to be the fans and the pumps. So actually circulating the fluids through the system. If I may brag about my co-founder a bit, we don't just design the physical box. He actually designed the thermodynamics, the mechanical structure, the electronics to power it all and then also the software to control it. We do this all in-house. We're big Tesla fanboys. All our competitors are outsourcing every single level of this engineering out and they're just integrating that and selling that as a product. So we've been able to get a lot of efficiency gains by just designing this all in-house with two people. So far we're fundraising and we're going to hire some more people, hire our friends in the Bay Area and building the 1 megawatt one with our own hands.
John Coogan 1:01:36 ↗
Fantastic.
Jordi Hays 1:01:37 ↗
Amazing. And so there's already a lot of energy on these campuses that you can draw from. So whether it's natural gas powered, powered from the grid, powered from nuclear, solar, whatever's going on, you're drawing from that, but your goal is to just draw more efficiently and take less of the power. So that can probably just go into the chips, right?
Akshay Trikha 1:01:57 ↗
Exactly. Yeah. You get a lot more inference value out of redirecting that power to your flops.
Jordi Hays 1:02:02 ↗
Okay. And then in terms of how you're pitching yourself at Demo Day, are you on the path to LOIs with hyperscalers? Are you working backwards from — are you doing business with neoclouds? Like what's the walk, crawl, run to actually create the economic flywheel to raise money and then go build this thing?
Akshay Trikha 1:02:19 ↗
Yeah, great question. So we've already started conversations with two hyperscalers. We're actually talking to a third one this week after Demo Day, which is super excited about. Let's go. One of our investors actually — we closed the check today. They're actually building $20 billion worth of data centers in Texas. So that's been really nice. But the really first — yeah, fantastic. The first thing for us is really going to be focusing on that pilot, just demonstrating that we can plug into an AI data center at scale, do it reliably, and then scale with our investor that we just partnered with today.
Jordi Hays 1:02:48 ↗
Yeah. And then what type of efficiency number actually draws the attention of a potential buyer? Is 1% enough? Is it 10%? Is it 50%? Like what's reasonable? Because I imagine we come in, we're 99% more efficient. Everyone's like, 'Yeah, that's not real.' But are we doing basis points here? Like how much of an impact do you need to have to actually move the needle? Because some of these projects are so big their bill for electricity might be hundreds of millions of dollars.
Akshay Trikha 1:03:21 ↗
Yeah. Exactly. Like guys, it's so crazy. My competitors are 100-year-old companies that have been designing the same thing for decades. There's this thing called the mechanical chiller. It's literally the same thing as your refrigerator at home and it costs $500 million per gigawatt. So people are really desperate to get away from these chillers and look for different types of cooling because that's actually eating up your grid permit. So that's a thing that actually costs 30% of your grid permit and we can do it for cheaper and we can actually have better opex as well. So really any percentage is okay. I think that like you can't quote like 0.1% gain but like people are thrilled if you have a 10% efficiency gain. And then also we're just in a supply crunch. So even if you just said, 'Hey, we have the exact same thing, but it actually will ship in the next couple months,' a lot of people might jump at that. So that's the benefit of being in...
Jordi Hays 1:04:04 ↗
What were you doing before this?
Akshay Trikha 1:04:06 ↗
Yeah, so I was actually scaling manufacturing at QuantumScape. So I was doing computer vision, working directly under the CTO, Tim Holme, founder CTO, took it all the way from inception to IPO. And I also did grad school at Berkeley studying material science. There's a material twist to this company we didn't get to talk about today, but we're doing something cool.
John Coogan 1:04:21 ↗
Very cool.
Jordi Hays 1:04:21 ↗
Very cool. I'll come back on after you raise. And it was great to meet you.
Akshay Trikha 1:04:25 ↗
Yeah, fantastic. Thanks, guys.
John Coogan 1:04:27 ↗
We'll talk to you soon. We're going to bring on some YC partners in about 4 minutes. Stay tuned. In the meantime, we can go back to the timeline back.
Jordi Hays 1:04:37 ↗
Talk about specs.
John Coogan 1:04:39 ↗
This is from Evan Spiegel.
Jordi Hays 1:04:41 ↗
Yes. And the Snap Specs are official.
John Coogan 1:04:44 ↗
$2,195 all-in-one AR glasses that Evan Spiegel has dubbed the next computer. $2,200. That's almost Apple Vision Pro numbers. That's expensive. It's going to be a lift. I feel like it's a lot. It seems like a lot of money. It's got to be...
Jordi Hays 1:05:10 ↗
Apple Vision Pro starts at $3,499. So, bit of a jump, but...
John Coogan 1:05:15 ↗
But this is a product that seemingly is trying to compete in the realm of like a — it's a mobile device. It's naturally a mobile device, unlike the Apple Vision Pro, which obviously some viral images on launch of people walking around with it. But I'm just thinking about like there are a lot of Apple fanboys who buy every...
Jordi Hays 1:05:33 ↗
Get this guy on right now.
John Coogan 1:05:35 ↗
What?

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APA

Tan, G. (2026, June 16). YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips, Threads hits 500M Users [Interview transcript]. TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006980/

MLA

Garry Tan. "YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips, Threads hits 500M Users." TBPN, 16 Jun. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006980/.

BibTeX
@misc{tan2026_3006980,
  author       = {Garry Tan},
  title        = {YC Demo Day Lightning Round, New Snap AR Glasses, SpaceX Rips, Threads hits 500M Users},
  howpublished = {Interview transcript, TBPN. CEOInterviews.AI},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {jun},
  url          = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3006980/},
  note         = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}