Let's just go right. Market clearing order inbound. You're surrounded by journalists. Thank you. Position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate Go retriever mode. Market clearing order inbound. 5. Pudding. You're watching Jimmy Man. Thursday, April 23, 2026. We are live from the TVP at Ultra Realm, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. We have a giga stream on our hands. Today we will be interviewing 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 different members of the new Thiel Fellowship class working on everything from ultrafast logistics companies to investigative journalism to AI recruiting and compute infrastructure. All sorts of different projects. And I love 10 minutes each, 10 minutes each. It'll be lightning round, lightning round of lightning rounds. I love last year. It's always super inspiring to see what young entrepreneurs are working on. The Thiel Fellowship class always impresses me. And we've had three of these folks on the show before, so we'll be checking in with them, seeing where progress is at the Thiel Fellowship. I feel like it's grown. I don't know that it was always $250,000, but it now. So the Teal Fellowship gives keeping up with inflation $250,000 grant to young people to build startups instead of going to college. So everyone here has either not graduated or dropped out or deferred or declined to attend college and instead is building a technology company. Is this a smaller class than usual? We don't. We probably don't have the full class because of scheduling and not everyone can be everywhere all the time. Sometimes we will be having. All the Thiel fellows will be joining us remotely, but they are all in the same place up in San Francisco and we will be calling into them. And we have Nick and Tyler up there managing that end of the show. This class of fellows includes young founders building hypersonic highways, a research lab for building foundational models for robotics, a fraud bounty hunter and a simulated brain. And you probably know Dylan Field is a Vitalik. Buterin is. He's also Teal fellow alumni and we are big fans of so many different founders that have gone through the project. And will Menaitis also a Thiel fellow. Anyway, we're gonna get that sound ready because we got some bad news. Thoma Bravo is taking a massive write down on a software company called Medallia. Thoma Bravo is reportedly handing over the software company Medallia to creditors after restructuring negotiat failed to materialize. This is a $5.1 billion equity wipeout for the firm who bought the business for 6.4 billion in 2021. And there's some, there's some background in Reuters that I think I should read through and then you can sort of give me your analysis and your. And what you're seeing on the timeline around take so from Reuters exclusive. Thoma Bravo nears agreement to turn software firm Medallia over to creditors. That does not sound good. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo is nearing an agreement to hand over software firm Medallia to lenders, wrapping up months of restructuring negotiations. The move will wipe out 5.1 and billion in equity. Medallia has struggled in recent months under the weight of $3 billion of debt, which it owes to Blackstone, KKR, Apollo Group and Antares Capital. Thoma Bravo, Blackstone and KKR declined to comment. Apollo and Medallia didn't immediately return. Quest for comments to Reuters. So, like other software companies, Medallia's valuation has been hit in recent months over concerns that its will eventually be supplanted by artificial intelligence. What does Medallia do? Medallia provides software that collects and analyzes customer and employee feedback for companies. We've had some startups, some of them backed by Sequoia Capital, that are using AI to do this exact thing. That's potential disruption. And then there's also roll your own. Their main rivals, Qualtrics. Yep. But, but yeah, and maybe you said this already, but you know that Sequoia was one of the big backers of Medallion. I didn't know when they were a private company. Oh, interesting. So they're like. I mean, they're still private, but they. There's a long history of that with. What was it the firm that was before Zenefits was called, like SuccessFactors. Lars Dalgard did that deal here. They did 35 million in 2012, they did another 50 million in 2014, and then they later led $150 million round. Wow. And then eventually did they take it public or did they sell it for 6 billion to Thoma Bravo directly from the private. Was Medallia ever a public company? That would be interesting. I think they were. You look that. And I will keep reading from this to give some more backstory. So private equity firms invested heavily in the software sector when interest rates were low following the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic. We all remember 3% interest rates. It was the golden era of startups and growth. All of the DCFs were massive. And then of course, the valuations came down once the interest rates went up. So investors have become increasingly nervous about the sustainability of high valuations assigned to some of those assets and the debt raised to buy them. If you're on a floating rate or not, you know these firms are not necessarily backed by a 30 year fixed mortgage like your house. Your interest rate went up and the debt payments ballooned. And if the cash flow from the business has not also ballooned, you could be in trouble like this company potentially is. Blackstone, KKR and Antares hold some of the debt in traded and non traded funds. FSKR Capital Corp. Marked the debt at 79 cents on the dollar in its last quarterly report. And of course debt debt is senior to equity. So what does that mean for the equity? Not good. And that's why this deal is happening. Apollo Debt solutions market at $0.74 on the dollar. So a question about how can they even recover, you know, the full value of that debt? The equity is obviously in deep, deep trouble. So Blackstone's global head of private credit, Brad Marshall said on a conference call in February that Medallia had been quote underperforming not because of anything related to AI, but due to what we believe to be execution driven issues. So there is a question of well if they restructure and this company gets in the hands of creditors, maybe they can roll out AI features and become an AI winner and accelerate the top line and restructure the debt. I saw someone was sharing that there were, there were some sales people doing kind of some anonymous reporting saying a lot of the reps were struggling to hit quotas like basically delivering like 20% of quota. So just basically getting out competed in the market. Sure. And just go back to the earlier point. Yes. Medallia went public in 2019 on the NYSE, was taken private July 26, 2021. It had been trading around the $5 billion mark prior to the take private at 6.4. So Thoma Bravo after taking it private installed a new leadership team in early of 2025. Marshall, the head of Blackstone's global head of private credit said that they were working on a turnaround plan and we expect there to be discussions around the capital structure and so people are blackmailing on the timeline. Brandon says yes, I am sure this is the bottom in software and we won't get worse from here. Not good signs. This is you know, potentially one of those cockroaches that Jamie Dimon is worrying about. There's another post that seems like it was deleted but yeah, I mean some of the screenshot here, the tough thing is that everyone involved here has been on a kind of a press tour saying like everything's Fine, yes. Like we're all good. Yes, AI is going to be an accelerant. But even, even ignoring the AI question, a lot of these businesses no longer have, you know, are founder led. They're competing against other companies that, that are founder led. And yeah, it's just kind of credit to Jamie Dimon for his comments saying like, you know, basically saying I don't think this is over. When you had first brands and some other shutdowns. Yeah, in the previous startup era there were, I mean I feel like it would have been hard to raise for just like a vanilla Qualtrics or Medallion competitor and just saying like pre AI, like we're just going to build SaaS and we're just going to build a, you know, a crud app and write software. Yeah. New a, new players. A company. Aru. Yeah, that's a very different approach. Simulate simulation. Yeah, that's a very different approach. And then we had another one. I'm blanking on the name. It was a YC founder. He had gone through YC a few years ago, but his company is taking off doing something, something similar. So people have been well aware of the opportunity that Medallia and Qualtrics have, have owned. Yeah. But in other debt related news, Xi Jinping wants to use the International Monetary Fund to rescue the array of distressed Chinese loans around the world. This is an interesting piece from the Wall Street Journal. Apparently opinion Noah Smith is laughing. He says lol belt and road failed so hard. Xi Jinping is incompetent. That is this is a very narrative. Do not go to China. Do not go to China. Yeah, this is an interesting thing, but maybe a potential bargaining chip. In all of the other discussions, you know, in tech, Tyler always points out that tech is like too focused on chips when it comes to Chinese diplomacy, that there are many, many questions around trade and what Apple's doing and rare earths and there are so many and just the broad history of the Chinese empire that play into what their Taiwan policy is, how they will interact in the Middle East. And we tend to focus it all on AI. It's all about the data centers and the chips and perhaps there are more things and this is one example of something else that is a key factor in any broader negotiation that includes chip exports and also rare earths and also talent movements and whether or not Manus will be able to move over to meta and a million other things. And so that is the job of these world leaders is to swirl around all the different trade offs and get to hopefully a good deal for both sides. Anyway, some breaking news. GPT 5.5 is out. Oh, it is, is out. This is introducing GPT 5.5, a new class of intelligence for real work and powering agents. Built to understand complex goals, use tools, check its work and carry more tasks through to completion. It marks a new way of getting computer work done. Now available in ChatGPT and Codex. I like this demo of the Rubik's Cube. That's very cool. GPT 5.5 excels at writing and debugging code, researching online, analyzing data, creating documents and spreadsheets, operating software and moving across tool until a task is finished. GPT 5.5 delivers this step up in intelligence without compromising on speed matches. GPT 5.4 per token latency in real world serving. There's the model card there and there are some other posts. We will wait for the reactions to come in. We will gather them, we'll summarize them. But the team cooked. Cooked. Congratulations to everyone that worked on this. Let's head over to Merriam Webster. John, what do you got? Merriam Webster added a new word to the dictionary, I believe. And I feel like the. Actually, I don't know, I mean. Okay, so they have a slang section. Oh, okay. Slang and trending. They must be working overtime over there because the number of wombos. If you're not familiar with wombos, these are word combos. Things like Lorraine. Lorraine the lore, Explain. Or Queen. I could tell. John, can you Lorraine GPT 5.5? Yes. Give you the lore, tell you about what happened with 4.5, 4 0, 3.53 Da Vinci, give you the whole lore, but then also explain what this model is capable of. That's the full Lorraine of GPT 5.5. But we're not here to talk about Lorraine. We're here to talk about chapelganger, which is a new word in Merriam Webster. The dictionary, it's basically the main dictionary as far as I'm concerned. Chapelganger is a term for a less attractive version of someone or something. So whoever's going out there and distilling 5.5 into sort of a chopped version of it, that will be the chapel ganger of the official GPT 5.5. So stay away from the chapel gangers unless you're, unless you're really down, you're lucky. And you just said you need, and you need a Chinese open source model to do something for you, then you know, buyer beware because it might have some flaws. But Kristoff says separately there is new news from Michael Kratzios that the government seems to be taking anthropic and OpenAI's messaging around distillation very seriously and is setting up a task force. We can read a little bit more about this later. But setting up a task force to actually figure out how to prevent distillation at scale. As the models get bigger, it's more and more of an economic impact. When you're talking about, you know, $100 million training run and a Chinese lab can distill it and sneak the weights out and sneak the, you know, exfiltrate the data. That's a lot different of an economic impact from stealing something that, I don't know, cost billions to train or billions to put together. So good news there, hopefully they're successful. It was also sort of a white pill to see a lot of the labs working together to, hey, we're seeing this weird amount of data. Go to this particular company. Are you seeing the same thing? Or it's a shell company and we have five shell companies in these areas that are asking for these queries. And then the other lab says, oh yeah, we're actually getting something similar. And if you puzzle piece those together, all of a sudden you're getting a really solid map of what a frontier system is capable of. And so it feels like we, the industry are the victim of a distillation attack, even if it might not register among a single lab because that single lab is only getting hit with like one third or one fifth of the total attack. So we can pull up this post from Kratzios. I'll read the letter. Yeah, yeah. Subject Adversarial distillation of American AI models. United States leads the world in AI technologies. That lead reflects decades of foundational research, bold entrepreneurial risk taking in hundreds of billions of dollars in annual private investment. American AI leadership drives economic growth, strengthens national security, and advances the frontiers of science, medicine and human knowledge. The breakthroughs emerging from American industry raise living standards, expand opportunity and improve lives around the world. However, the United States has information indicating that foreign entities principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate industrial scale campaigns to distill US Frontier AI systems. Leveraging tens of thousands of proxy accounts to evade detection and using jailbreaking techniques to expose proprietary information. These coordinated campaigns systematically extract capabilities from American AI models exploiting. I don't like that. That sounds bad at all. Exploiting American expertise and innovation. Every AI researcher needs this button on their desk. If they detect a distillation attack, fire it off and the security team will come and make sure you're locked down. And it does seem like overall, all the labs are being more careful about how the APIs roll out, how they're doing KYC, how they're doing different partnerships and stuff. And I think it's all a back and forth and a dynamic. But it's fun that this new model is available and people will play with it, and I'm sure we'll see some cool stuff. Yeah. And Quen 3.6 rolled out yesterday. People are like, wow, it's almost as good as opus 4. 5. Because they distill opus 5. Don't ask me. Anyways, I'm glad that Kratzios is on it, and I'm glad the labs can coordinate and work together on this one. Yes, yes. More breaking news. Yes, and unfortunate. But we had talked about this previously. Meta is cutting 10% of their workforce, which is 8,000 employees. But this has been playing for a while, eliminating 6,000 open roles. Yeah, I saw Microsoft was doing something similar. They're offering early retirement to something like 7% of the workforce. Trying to lean out a little bit. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage over the underlying motivations. These companies can be big, and sometimes maybe they're too big. Maybe there's AI gains, maybe there's, you know, different investment strategies. We will have to see where they are moving chips around, what projects they are actually cutting, what projects they are doubling down on. Because these companies are also hiring at all times, effectively. Well, Christoph had some actual media ideas for the tech industry. He says there's not enough media in tech. You see, we need more. Need more, need more tech. Positive media for sure. So he says, silent Library with founders, winner gets investment. What is Silent Library? Silent library. So you're. Is this like a. Is this like a. Like a webcam that observes? Silent Library is a television show. It had four seasons. It's a game show. Oh, it's a game show. Game shows are fun. I can see a game show being. Being fun. At least different. And it was six friends vying for a cash prize. If only they can remain silent as one of them is forced to endure a bizarre stunt while seated in a library. Okay, okay. What else? Jackass with founders. What does that mean? How do you make that tech related? Maybe like humanoid robots? When I think of Johnny Knoxville, I just think of riding bull riding effectively. And so I imagine, like, riding some sort of robotic bull would be it, but, you know, it's very dangerous. Like the team that worked with, like, Bam Margera and Johnny Knoxville. They had some serious injuries from time to time, and I don't know if it's in your best interest to be a founder and be like, yeah, I need to launch my startup, so I got to go in the ring with a mechanical bull and potentially break my arm and not be able to code. And I don't know. Seems rough, but would be entertaining. And with the right twist, I believe it could work. Interview founders while going ghost hunting. I feel like paranormal tech content. Jesse Michaels doesn't get enough credit here. You know, he is a technology. It's in the technology charts, and it charts high like it's up there. And he has an incredible pedigree, great investor, and also, you know, has some of the best reporting on aliens and paranormal activity and conspiracy theories. And, you know, I guess he just hasn't cracked the way to bring a founder along. But if you're. If you're friends with Jesse Michaels, are in touch, maybe you just tag along for a little cameo on one of his videos and that's all the PR you need. Founders give their pitches while skydiving. Can you. I like skydiving. Can you talk while skydiving? With the right headset. Have you gone skydiving? No, but I like the idea and I like the videos. I like that it's always in like the vibreal of like the. What's that movie? Is it Keanu Reeves? Point Break. They go skydiving and he goes skydiving, and there's only one parachute, so they have to fight it out for the parachute. You have a seen this movie? Have I. Have I told you the story where I was? I was on an overnight flight back from Europe. No. I'm sitting on a. On a plane. Yeah. And I'm awake. I can't sleep. Okay. And out of the shadows, Skydiver John Wick. Oh, walking up the aisle. Keanu Reeves. Yeah. The real aisle. Sitting there. It's effectively like 2am And Keanu Reeves is like walking at me on this plane in the middle of the night. Yeah. We ended up talking for like five minutes. Really? It was cool. That's cool. He went and went back to see and. Yeah, well, he stayed on the plane. He did not. Super, super nice guy. What else do they have here? SF party. I'm smacked. Videos. I don't know. I'm smacked. Wow. Unk. You're. You guys. You guys know. I kind of remember, but remember, I need to. Basically, this was this whole like. Like, you could call it a media company, but it was really Like a guy that would make party videos. Okay, what era are we talking to every college? Okay. So it was really popular. Probably 2010 to pre nelk 2013. Okay. Okay. And I will say a lot of people use these videos as a sort of college guide. Okay. Okay. So. So not speaking. I'm sure they have millions and millions of views at this point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Last one. VC price is right. Is this a good. I feel like people don't. There's always a huge adverse selection problem with anything related to sharing financials or sharing your company. I mean, this is a twist on Shark Tank to some extent, but they actually did try to do Shark Tank for software. It was called Planet of the Apps. Gary Vaynerchuk was a host. We can ask about him tomorrow. He's coming on the show and I'd love to know his reflections on tech media. I think Gwyneth Paltrow might have been a host. Co host. They had a plan of the apps. Planet of the Apps. Look it up. Planet. Planet of the Apps instead of Planet of the Apes. Yeah, Gwyneth Paltrow was there. Gwyneth and Will. I am. They had some. They had a stacked lineup. Jessica Alba. JESSICA Alba, FOUNDER of the. On each of the episodes, software makers have 60 seconds to pitch their idea in front of the advisors. Yeah. On a slow moving escalator with a visual idea of an elevator pitch. Why not put it in. Why not put them in an elevator? Yeah. New episodes were released on Tuesday. Did it get renewed? Did any of these apps go anywhere? They had silo focus and study timer. Okay. Companion. I could imagine that mobile personal safety pair a showroom to your home. Dote the mobile mall tracks battle squad twist live events with a dating twist. Scooch the word game. Yeah. These are. These sound like interesting ideas. Not as interesting as like a. As a cooler that is like has a gas powered engine that you can like ride around. Which I think of as like the quintessential Shark Tank. Yeah, exactly. Like Shark Tank works because the products are very. Are highly visual and you get to see. Oh, we made a new mop. Okay. We're gonna watch Mark Cuban try and mop and this is going to be like physical and visual and interesting. It is. It is very difficult. Do we have. Are we making progress on our Shark Tank idea? I feel like this is very, very important. We'll have to get the updates in. How's the Shark Tank? Are you making progress? Are we making progress? We're on the way. Okay, good stuff. We're Very excited about that. Anyway, lots of opportunity in media. Also lots of opportunity in simulators. We have talked about simulators. TVPN simulator. We made Jeremy Gafon Simulator. But the simulators are getting less advanced. In some weird twist, you would think they get bigger and bigger and you turn them into real games. We're going the opposite direction because the simpler the game, the funnier. This is Coconut Simulator. Let's watch this. Coconut Simulator. This better be worth 99 cents. Okay. I'm not gonna lie. Okay, what do we do? It looks good. I can't move. Why can I not move? Am I like dead? Ass of coconut. Are you Serious? I spent 99 cent to be a coconut. There's no way. What could be the difference between arcade and realistic? Coconut has no eyes. You can't see anything. It's just black because the coconut has no eyes. It's first person view. This is impossible. You were in third person view. But it gets. It gets better because there's a sequel. There is Coconut Simulator 2, which. Which is now, I believe, multiplayer. Let's play this one. Game mode. Arcade. So what's the difference between Coconut Simulator 2 and 1? Coconut Simulator 2 is a lot more in depth. The other coconuts, it's multiplayer. I thought you guys said there was a story to this one. There is. You're just not seeing it. It's a beautiful story about growing old with your friends around. This game is definitely game of the year. It's beating Crimson Desert. No chance it survived. Trust. Realism mode is different in this one. I'm telling you right now, Realism mode ends up being the same. I'm gonna crash out. Coconuts have no eyes, so you can't see. It's such a funny prank. I love. I love a simulator prank. What were you saying? Who's in the chat? Ty. Ty says games has a bit. Yeah, no, it is true. There's actually a third simulator that we need to review. This is Banana Simulator. You are the first person in the whole world to play Banana Sim. What do you mean? Remember when I showed you Coconut Simulator and I added this to my wish list? It's not supposed to be out yet. You're the first person to play it ever. I'm kind of jealous. How did you get it then? The developers liked our last video and they sent me an email. They gave me this one for free. The developers of this game sent you an email? I have it on my phone too, if you want to see it. It's the same email, just smaller. So you didn't have to pay real human dollars to play this. Not this time. This one doesn't even have sound. It's the beta. Technically, you're the number one banana sim player in the world. Right now. You have 391 points. How do you get points? 395 points now just for playing. Just for points of me. Diet Coke simulator. Diet Coke simulator. Just playing Diet Coke is good. You just sit there and every. Every few minutes. I mean we have Data center simulator. Maybe the next one is just GPU simulator. And it just sits there and it just hums. Yeah, that's it. Sometimes you overheat. That's the end. Sometimes you got to be plugged back in. Yeah. Well, let's move back over to tech. Kevin Kelly, the founder of Wired, had some incredible predictions in 2016. Let's read through them. Summary of the inevitable. Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. This was Kevin Kelly's book from 2016. According to Kelly, much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable. The future will bring with it even more screens, tracking and lack of privacy. In the book, he outlines 12 trends that will forever change the ways we work, learn and communicate. Becoming moving from fixed products to always upgrading services and subscriptions. That has definitely happened. We're moving away from even seats. Everything's consumption based now. Cognifying. Making everything much smarter using cheap powerful AI that we get from cloud. Nailed it. That is flowing. That is a fantastic prediction for assuming he wrote it. He actually wrote it probably in 2015. Published in 2016. But he's the creator of Wired. He's been tapped into tech his entire career and has a ton of interesting reflections too. He's written a more recent book about reflections on life that's very good. Depending on unstoppable streams of real time for everything for sure. Turning all surfaces into screens. That definitely happened. Your toaster can watch screening TV now. Shifting society from one where we own assets to one where instead we have access to all services at all times. Collaboration at mass scale. On my imaginary sharing meter index, we are still 2 out of 10. Filtering. Harnessing intense personalization in order to anticipate our desires. Remixing. Unbundling existing products into their most primitive parts and then recombining in all possible ways. That's definitely happening. Coconut Simulator unironically an example of that. Interacting. Immersing ourselves inside of computers to maximize their engagement. Tracking. Employing total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. Sounds scary. Potentially a good outcome if things are done properly. Promoting good questions is Far more valuable. What you think total surveillance is potentially. Well, he says total surveillance for the benefit of citizens and consumers. So if there is a black box where my Netflix recommend, where my Netflix activity exists, where no Netflix employee can see it because it's encrypted, but it can make great recommendations and recommend me the next great show that I will actually enjoy. I'm cool with that. Surveillance. That's surveillance. But it's like, it's potentially good for me and I have a better experience for the benefit of John Coogan. Yeah, yeah. There is. There is a surveillance bull case. Constructing a planetary system connecting all humans and machines into a global matrix. Okay, that one we're still waiting on. But a lot of good, interesting predictions. Jason Schumann says wild how accurate these predictions were, and they were, in fact. Well, without further ado. Yes. We have our first guest of Keel Fellowship gigastream. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great, guys. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today, introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. We're building autonomous forklifts. The real goal of all of this is get anything anywhere in just a few hours. And we're starting with what we think is right, and we're going to do everything it takes to get there. How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts, or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What are you thinking? You know, we actually started thinking we'd be the comma AI of forklifts. But, you know, cars have can bus standardized since 2008. It's a software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts, even if it's the same forklift, same year, even the internals will look different from each other pretty often. So if you want to build, like a kit that goes on any forklift, it doesn't actually make sense. So we tried that. We did. And then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift, you know, one model. You know, we'll deal with the differences throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay. Yeah, we tried that. That also sucked. You know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer. We were kind of where everybody else was in the market, you know, this this isn't the most original idea in the world. Everybody knows, like, yeah, construction. Well, there's also big. There's applied intuition. Like, yeah, there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. So you do, you kind of probably have, you know, you got a speed run, trying a bunch of different approaches, figure out what works. But the same thing happened in the car industry where, you know, Ford and Toyota were like, yeah, we're doing self driving too. And then it was like, okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control, but we're still, I'm still waiting for Even Tesla level FSD from like 3 years ago to roll out into like the major American car manufacturers. So there's clearly an opportunity. So how do. So where are you now? Did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like, what went into that? Yeah, I mean, I think what Tesla did, right, was that they got control over their platform. Right. We realized that, you know, that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts. If you wanted to make it viable for customers, you actually had to make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift and we did. You know, we built our own forklift in like Q4 last year through a manufacturing partner and it worked great. You know, done some iterations since then and now we are deployed and we were deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability, which is.

Further ado. Yes. We have our first guest of teal fellowship gigastream. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great, guys. Nice to meet you. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today, introduce yourself and the company. Yeah, I'm Victor Boyd. We're building autonomous forklifts. The real goal of all of this is get anything anywhere in just a few hours. And we're starting with what we think is right and we're going to do everything it takes to get there. How vertically integrated do you want to be on day one? You want to retrofit? Is this the comma AI of forklifts or is this the Tesla of forklifts on day one? What do you think? You know, we actually started thinking we'd be the common eye of forklifts, but you know, cars have can bus standardized since 2008. It's software problem to get control over a car. You know, the difference between cars is just software. The difference between forklifts. Even if it's the same forklift, same year, even the internals will look different from each other pretty often. So if you want to build like a kit that goes on any forklift, it doesn't actually make sense. So we tried that. We did. And then, you know, we realized, okay, that's not the way to go. Then we decided, you know, let's just retrofit one forklift, you know, one model. You know, we'll deal with the differences throughout the years, but at least it'll be okay. Yeah, we tried that. That also sucked. You know, it was just unreliable. It wasn't fast enough for the customer. We were kind of where everybody else was in the market. You know, this, this isn't the most original ideal in the world. Everybo everybody knows, like, yeah, construction. Well, there's also big, there's applied intuition. Like there's big companies in the category that have been running at this problem for a long time. So you do, you kind of probably have, you know, you got a speedrun trying a bunch of different approaches and figure out what works. But the same thing happened in the car industry where, you know, Ford and Toyota were like, yeah, we're doing self driving too. And then it was like, okay, they can do some lane keep assist and some adaptive cruise control. But we're still, I'm still waiting for Even Tesla level FSD from like 3 years ago to rol roll out into like the major American car manufacturers. So there's clearly an opportunity. So how do so where Are you now, did you build that first autonomous forklift? Like what went into that? Yeah, I mean, I think what Tesla did, right, was that they got control over their platform. Right. We realized that that was going to be the thing for autonomous forklifts. If you wanted to make it viable for customers, you actually had to make the platform viable for autonomy first. So we had to build our own forklift and we did. We built our own forklift in like Q4 last year through a manufacturing partner and it worked great. You know, done some iterations since then and now like we, we are deployed and we were deployed in a very difficult environment. We're doing better than anybody else in terms of throughput and reliability, which is really all we care about. We plan on continuing this year. What we want to do this year is we just want to make it, you know, a super scalable product because have you honest? It's not right. Sorry to interrupt, but has there been a company in the last 10 years that decided to build a new forklift from the ground up? Or is this a category that has been generally overlooked as everybody has wanted to build new EVs and platforms that are maybe more exciting to some. You know, there's some people that kind of got halfway there, like they would go with somebody else's design and make a few changes and think that that was enough. But realistically, like, you have to be in the process from the very beginning. Otherwise there's just all these trade offs that are made in the design process that, you know, really affect you. It makes your product horrible. So we did it from the scratch. You know, we, we have some off the shelf parts, but that's a motor, right? Like obviously I'm not going to design a motor from the ground if I don't need to, I'll just use a forklift. Everything else needs to be me. Everything else has to be my design so that we can have full control over the system, iterate faster than anybody else and build the actual real product that actually works. Can you talk about the environments that forklifts operate in? You mentioned that you're deployed in a difficult environment, but what's the standard environment? And then how does your test case differ from that? I mean, the standard environment you can think of like a warehouse where they just ship a bunch of dog food. You know, let's say like 400,000 square feet, just lots of racks. You know, it's not that difficult, right? Like if you cause product damage in a dog food warehouse, it just stinks. It does stink. Really. Bad. Like, don't get me wrong, they're not going to be happy. But, you know, we. We went into a pharmaceutical warehouse. So whereas in the dog food warehouse, like, okay, I damaged the pallet, let's say I destroyed everything on the pallet. That's a couple thousand dollars. In a pharmaceutical warehouse, I destroy a whole pallet. That's hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I think, like, our idea behind it was, you know, this is incredible forcing factor. This makes us, like, actually build a reliable product that's not going to cause damages. And then when we are successful here, we get to show this to all of our other potential customers. Like, look, guys, I know you've been burned by the industry before, but look at how good we're doing in this place. I mean, if we, if we destroyed product in their place, we wouldn't be there anymore because we would have already. It's a bad thing. You don't do it. Talk about teleoperation. Did you go down that path at all? Are you compatible with teleoperation? Is there any value? Yeah, I feel like this is such a unique environment because you can figure out autonomy, but there should be relatively easy way to take over the system and just use an Xbox controller as you get to full autonomy. I don't know if that's. Yeah, I'm glad you said Xbox controller. That's what it is. So when we do teleop, which is about 50% of the time right now, it is with literally an Xbox controller. There's some things where they have to click on the screen to select what palette they need to pick up, for example. But when there's some scenario where the robot's lost, it delocalizes, or we need some extra training data on some workflow, then it's like, yeah, just pick up the Xbox controller. It's literally, guys, you know, they're not on site. They're. They're somewhere thousands of miles away just getting it done. It works perfectly. I think it's. It's extremely valuable. I think it was a dirty word in the industry for a long time to say, like, remote operation, which is. Which is really stupid because, like, customers don't care. Guys, like, you know, the customers don't care if you're fully autonomous. Customers care if the work is done. So if you're over here, like, you know, stressing about, oh, dude, we're. We're only, you know, 10% autonomous, but you're getting the job done every single time and you're profitable, like, I mean, obviously keep Going for more autonomy, push those margins. But, dude, the customer could not care less. Yeah, totally. We've. We've said that to some humanoid founders on this show and they're like, no, it's got to be fully autonomous. Yeah, it is, it is like a less sexy narrative. And so I think people want to deny it or something. But, yeah, the end work product makes the most sense. Talk to me about the interaction modality for the human or the manager or the owner of the warehouse in a basically full autonomous mode. Because I imagine at some point you have to have a system that decides, okay, we actually need to dispatch an order to get that dog food off of the top shelf. And there's a lot of different pallets that are stacked, backed up at different levels, and what systems are you plugging into? Or do you want this to be something where there's still a human in the loop managing and dispatching orders, and then they're sitting in an office, maybe overlooking the warehouse, just sort of giving orders? But what is the path of the workflow right now? It's basically like the robots have this task that needs to get done every day, pretty much all day. This is very common in warehouses where there's only a few things that you need to do every day, and it just takes a really long time and you need to have it done by the end of the day, but it doesn't really matter how fast it is. And in those scenarios, you just kind of give the robot instructions. We have a map and you can set up zones or shelves, and you say, this is what's in this zone or this is what's on this shelf. And it needs to go to this other zone or this other shelf, and then the forklift just does it. I mean, you know, it can be that simple eventually. You know, the idea is that I would like to be able to run the warehouse for the customer. Yeah. I don't want them to ever have to think about it at all. I'd rather it just be like, okay, we are literally your pallet movement within this warehouse. We run your whole business anyway in terms of physical movement. We also have your inventory management. We can make decisions based off of that. We know your truck is going to be in here soon, for example. We'll just set up the staging for you. You don't have to tell us that has to happen. That's the goal in the next year. Forklift is the wedge. Very smart. Have you thought about. We were talking about simulator games earlier. The chat is asking, have you thought about making a forklift simulator where normal people could play the game online, but in reality, they're actually helping you train. Sort of like the capture. Yeah. Getting training data. Yeah, that's actually funny. I did think of that because I was looking for a game myself because I've always been into logistics, but I got into warehousing, like, a few years ago, and, like, you know, I looked on. I looked everywhere, dude. I even looked on Roblox. Like, I was looking on Roblox. They don't. They don't have any, like, good warehouse games, man. It's such a shame. Somebody needs to do that. Maybe. Maybe somebody in your chat will do that for us. Yeah. How did you make your first dollar? How did I make my first dollar? Yeah, I think I. I'm pretty sure it was when I was selling. I sold candy on Easter when I was very young, and I actually made money there, which is funny because, like, the kid I sold it to was literally walking with a basket full of candy. Like, definitely more candy than I got that year. But I sold him this egg. And I was like, dude, there's. There's something really good in here and you want it, but I'm not going to tell you unless you give me a random reward. Did you. Did you. Did you drop out from anywhere or were you. Are you. Are you coming out of high school? High school, Yeah. I dropped out of uab. I went to a state school in Alabama. I mean, I grew up there. And then, you know, I didn't have the money to go anywhere else, and I didn't know I didn't want to go to school in the first place. So, you know, the second I got the opportunity to fly out here to sf, I was like, okay, it's over. I'm leaving. It's over. I love it. Just getting started. Well, Victor, thanks so much for coming on and breaking it down. Fantastic to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back. We'll talk to you soon this year. Good luck.

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