73: The Future of Housing with Jeff Wilson

Today we're joined by Jeff Wilson, founder and CEO of Jupe to talk about why there has been so little housing innovation, what we can do to make housing more affordable, and what he's working to accomplish with his startup Jupe. You can check out Jupe at https://jupe.com/

Transcript:
William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past towards a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, will Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Well, Jeff, how are you doing today?

Jeff Wilson 0:45

Still Alive, man, I, you know, I used to say, prior to the pandemic, that I was either upright and breathing, or vertical and ventilated. And you know, since the pandemic hit, those things just aren't as cool to say. So say, you know, I'm still alive.

William Jarvis 1:05

Yeah, well go. I love that. I love that. Well, Jeff, you know, thank you so much for taking the time to come on and you didn't quite busy lately. Just raise big round lot going on. Very exciting. Do you mind giving us just kind of a brief bio and some of the big ideas you're interested in?

Jeff Wilson 1:22

Yeah, brief bio. I'm a sixth generation Texan grew up on a farm. Got out of there fairly quick. And, you know, went through a career in Silicon Valley. And then went into academia became a professor in environmental science. And then what really changed my life was one day, I got an idea that I wanted to live in a 33 square foot trashcan for a year to sort of consume 1% The energy and water and live in 1% of volume. And then that led to me leaving academia, running a startup that was a housing, prefab startup, and then now running jute.

William Jarvis 2:05

I love that. And how did you first get interested in kind of like, you know, this aspect of like habitats for humans, and you know, how it could be different in the future?

Jeff Wilson 2:17

Yeah, the the first time that I probably thought about this was during my postdoc, which was based in Boston, at the Harvard School of Public Health, I spent time in West Africa, in Ghana, and we were sort of start studying in the poorest areas of a craw exposure to air quality or, or exposure to lack of air quality, folks stirring over these big pots all day while they were cooking with wood or coal, and just got, you know, got to see firsthand you know, some of the the way living conditions were outside of the US, again, thinking about it then went all the way through to really, you know, these are the kind of things you think about when you're lying in a dumpster, staring up at the stars at night. That Hey, housings kind of fucked. Do something about it? And really, you know, even going back to like, just thinking about Maslow's pyramid, right? People still even look at Boomer things like this. If you take in food, clothing and shelter, right, food is a distribution problem, there's a lot of really, let's just say, folks with a healthy amount of gravitational pool of mass in Texas, and, you know, other places in the world, they don't have a lot of food, clothing, pretty solid, but shelter is just absolutely fucked, right? Like there's a billion and a half people on the planet that don't have adequate shelter. And even if you think about like this office, I'm in even the quote, well, design spaces. Yeah, the one year and that we just think about them as being comfortable, right? Nobody thinks about them as being absolutely delightful. And so it's one of the things we're trying to do in Jube is provide like a level of delight within an experience. And so that's really the push the next level thing that we're working on,

William Jarvis 4:34

got it, got it, you know, there's like a, there's a there's a developing world version, this is kind of a developed world and you know, these distinctions like whatever. But, you know, I think you understand what I'm kind of getting at it, you know, if we look at just America, right, you know, housing prices are up 30% year over year. It's just this bananas thing. They just keeps going up and up and up. You know, I think mortgages as a percentage of the loans bank gets Thanksgiving has quadrupled since 1980. You know, it's like this just you know, housing just gets more and more expensive every year, and there's just kind of no end in sight. It's like, what are we gonna do about this? Do you see, you know, Jupiter as as, you know, taking some of the pressure off of that for, you know, Americans and people in the last where housing prices have just gotten completely out of control?

Jeff Wilson 5:23

Yeah, I think it needs to be a almost catastrophic, like, leap off of the tracks. Yeah. So if you look at how we've been doing things, um, you know, there's this book Sapiens, have you read it? I have no, I traced, I traced this all the way back to the sky talks about how a lot of what we have in the modern day that is painful, actually came from when we first decided to settle down and sort of take care of this thing called wheat. And about 12,000 years ago. And so what did we start doing, we stopped roaming, we started accumulating more possessions, we started putting up walls, we started, you know, taking care of animals, I think the the institution of marriage was probably invented around there. All of these things since then, when you look at housing kind of evolved in not really that much of a different state. And in my opinion, a lot of that has to do with us arguing over a little postage stamp of land in these areas that have also evolved from that time, especially since Industrial Revolution called cities, to where it's one piece of land connected to a fixed grid, right in one specific space, which you're tied to for 30 years, right? Like what else is like this, plus, all of your wealth gets thrown into this, which it's not exactly a liquid asset. So if you look at all the progress, right, then building technology, the biggest innovations in the last 50 years and housing and then construction, or probably the nail gun, which may go back to the 30s or 40s. And the preassembled trust, nothing else has really made a massive, you know, dent, I mean, there were other things like concrete pump trucks and things, but it hasn't changed the game. And so what I'm thinking about is we need to take almost a decentralized, right viewpoint, as we are in many other things in the current day, right? towards housing, why do you connect it to one piece of land? And why, you know, be tethered to this 30 year mortgage, and this extremely harmful, mostly petrochemical backed grid of electrical and water? Right. So Joop wants to detach us, you know, cut that chain that ties us to particular piece of land, and sever the connections to the grid, such that we've got a new way of living, right, not a way of incrementally advancing the the march of real estate as it's existed.

William Jarvis 8:17

I love that deed to any theorizing as to why housing has been so resistant innovation.

Jeff Wilson 8:25

I do I have a model for this. So let's take a leap in innovation around let's call it electric vehicles, right? Let's take Tesla. So when you're building out a company like Tesla to completely make a quantum leap right off of fossil fuels. There are a couple of elements of things that I can talk about later, in some ways. Joobs, kind of a combination of Tesla and Airbnb, and its current incarnation. But you have almost like a puzzle you're trying to solve for, right? Yeah, a single plane. And you're moving around different sort of subsets of that problem set, right, which may largely be engineering, maybe some light regulatory stuff, supply chains, these, these things kind of exist, right? And you can see them. When you're talking about housing, it becomes at least a Rubik's Cube. Right? And let me explain that. You're not just solving the puzzle for say construction technology, oh, we've got 3d printing or we've got modular housing, or you've got this new type of panel that integrates in electricity. You then when you start to build a 3d printed home, you have to now look over here at the financing arm. Now a bank Wells Fargo's gonna say I'm not going to find out that I don't even know how a 3d printed home works. Then turn the corner again. And you have a construction industry. doesn't understand it in the labor doesn't exist, then turn the corner again and you have a different regulatory set up. And coding and zoning setup in every single city, Palo altos is different from San Jose. Right? Yeah. And then last, I'll turn one more corner, the fucking craziest one on the dark side of the moon on the dark side of the Rubik's Cube. Elon doesn't have when you park your Tesla in a driveway, the neighbor saying, Hey, I'm not in my backyard. I don't like the color of your Tesla. Therefore, I'm going to initiate a vote that says you can't park your Tesla in that driveway. So you think about all of those things. Plus, they talk about hardware being hard and Adams harder than bits. You're talking about the heaviest asset class that's also mired and forget about the mob and garbage right disposal, you're talking about the oldest families and the oldest way to transfer wealth over generations. The way the Kushner's transfer wealth is through real estate. So think about all of those fucking forces within the system. And it's why joopa said, we're going to design something like nimble, and we're going deep into the forest to sort of build this army before we come back. Right? So I'm not getting anywhere close to cities. Right, right. We're gonna go build, you know, we're gonna go out to the deep forests of New Zealand, figure out the the system and then come back and try to solve these problems in the cities if people even stay in cities.

William Jarvis 11:42

Right, right. That's a big question. Right? You know, with COVID, you know, has this broken the back of the mega cities, they're kind of monopoly on all these network effects and things. And it's my belief, I think it has some extent,

Jeff Wilson 11:53

right. I mean, I'm in Austin, Joe Rogan's here now Elon is here. And I'm what's his name? Friedman. Lex Friedman's here. Yeah, who else would you want to hang out with? Right?

William Jarvis 12:12

Those guys the whole crazy Oh,

Jeff Wilson 12:14

this Austin was, you know, for a long time, considered a second tier system, and COVID broke that another thing that's unique between Austin and San Francisco, LA and New York, those cities are going to face a significant little problem when sea levels start rising. Right? And I don't know, we're maybe 300 feet above sea level or so here in Austin. So it'll be a little longer. But what are we going to do about housing? Are we going to just keep, you know, building walls and moving the housing in further? Are we going to build a whole new decentralized kind of system what Gary tan my main backer, coined as universal autonomous housing, which I think is great term.

William Jarvis 13:02

Love that. That's such a great term. Could you talk about, you know, just for the listener who might not have heard of Jube? You know, and I guess they're, you know, probably walking their dog or some listen to the podcast. Can you help visualize know what a Joop is and and kind of what makes it special?

Jeff Wilson 13:16

Yeah, so um, Jube is, on first glance, a little spaceship. And actually, I tell people, you know, it's actually a really good deal for us to land our spaceship on your property, and we'll split the revenue. So it was designed by industrial designers from places like Tesla and drone designers, not by architects, as most structures traditionally are. And then the system by which we we moved you was inspired by the skateboard chassis at Rivia. So we flat pack down an entire volume of a house so that we don't ship air. So on the same truck, that you might ship, a one volume metric unit, we can split, we can ship 12 or 15 Joobs to a site and then pop them up as living units. And about an hour and a half each completely off grid. Right. So right now our MVP is just good for really one night of sleeping and this beautiful spaceship with Baltic birch floors and trek lighting and off grid power. And we will build out the systems to eventually have a village on a truck right? Or city on a ship. Really.

William Jarvis 14:32

That is it's super cool. And they book they There's

Jeff Wilson 14:35

one behind me if you are Yeah, if you do happen to want to go subscribe, smash that subscription button. There is a picture of our bling unit above Los Angeles behind me that has really look spaceship. He has all these LEDs shut on it. So

William Jarvis 14:52

very cool. It's very cool. Well, you know, Jeff, how has the journey been so far in a building Jube has it been harder than you thought? has been easier than you thought about

Jeff Wilson 15:01

well, so I had one shit show hardware startup already, I'm hoping not to have another one. But even so, I'm gonna just say anybody that's looking at starting a startup and one of the hardest to move the needle on industries, don't start it on April 1 2020, at the very front end of a up into the right thing called the pandemic. So that's added when building a physical product and an entire new thing to the mix. We did try to solve for some things so that we didn't in our last startup, that by getting to revenue a lot quicker than maybe even the product was really ready and building a product where frankly, we gave no fucks when we drop these things, the you know, in Los Angeles and rented them initially, it was completely illegal, right? They're gone. Now. Anybody looking for our units? I'm sorry, they're gone. Right? But yeah, it's really difficult building a physical thing and forget about a speaker you can hold in your hand, right? These things are eight and a half feet by 13 feet wide, and they weigh 1100 pounds. So I think like, we were really smart about getting these things into the world, getting users in them, asking the users what they thought and selling a few at a margin. I think we had the most revenue of any of the 400 companies or so in the batch Y Combinator, right? Which, I mean revenue that early as one thing maybe that's not worth bragging about. But look, we were in the last batch of Y Combinator. And we just started the company in April of 2020. So for getting a hard tech product to market. We, you know, I think we did a pretty good job. So getting product to market, you've got some margins on if we sell 20 Jeeps right now a month, sell them which we're not doing much anymore. We've got a new program, where as Paul Graham would say, default alive. So very good. That's good. A good place to be.

William Jarvis 17:22

Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, it definitely it protects your downside, it makes it gives you a lot more flexibility. Right. What's the plan going forward? You know, like, what's your strategy? I don't know how much you want to talk about this, you know, like, it's oftentimes to get these heavy.

Jeff Wilson 17:35

You know, I this is where all the comparisons, probably end. But I'll you know, I think when Ilan was asked about this in an interview about hey, what about all these, you know, Tesla killers and electric car makers? Look, I'm in the same situation, I want the problem solved. Right, right. I think I can do it better than anyone else. But if somebody else does it better grape and, you know, there's also 1.5 billion people that need housing, it's a pretty good market. It's pretty big market. I don't think anyone's gonna gobble it up. You know, if we get 1% The Mark of the market, I think we're you know, we'll have a market cap somewhere similar to like Apple, right, right, you get 1%. So I have no problem talking about that. Look, you know, we now have a unit that is good for one night, right? We're developing out our toilet prototype right now, which is, by the way, going to be fucking awesome. It's going to be mind blowing. I won't show you that yet. But it will be the greatest experience the bear shooting in the woods has ever had. I'll just put it that way. You probably have never shifted in a I'll just put it this way. Marble laden toilet in the middle of the woods. So what we've got to do is create that magical experience out a little bit at a time. So right now you can stay one night dupes are magical. I've had most people that stay there say it's a greatest night asleep they've had in their life. Right. And there are some design elements to that that I can talk about. But taking that delightful experience and moving it from one night to then to having the greatest shit in the woods that you've ever had and maybe the greatest shit ever. Then moving to what is a weekend look like? You know, let's add an off grid sauna to that. And then what does a week look like? Let's add Starlink and a Zoom Room tube right to where you can actually do a podcast or a call like this. And then beginning to add kitchens, vertical gardens, right till pretty soon you do have an entire village that sets up anywhere on the planet, right was pretty good weather right now we haven't weatherized him yet. And, and a day, right. I mean, that is a pretty insane proposition. As we move forward, we want to start developing a fleet of Jeeps that we then can deploy. If there's a wildfire and Paradise, right Northern California, we can pick up these tubes and get them in a day 1000s of them right to wildfire victims, placed them in their backyards and allow them to watch as their house gets rebuilt, right? Pick them up and take them to Burning Man for a few days, then pick them up and take him to New Orleans for where a hurricane is hit, right? Like, have a crypto conference in the you know, middle of North Dakota, in the summer, on a raw beautiful piece of land. So we want to move and then towards this model that Gary called the Universal autonomous housing to where we can provide a dynamic supply for for living a really delightful living experience to wherever the area of highest not need, or highest sort of nightly rate is and then begin to integrate in some serious tech, from all the way to when web one was created to an NFT platform that we will now probably launch second quarter.

William Jarvis 21:33

Very cool, very cool. And do you see like, you know, kind of the development of Jube kind of going like Tesla, where you know, you have the Roadster and so you kind of hit the ultra top end first, you know, you kind of established like some some kind of, you know, robust market there big market share, and then you kind of move out a little bit and then it's like the Model S and then it's everybody will absolutely

Jeff Wilson 21:57

like that the market for our model. You know, our roadster is a lot bigger than the Roadster market. Right, right. glamping is about a $5 billion industry and it's growing at 20%. There's a billion dollars in value added every year. And the largest glamping company in the world is maybe has like four or 500 units. Oh, wow. That's it. Right? So it's completely fragmented. So it's a great roadster market. And it allows us to begin to dial in that experience to that magic, you feel in driving a Tesla exists in no home environment, right, you just you don't get that in indoor environments. So that's what we want to leverage the tech into doing not just through design, but to saying this was not just kind of, you know, a cool design Airbnb that I stayed in, that was really comfortable. It was fucking awesome. We need to make fucking awesome experiences now and then translate that down to a model three, with different business models. And I've always wanted to solve the big problem. But I was talking to the guy that that started Architecture for Humanity, won the TED Prize between bado and Clinton for this and talking to him early about Joop about wanting to solve these refugee crisis crises and various things. And he said, you know, don't try to start there. Elon would be dead if you want to try to start with the model three, right? You know, start with something and I think he was then head of humanitarian efforts at Airbnb, start with something that is more a roadster example, exhibit A, there are 10,000 refugee shelters right now sitting in a warehouse outside of Stockholm. And that was IKEA attempt, right? To solve that refugee even with all of the logistics, flat packing, manufacturing, and just raw force of IKEA. Yeah, they failed in their attempt to provide refugee housing. Right? A little startup building, you know, a wooden frame in a guy's a SpaceX guy's garage in Hawthorne, you know, isn't going to be able to solve the refugee crisis with the same strategy.

William Jarvis 24:36

Right? Right. That does make sense. Have you looked in like tried to diagnose like, you know what, and it probably it's like a lot of different things but like what went wrong with like the IKEA example? Do you know is it just like, doesn't have real well, I could fit or something? Yeah, so I mean,

Jeff Wilson 24:51

look, it was going back to that Rubik's Cube, um, not not solving and understanding something Some of the dynamics, I didn't even talk about the politics, right of that Rubik's Cube, it ends up being a DND gaming die, right in the end, like a 42 sided 42 is an excellent number, by the way. Um, it uh, you know, they had some safety issues that were called out with the units collapsing or maybe they caught on fire or something like this. And, you know, the the political system that you enter when you're starting to work through the UN, or you're starting to work through the who, and then you're, you're literally just debt. Right? How are you going to go back reputationally after you've, you know, had a couple of these incidents with folks that are already have had a pretty hard time and a pretty hard life. And that's what I want to give those folks dignity, right, like, not a mud floor, right? And eighth inch plastic, right, eighth or 16th of an inch plastic between them and the elements. I want them to have a not just a comfortable night of sleep, but why should they have a truly, I don't want to call it joyous but a truly exceptional and awesome night asleep.

William Jarvis 26:34

Right? There's no reason that that shouldn't be accessible as well. Do you have the sense that American houses are just too big? Do I Do we just have too much of a preference for them, you know, you've lived in small

Jeff Wilson 26:46

you know, I am going to start the answer with an acknowledgement of my living in small spaces, I lived in a 33 square foot dumpster for a year. That was six foot by five and a half foot footprint and I'm six one. So I still, my girlfriend has told me that I for some reason, turn diagonally in the middle of the night. And we finally figured out was I was so used to sleeping diagonally in the dumpster that I have some sort of muscle memory from it. So and then the last place that I live or the next place after that was a 350 square foot Casita, and now I've designed 111 foot, square foot, very comfortable living structure and Joop that by the way, the jeeps can be combined to create much larger structures, right, by the time you have eight Joobs click together like Legos, you've got 1000, you know, nearly 1000 square foot structure. So you know, I don't like to get on a preachy pulpit about your house is too big, right? You can get in a lot of trouble there. But yeah, I think when you're talking about efficiency of space, I do think they're very inefficient. In terms of, you know, using space, the dining room is just probably the most ridiculous right room in the house that nobody ever goes to. Right, right. Like anymore. Like, it's, it's, it's a remnant of the 50s when, you know, Dad would come home with his lunchbox at 513 every day and the family would sit down for as we call it in Texas supper. Yep. Um, you know, and then there are just weird things with how hallways are designed extra bedrooms, a lot of that space could just be used much more efficiently and in multiple kind of use cases, but let's just talk about efficiency in the how the whole house is built. Right? You know, it's really optimized for cost and labor efficiency, religion, right. I have something called that I call The Home Depot parking lot test. And so if you've stick built a house which means using normal two by fours and you're putting up drywall and painting you can go pick up a couple of guys in the Home Depot parking lot, they can do a lot of those jobs. Right? If you have you know, you have these structural insulated panels or 3d printed house or anything out of the ordinary that those three guys in the Home Depot parking lot, can't understand or fix. You're going to run into problem, right? And it's going to stop your whole construction process. If you don't have the labor, some people don't show up that day. But literally everything from pouring the foundation and framing that up to putting the roof on unless it's a specialized trade, those guys can do that. Right, right. And so that's another form of the kind of inefficiency of you know, to get back to your question. It's not as much of the houses just being too big, they're way too inefficient in every way.

William Jarvis 30:34

Got it got. It's just like it's too expensive, deviate from the norm in these other ways to just get Yeah,

Jeff Wilson 30:39

and I mean, I'm literally sitting in an office with my co founder from casita across the way he now build single family homes. here in Austin, we build some of the biggest homes in in the city. And he knows the same things. I mean, he was literally a co founder of a prefab modular housing startup. And we tried to change housing that way, and, you know, ultimately couldn't move the needle and ran out of money.

William Jarvis 31:11

It's tough, it's tough challenge, very tough challenge. How much did you cost to produce? I don't know if you can talk about that. But yeah, I can't talk

Jeff Wilson 31:18

about that a lot. I can talk about how efficient we are. Yeah, we're able so Casita, my last startup, which was a typical modular housing startup that we built a factory house and shipped it out and dropped it in a backyard. That took us about 30 days, with probably 15 people, I can build a Joop in four hours with two Wow, wow. And we will get more efficient than making cars at that eventually, my co founder pushed an escalator out the door at a factory every 57 seconds. So, you know, when I'm talking this crazy talk about building hundreds of 1000s or millions of homes, yeah, it's completely doable. And there's a complete market. It's right, it's getting between A and B. So we sold Joobs, anywhere from about 20 to $25,000, depending on the options. We're no longer selling them, what we're doing now is looking at all this gorgeous land across the United States that is not used in saying Do you have a piece of land? Great, let's look at it. And if it's going to meet our sort of requirements, we will give you juice, no cost up front, and you essentially pay us a licensing fee, and split the revenue. So that creates for the landowner, no upfront costs, right. And maybe they don't even ever have to show up at their land, right. They just go under our booking platform, and it generates revenue. And it's also great for us because it's more of a SAS Type revenue stream, right? We now have a recurring revenue stream for the seven years of that Jube. We're generating recurring revenue that's fairly predictable. It also gives us control over to the product and brand where as part of that licensing program, you know, when the Jube starts getting old, or when the Model S comes out, right, right, we can go actually hot swap out your roadster that's now five years old, or three years old for the very latest 2022. Right? Model S plat.

William Jarvis 33:41

You go. Yeah, that's right, we'll

Jeff Wilson 33:43

swap we'll upgrade it again, no cost to the landowner. And it also gives us the ability to shift the fleet around, right. If your piece of land is really spiking in the summer and Southern California, there's another piece of land we have them on in North Dakota, or in Montana, we can shift that fleet so that you can increase your revenue stream that's completely dynamic. If the Mayor of New Orleans then calls and says I need 10,000 Jeeps down here there's a hurricane coming in the Gulf, we can shift the fleet to meet his need, right? Because your his or her knee.

William Jarvis 34:29

I love that and that gives you a lot of modularity and like how you meet demand, you know, what does it take to get you know, so you can flat pack them you know, how many can you put on like a semi and then you need like a forklift to get them off. What does that process kind of look like? Yeah,

Jeff Wilson 34:43

it's also become very simple to ship a casita typical prefab unit that we had across Austin. It required two big cranes to lift 40,000 pounds. On both sides. Get it onto a double drop lowboy. 18 Wheeler, with a specialized driver that required set shutting down streets, that was a process and it cost $15,000. I tried to shift in the right direction by an order of magnitude, every single process and the logistics and costs of a Joop relative to most of the other products out there. So we can get 12 Joobs, on and off a truck with a forklift. And literally with one person, get them across that same distance for not 15,000 unit, but about $150 a unit. So that efficiency and eventually we'll have robotics that are able to load on load, and maybe even pop these things up with a button to where an autonomous truck drive, you know, an autonomous truck could get these to a location, they could get on and off the truck would throw botnets and literally set up a hotel, or maybe even a village with no humans, right? Amazing. That's kind of fucking crazy to think about. But the technology is either all out there or on the roadmap right now, to be able to do that. It could be one of these things in technology, where I don't you probably know who said this, but it was something around either, you know, the technology and science fiction. And I'm Wait, I'm not quoting anywhere near that. So I'm probably butchering four or five, but the general concept is that the technology might see and sign science fiction, or one of these visions is either not going to ever happen, or it's going to happen way, way faster than anybody ever expected. Right? Um, and who knows, maybe we'll never offload a Jeep with a drone and robot and set it up from somewhere in Nevada by pushing a button. Or, you know, or it will happen in the next couple of years.

William Jarvis 37:10

Oh, yeah. That's so cool. I really love that vision. I've got a question. And it's been on the nose, you don't have to answer it if you don't want to. But I love to ask this question entrepreneurs, because I get a lot, you get a lot information on this, you know, will you be successful with you?

Jeff Wilson 37:26

It is a fantastic question. Um, and very honestly, I don't know. But I do believe enough to work 16 hour days, every day for the rest of my life on it. And I think we have a team that believes in a similar fashion, there is no first principle prohibiting us from doing it. And generally, when there is not a first principle that doesn't prohibit something that is doable. And I believe we can do it. We've had we have a team of people that have failures in their past. Yeah. And I think it's really important. I actually like to hire folks that have gotten up, brush themselves off, and that have learned from those past failures and applied them to what we're trying to do now. So look, I mean, we have, we're default alive, as a call Graham would say, right, by just selling 20 Jutes, we still sell 20 a month to cover our burn. And we are going to do everything in our power. And, you know, in our ability to grind to find the people to help us do that. That's the biggest question mark. Yeah, the biggest question mark. And this whole thing is, can I get the right people onto the train? Really, the funding? If we do that, we will get funded. We will continue to be funded. We will continue to build things out. But it will be about the tower.

William Jarvis 39:15

Oh, that's a really good answer. And yeah, you've proven your capability to default alive. You've got funding from your top tier firm initialized Gary tan. I'm curious what you know, as much as I can help, you know, with my spark podcast here, what are you looking for? Like? What are the skills you need? You know, and what can we try and help source for you so you can be successful on the talent side?

Jeff Wilson 39:40

Absolutely. The number one thing we're looking for right now is technical talent. And at the top of that list, the CTO gotcha and CTO that understands software but also understands integration into human experience right into the atomic aspect of that, that's going to help us build that delight on the user side, but also things like robotics and self driving cars. I mean, the folks I'm interviewing right now for that position, have built VR type glasses, right? That integrate with the software needed to do that. They have built self driving cars, right? They built drones. So folks that either have a lot of interest in that I'm done that in a built Tepes. Because that person and myself are then going to have to go out and find an absolute kick ass team to execute on this vision. And I would like to transition that, if it's okay, into the technology aspect of this, people will look at it and say, guys got a tent lit up tent. What a fire case, even thinking, like of needing a CTO, right? Well, if you think about Jube, it doesn't have anything to do with the actual tent. It has to do with that chassis product underneath it that currently acts as the foundation and has inverters and, you know, a little bit of IoT, and a bad, you know, some batteries in it some solar panels. Yeah. It is an awesome experience for one night, we can't make it awesome for too much longer and delightful without technology. So you should be able to not only book into a Joop on an app, but show up at the site and have it detect your location impulse when you're there. As you approach the Jube, you should get a notification that the last time someone that was in that Joop was 14 hours ago, you know somebody had crept into it right there should be a locking mechanism on the on the outside, when you go in your Spotify should click on automatically. You should open up the fridge and the floor and find your dark chocolate peanut butter cups and Japanese whiskey in the fridge that it knew you liked that's been delivered, right? You should lay down and have the right frequency of white noise come in, right that the unit has learned that you appreciate Maybe there's even haptics in the bed at some point that helps you to sleep better, that are attuned to you. Right? You should then eventually be able to drop a pen anywhere on the planet. And and select a date range for when you want to go there. Have your friends notified. Right? Where have you always wanted to go? Well,

William Jarvis 42:50

oh, man, probably North Dakota, North Dakota.

Jeff Wilson 42:54

Really? Okay. Was it the Black Hills there? Yeah. Or is it South Dakota? Well, something like that. Let's say you want to go to the Black Hills, right. And you've been on the job platform for a while you absolutely love it. There's bathrooms now and zoom rooms connected to Starlink. You love it that your dark chocolate peanut butter cups are there every time and see say You know what, I'm just going to drop a pin at the Black Hills on the app, the Jew pap, and then I'm going to slay 20 of my homies that I want to be there with me next July. Yeah, and let's say 10 of them, except that triggers a back end system where we go find the piece of land, right from a landowner in that area, make them an offer of $1,000 for that month that they're going to earn. And they have to do nothing but give us access to the land. Those chips are deployed there. Maybe you say I want a sauna. We want a hot tub, right? And we went to a large you know, community room to be delivered as well. You get booked a ticket, an Uber from the airport, you show up all your friends are there in a place that was raw prairie a couple of days before, right? So these are the kinds of things that we need to enable that will all be enabled through technology. We're now working on things from the very earliest parts of the internet integrated in into NFT platforms of fracture analyzing land in fractionalized Jupe assets, right, such that we can form whole new ways of community through web three that have never been imaginable or possible before. I know how to articulate that vision between where we are a tent. Yeah, and there. I know fuck all. But I know I know fuck all. And I wish the people are still on our team that know how to evaluate the technology aspect of this and bringing in that CTO, like, Austin, I'll read the founder of, you know, lambda schools, one of our investors, and, you know, we'll look and really help us sort of screen and that and find this person plus Gary Tan, who in my opinion is, you know, made the first bet on Coinbase. And it was one of the greatest seed investors in the world. Yeah, so that's what we're gonna do. And that's why we need a CTO and technology, folks. I think we got rather than just an ad for a CTO there, we got some of the kind of vision out there on why we did that.

William Jarvis 45:42

Absolutely. No, I think that that was really excellent. You know, I have some people in mind, I'll make sure I connect you with them. And if anyone's listening, you know, how should they connect with you? And you know, I'm gonna,

Jeff Wilson 45:53

I'm on a I'm on Twitter, at at prof dumpster PR o f dumpster. I went by Professor dumpster haven't been able to drop the Twitter handle. Also, my direct email is the letter j@youtube.com. There's also a lever form and encourage people to go to the website and click careers because we talk about the crypto wallet that we give people at Joop as part of their 401k we talk about the night the train trip through the night that you go out to this cool place called Marfa, Texas, actually, art blocks, I think just bought a house there. Oh, cool. And some of the other kind of cool things, you know, working with the team and the culture that we're trying to make unique. If you don't hit your OKRs quarterly, you sleep in a dumpster in the middle of the desert. And he I'm kidding. I love it. I love it. So yeah, I should, uh, yeah, on top of that, so I should say how the name Joop came up. Yes, absolutely. I'm curious. Because people actually somebody just asked me an interview earlier today. And it's kind of a funny story. You know, the company was called simple structures. Actually. I think that and then foundation. So Foundation was the when we applied to Y Combinator. The first time we were actually going to just make the foundation product really cheap sits on right foundations that were integrated with all the guts of a home as a decent idea. But Y Combinator rejected it. Which I don't think it was actually probably nearly as good ideas jute. So when we got our first little round of funding, after this, we all went to dinner, my girlfriend at the time, said hey guys, I've been thinking about something Elon is kind of a lazy son of a bitch. And everybody kind of drops their forks and looks over she goes like Gaiden really needs to like get a little bit more ambitious. And we're like interplanetary species budding cyborgs, ships and brains and bringing the world off of fossil fuels. The guy's thinking pretty big. And she said, Yeah, I just think he could go a little bigger. And we're like explained, she said, you know, if you want one more planet to Jupiter, he would probably get like a 400x. On surface area. Nevermind. It's a gas giant, but like, It's way bigger than Mars. He's kind of being lazy. Just going to Mars, right? It's a bigger market out there. She was like, you guys should just name your company some ridiculous fucking Silicon Valley name like Zooks or jewel, or Uber. She said, just call it cheap. And we're like, that is the most ridiculous thing ever. No fucking way. And we kept joking about it. And then I looked up jube.com, who owned it? Yeah, and wrote the guy and said, Hey, we're working on housing. And he said, You know what, four letters fallible URL, this thing's worth 50 100 grand, but I work on affordable housing, too. I love what you guys are doing. So here is I know we paid $5,000 or something. And then I said, sign from the heavens, or at least from the planets from Jupiter. Now, Jupiter.

William Jarvis 49:24

I love that. That is such a great story.

Jeff Wilson 49:27

And I have actually then a funny side story. I said, You know what? I'm going to calculate how lazy is and I have the receipt from I can send you a picture of it from that night at the restaurant where I'm like drawing these radiuses and you know, four pi r squared is the surface area of a planet. It's like an order of magnitude off. But it is still bigger and Elon, according to my girlfriend will still call him lease

William Jarvis 50:01

I love that. That is so cool. That's a great story. That is a great story. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for taking the time today. I really enjoy talking about jeep. I think we hit where we want to send people. But is it is it jeep.com? Is that the place to go.com

Jeff Wilson 50:16

or hit me up J Ed joop.com on email or on Twitter at Prof. Dumpster

William Jarvis 50:24

super sounds great. Well, thank you, Jeff.

Jeff Wilson 50:27

Thank you so much. Thanks. Well.

William Jarvis 50:35

Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives.