Applied Intuition: The $15B Physical AI Company (You Should Know)

**Qasar Younis** (0:01)
Marc Andreessen has been with us from day one. Series B was led by Himant at General Catalyst. Series C was Bilal at Lux and D was Elad Gil. Without a doubt, our customers look at the fact that we've been around for nearly 10 years, our crazy claim to fame that we've never spent the money we've ever raised.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:17)
We have to talk about.

**Qasar Younis** (0:18)
Yeah, most companies in the Bay Area are more hobby projects than they are earnest, serious businesses.

**Peter Ludwig** (0:25)
This is all happening autonomously, and these operators can control a whole fleet of vehicles, remotely, here.

**Qasar Younis** (0:30)
People don't want to work in mines in faraway places. These are dangerous jobs. AI really in these industries is being pulled out of our hands because technology can help solve this problem. We opened also in India and UK offices last year. About 18 sites globally. Australia could be one of those countries where we're doing driverless trucks, and we're doing a bunch of different ports. We're kind of hopscotching like a board game throughout the planet.

**Peter Ludwig** (0:53)
In 10 days, we showed them a video of these infantry squad vehicle driving autonomously out in a test environment.

**Qasar Younis** (0:58)
This view that everything is going to take a long, long, long time, and it requires many years of planning, it's just false.
Molly, what's the craziest thing I can do to get this thing to be viral? I don't have a sword.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:21)
Qasar, what is your hottest take?

**Qasar Younis** (1:24)
My hottest take? I've gotten in trouble for giving hot takes, but you know what?
I'll try to be restrained, but maybe I won't. I think most companies in the Bay Area are more hobby projects than they are like earnest, serious businesses. And it's kind of like, we'll take a swing on this. And I don't mean to disrespect my own, you know, my co, I'm in the fraternity of co-founders or founders who were kind of toiling away. And it's very hard to see who's doing it for the right reasons, doing it for the wrong reasons. And I think it's like kind of maybe some of the wrong motivations that exist. I think if you roll back the clock 15 years ago or 20 years ago, right when we were entering the Bay Area, literally around that time, it's not, it's, I'm not like one of these people where like the old days are always great and the new days are terrible. But the new days are definitely popular. Like it is, like I think sometime between like the social network and the HBO show Silicon Valley, it's, and then like just us as consumers, just adopting smartphones and software becoming a real part of our day to day to day life. Silicon Valley like Sunnyvale went from this cottage industry to suddenly the center of economic activity for America and for the world. And that attracts a huge group of people like a magnet. And so the valley today, especially, I always make the distinction between South Bay and SF Silicon Valley and San Francisco, but a lot of times it's interchanged. Because I think the cultures are different. Yeah, I think the cultures in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara and Mountain View are different than the culture in Mission or Dogpatch, I do. Maybe it's a perception and maybe it's not true, but I don't know, at least I perceive it. And so the point being or the punchline being is that if you look back at finance in the 80s and 90s, Manhattan attracted everybody and it kind of became a money thing. And I'm not to say that the old Silicon Valley wasn't a money thing. These are businesses to make profits, but it seems like it's more of a money thing. And is that good or bad? I mean, who am I to judge? But at least that's not our motivation. I think if that's singularly your motivation, I think you probably maybe build a company a different way. Like we wouldn't build a company this way if just making money was the only outcome we wanted.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:55)
So I actually wanted to talk to you about that on a couple of different dimensions. One of them being, I feel like you just came out of stealth.

**Qasar Younis** (4:04)
Yeah. Well, call it classic, not bestseller.
So I think if you know, Marc Andreessen has been with us from day one. Marc Andreessen is not exactly an unknown person. So I think, yeah, it's his guy. He created this thing called the Web Browser, but he's been with us from the beginning. And our Series B was led by Himant, that General Catalyst. And it's like we're, Series C was Bilal at Lux and D was Elad Gil. These are like this, they're the in folks of Silicon Valley. And I worked at Y Combinator before, I worked at Google before. So we were here, I think we're just, our relationship to the ecosystem has always been different. It's not been antagonistic or anything like that, but I think we're just not, we have actively sought that limelight, I think before, that's changed in the last year. Because now every time people hear me say that they're like, oh, but you were on this podcast. Yes, we're actively changing that. We're getting our, you know, we're here. We're talking to you. I mean, that's something that we wouldn't have done in a couple of years ago. We had success a couple of years ago. I think we, there's two practical reasons why we've changed this. One is just recruiting, recruiting numbers. Historically, we've gotten all the people that we ever wanted. But if you look at the mix of outbound versus inbound, you have certain like benchmarks as the company grows. And as we've gotten bigger, the benchmark moved to where we're doing, we're still doing a disproportionate amount of outbound to the stage we're in. Roughly as you get bigger as a startup, your outbound actually drops because people know who you are and you're starting getting a lot of inbound. Company like OpenAI or Anthropic, there's other reasons because we're also a technology provider and they're more of a consumer, prosumer product. They're not going to do a lot of outbound. There's enough inbound coming here. And so when we saw that, that was the first time we had that internal debate like, hey, this and we're all of our values can be reduced to two words, radical pragmatism. And so it's like, that's maybe not the right strategy. And then the second thing is that I think heavily influenced by Marc and some of our investors who said, let's get the word out there. I think this is a great company. And I think earlier on also, we were very, very thoughtful of not creating so much attention that would inspire a lot of people to compete with us. Now it's kind of like we've grown up a little bit. We've got some muscles. We've gotten a few rounds under the belt. We can go into the ring and fight basically any oncomer. When you're really small, you're embryonic. That's a little dangerous. And I do think actually the new crop of Silicon Valley companies, some do take inspiration from us in the sense of, not like the pithy things like the shoes and the name and all of that stuff, but like real things like, hey, we're going to be South Bay Basin. We're not going to be very loud. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.