✦ AI generated
Ragav positions Posha as a rare exception in the robotics industry, having shipped 1,000 cooking robots to real homes with strong retention metrics.
Ragav: So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes in real kitchens with 1,000 real world deployments.
Pasha positions itself as one of the rare robotics companies that has moved beyond demos to ship a working cooking robot to 1,000 actual homes, separating itself from the vast majority of robotics startups.
Ragav: So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes in real kitchens with 1,000 real world deployments.
Ragav draws a parallel between autonomous driving and cooking robots, arguing that technology will free people from the obligation to cook daily meals.
Ragav: So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'll only be going to cook because they want to. Same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to. Cooking is going the exact same way. Door Dash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy, but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore.
supports · 1
Ragav predicts that within a decade, cooking robots will make home meal preparation a choice rather than a necessity, analogous to the self-driving car revolution, reducing DoorDash to a fallback option for meals a home robot cannot prepare.
Ragav: So 10 years from now, nobody's going to be cooking because they have to. They'll only be going to cook because they want to. Same way nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to. Uh, cooking is going the exact same way. Door Dash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy, but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore.
Sam frames the audience-vs-community distinction with a vivid test: if everyone were in a room, are the chairs pointing at a stage (audience) or at each other (community)? Only the latter survives without a central figure.
Sam Parr: I think people use the word community and audience differently. So for example, MFM is an audience, meaning if we quit doing this, the audience eventually is going to go away. Sean owns a brand that has a community. It has a community online where lots of his customers are talking and interacting, and that's a community. And I think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about. The best thing I heard of this is if everybody was together, which way would the chairs be pointing? So an audience is all the chairs point at the stage. The community is the chairs point at each other.
Midday Squares has scaled to $40 million in annual revenue selling refrigerated chocolate squares, a pace equivalent to 60 bars consumed every minute of the year, with a trajectory toward $60 million the following year.
Nick: We basically sold $40 million worth of $2.49 chocolate bars. That equates to about, let's just call it roughly 60 bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in 365 days a year for you to hit that number.
Nick explains how a global cocoa supply crisis caused by weather, disease, and corruption devastated their margins just as they reached profitability.
Nick: Since we started this business in 2018, chocolate went parabolic. The cost of cocoa and that means we lost like 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it and chocolate we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter went up to 32,000.
Midday Squares hit $1M in revenue in four months by imposing strict constraints — no Facebook ads, Montreal-only distribution, and founder hand-delivery with costumes and Polaroids — which generated organic word-of-mouth and social content from delighted customers.
Nick: We couldn't use Facebook ads. We had to get to a million dollars of revenue and we couldn't use Facebook ads. That was constraint number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city... We chose Montreal... we had to get to a million dollars here... We would wake up in the morning every morning... and we just went way too far with it... We would literally go on people's Instagram. So if you had a dog named Chuck, we'd be like, 'Shout out Chuck.' And we would wear these crazy outfits and we took Polaroids of ourselves... We would show up to the house and be like, 'Wait, why are you doing the delivery?'... Then we would leave them the photo. Then they would post... We got to a million dollars in like four months.
After three years of price disagreements with Costco, Nick took a gamble by proposing a record-breaking road show challenge that his team ultimately delivered on.
Nick: If we do the road show and we break the road show record, like the most sales ever in 14 days, will you give us 1999? And we shook hands that day. Uh 140 uh 100 We can't put 160,000 in 14 days. And how broke the record to the 160 was your barely break it or did you No, we smashed the record.
Traus describes how his AI system fights insurance companies on behalf of dentists, recovering lost revenue and speeding up payment collection.
Traus: Basically what we do is I don't know if you've ever been to the dentist or a doctor and gotten a bill from the insurance company and been like, you know, what actually is this? Right. And that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patients over, but the doctor's over. And so, the reality is in order to get reimbursed from the insurance company, the doctor has to do a bunch of administrative work and doctors hate it and they do a bad job. They lose money. My mom is a dentist. She's losing 10 to 15% of her money to these insurance companies. So, I was like, what if I could automate this process of dealing with the insurance companies?
Traus frames his company as empowering small dental practices to remain independent rather than being forced to sell to private equity firms.
Traus: I don't know if you guys have, you know, these PE roll-ups. They're buying up all these like Taco Bells, dental practices, and you know, the truth is 70% of the market are still independent guys like my mom, and they feel like they have no other choice but to sell it to the big guy. I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice? And they're like, heck yeah. That's the multi-billion dollar business here.
Traus argues that 70% of dental practices are still independent owners who feel trapped between selling to PE consolidators or bleeding money to insurance companies, and Daydream's automation gives them a 'third door' to stay independent and profitable.
Traus: 70% of the market are still independent guys like my mom, and they feel like they have no other choice but to sell it to the big guy. I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice? And they're like, heck yeah. That's the multi-billion dollar business here.