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WOLF TUESDAY AFTERNOON SPACES
Recorded: Dec. 5, 2023 Duration: 2:00:50Space Recording
Full Transcription
Mr. Penny in the flesh.
The big dog in town this week.
What's going on?
No longer anonymous.
Yo, yo, yo.
You believe it?
That was one hell of a coming out, if I don't say so myself.
Yes, sir.
Yes, sir.
And it just keeps going.
I've been loving it.
Some of the follow-up posts have been great as well.
How's all them likes feeling?
Good.
It always feels good.
You know that.
I do know that.
I do know that, man.
You got a few posts with over a thousand likes in the last few days.
I'd love to see it.
You deserve it.
It's definitely been a good experience these past few days.
The biggest, funniest change is now as I'm walking around, if someone gives me a double take or looks at me for too long, I wonder if they recognize me or they recognize the video.
That's something I never had to deal with before.
That's pretty funny.
That is pretty funny.
I hadn't thought about that either.
Cool, man.
What's your next in-person event you're going to go to?
Show your face at.
Well, I'm going to try to make it to as many as I can.
I'm not sure when the next official Tesla event will be, but if I can manage to get either a referral invite or get a lottery or a plus one, I'll definitely try to make the trip.
Otherwise, I know for sure I'll be going to X Takeover whenever that happens.
Yeah, I mean, I love the in-person events.
It really makes a difference to get to know people and, you know, shake hands and have a drink, and that was fun even when I was anonymous.
So now it's, I think, probably going to be even more fun.
Absolutely.
Going to be a good time.
Well, let's talk about this event a little because, Penny, you actually weren't here on Friday.
We did a space about the event.
Larry, I see you in the audience.
I'm shooting you an invite.
What was your experience like at the event?
What did you think of it, getting to see the Cybertruck up and close as a shareholder?
Just walk me through your thoughts.
Yeah.
Well, it started out that I got to the gate and wasn't sure I was going to be able to get in.
I had been given a late plus one ticket, and I had an email confirmation from IR saying, yeah, you're confirmed.
We'll send you the QR code tomorrow.
QR code never came.
So I was sitting at the gate, you know, talking to the security people and hoping that they could help me figure it out.
Eventually worked my way all the way up to the head of security for Tesla.
He had flown in from the Fremont factory for the event, and he let me in.
So that sort of saved the day.
Inside the factory, the tour was absolutely incredible.
I was there for the annual shareholders event.
I think it was in May, and they offered us a tour then.
But it felt like follow this line that's really far away from anything cool.
And, you know, don't try to go anywhere else.
It wasn't very impressive.
This one, we got to get up close and personal and walk down the entire Cybertruck line, which was just shockingly cool.
Watching all the robots do their thing.
Seeing, like, I don't know.
I didn't count, but it felt like more than 100 Cybertrucks in, you know, different phases of their builds.
Some of them complete, some of them not.
Seeing all of the, like, exploded Cybertrucks, like, where they're hanging the different parts, and you can sort of see how everything goes together.
That was super cool.
Even employees were, like, standing at different stations along the way and explaining what stage of the build process that we were walking by, what the different robots and machines did.
The tour was by far the highlight from my point of view.
I hope that people in the future get a chance to do a similar tour.
I'm not sure anyone's going to get walked down the Cybertruck line like that again, now that they're going to be in production.
But, yeah, that was such a super cool experience.
The parties and after parties were amazing.
I got to meet tons of new people at hotels and bars and, you know, wherever the crowd was going.
There were after parties at Airbnbs.
I got to hang out with, gosh, a lot of the people that are in this space now.
So, I absolutely treasured every moment of the event, really.
These are the times of year that I look forward to the most.
So, it was awesome.
Beautiful.
Love hearing the recounts of how it went.
Glad it went well.
There were some posts, one from the Tesla Ho, talking about how she felt like they could have done more with selling merch, making it a little bit more expansive.
There were a lot of people crammed in.
Did you feel like that or you think it went pretty smoothly or could there have been things that they could have done even better?
Well, I mean, they definitely would have made some money if they had some merch and there would have been some happy customers.
There was tons of people wearing, you know, whether it was their AI Day shirts or whatever other Tesla merch they have.
Very popular.
Everyone was so excited about the event.
Everyone was talking about the energy as it was building up towards Elon coming up and doing the announcement.
It was like Disneyland for us dorks.
And if we could have brought home souvenirs, that definitely would have been cool.
So whether it was like some sort of unique hat or T-shirt or something, maybe only for people that attended the event, I think that would have been a huge hit.
They probably could have sold it to everyone there.
In terms of like the crowd, the area of the factory where they actually did the handoffs of the Cybertrucks was pretty small.
So cramming all of the people in there, it did feel a little bit like we were, you know, sardines.
I for sure could have used like a chair or, I don't know, a little bit better planning in terms of making sure everyone could see the stage.
I'm tall, so I could still see it all right.
And no one really tries to push me around.
But there were tons of, you know, people who aren't above average height, who couldn't see anything.
They had to like hold their phones up above their head and hope that they could record it without actually being able to see it themselves.
I think that part was probably a bit of a disappointment for anyone who had that sort of bad luck.
But that, but that was also very short.
The event itself, the delivery part of it was probably only, I don't know, 30 minutes or something out of, you know, most people went there for a couple days.
So it was almost like that the deliveries of the trucks were a footnote in a much bigger, more exciting trip to me.
Um, but definitely like it, it hit home that this truck from the future that we've been seeing for years now, uh, polarizing haters and lovers.
And I've been sitting on my five pre-orders since whatever year it was.
And, and it's real now they're giving them to customers and the line is real.
They're actually building them.
There's not just a couple.
Uh, I remember it feels like less than a year ago, there was like maybe two or three cyber trucks and now there are very many and I think they can make them fast.
Speaking to the employees that attended the event, they were super excited too.
It was interesting to find out that they have a hard, like, even if you work on the cyber truck line, you were not guaranteed a ticket to the event.
Uh, there were a handful of like leads that were there aside from the volunteers being able to enjoy.
The event, um, yeah, I mean, generally speaking, they could have improved a, just a little bit on, on, I would say like just the area where they executed the deliveries.
If you were receiving a car, I'm sure it was amazing.
Uh, you didn't have to stand in the crowd, but for those of us that were watching, there's a bit hectic.
Yeah.
I love it.
Appreciate you starting us off your penny.
All right, Larry, I know you messaged me.
You had a few things you wanted to walk through here.
We'd love to turn the mic over to you.
Ah, thanks.
Well, so I, you know, I, I actually wanted to talk about how exciting this, uh, 48 volt battery and the transition to this new, um, EE, uh, architecture, electronic to, you know, electric, um, architecture is.
And, um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh
you know it's a major change to car architecture after 110 years it's the first real major change
to the electric architecture and electronic architecture up to now it's a patchwork quilt
a truly patchwork quilt of wiring harnesses which are incredibly inefficient and make it
almost impossible to test uh properly test the vehicle um and that is going to that has reduced
their costs on on the uh cyber truck by a very substantial amount i mean people uh are going to
be amazed at the margins they're earning on the cyber truck and a very large part of that is the
contribution of this new architecture and you know the oems have had this 48 volt system
defined at least defined uh 10 to 15 years ago but none of them have been able to make the switch
simply because of the incredibly uh complex system of uh their supply chain you know they have uh
all of them have tier one suppliers tier one suppliers all have tier two suppliers tier two
suppliers all have tier three suppliers and a single electronic component for and software
for a car could be five or six layers deep so to make a change in the architecture involves you know
trying to orchestrate multiple different uh suppliers for multiple different oems with multiple different
levels of supply and therefore architecture change is almost impossible so the fact that tesla is making
this change and will be the first uh manufacturer to actually offer a vehicle based uh 48 volt system
uh puts them in a really really strong position to offer this as a solution to other oems and they've
already taken steps in that direction so it's pretty exciting uh it's exciting from the perspective of what
it's going to do for what it's going to do for what it's already done actually for the cybertruck for
example steer by wire is a direct beneficiary of that not even you know beyond even the the savings
a dramatically lower uh weight of uh wiring is another beneficial another beneficial result
um and so what we're going to see is going to be interesting i mean at at the uh investor day they
alluded to the fact that they're interested in working with other oems they've done this now successfully
with their supercharger network so i expect this is going to be the next major revenue stream from the
auto business for tesla so that's just what i wanted to uh you know put into the ether
yeah super interesting there larry what type of dog you got going on over there
he's an old dog but uh can't be silenced
yeah anyway sorry about that no no worries i love you digging into the technicals here and the
intricate details i'd actually like to bring it right over from you to jeff lutz jeff curious if you
have some thoughts about larry just shared there perhaps something else you know with regards to specs
or other areas that are standing out to you yeah um great to be here thanks for having me on i was at
the event as well and share many of the same um bits of feedback is is uh penny i thought the
for me and i think of my background the um ability to walk through the operation and see it now we were um
um we were witnessing processes that were running in a loop mode um so but there was real production
with our working process on the line it was as many many trucks but the yeah i would say definitely going
through the operation was a huge a huge highlight and i i even followed up with with tesla afterwards
i had to ask multiple times it's okay for us to take pictures and videos i said yeah absolutely
because at other events it wasn't wasn't okay and then i asked again if we could share
that information because i saw it being shared online i said yeah go ahead so um really transparent
of tesla and really um really you know you know beneficial if you're a shareholder just
to see the process and understand um how this goes together i mean i could go on for a long time i
just put out about three videos with her just on the whole experience but um in terms of uh and the
product launch itself and the pricing and so forth but yeah the the i agree the highlight of the event
was definitely the walking through the line and then of course seeing other like-minded uh tesla investors
and enthusiasts people that are really excited about what tesla is doing uh i just a couple of
things um on the pricing side you know i think there's this like almost like a stopwatch starts
as soon as an event is done and it's like who can put the first comment like you know one-liner out
there in the ether and i just think the like the wall street take on tesla um cybertruck pricing uh was really
off and and i i've made my comments known online and other spaces and in in videos now um i'm not sure
what else i can do um but i mean the one takeaway i think i would have for the team on pricing
is first off the pricing is very comparable and you actually do proper comp analysis you know
wall street needs to to maybe i don't know talk to real estate agents or something about like how to do
proper comps but this is you know this these are technical comps and and and and do it the right
way but i did the one the one thing i would tell you is just time in market is very important tesla is
t equals zero time in market now they need to come out and meet the market that is there so i totally
understand it and they are it's a better product it's better spec'd um and you know there's there's not
there's more than than range and speed like the zero to 60 and range aren't the two factors
that that serious car truck buyers are buying product on but uh the the thing that wall street
missed was that the ford f-150 and the rivian r1t have had two years in market to be they've been
running their supply chains for two years they've had two years to introduce cost reductions event-driven
reductions from engineering from their supply chain from their suppliers from in factory
they've had um all this time to get their their supply chain to scale and get the full utilization
tesla's at t equals zero so for tesla's pricing to be comparable at this point in time
just think of what tesla's history is what what did tesla do a couple years after the model y
what did they do a couple years after the model three there's documented facts of them taking their
cog structure down 30 or more and i believe you know they'll be able to do that the other thing is
um tesla's larry indicated um they've made decisions that have deleted a lot of raw materials from the
product and uh and and so so basically anybody who's going to deliver a 2025 or 2026 version truck
if they don't really if they don't start where tesla is on the 48 volt architecture i mean they're going
to be really honestly another generation behind now taking both sides of this at this point in time
you know tesla did a great thing for their unit economics by pulling all that material out raw material out
but that's supply base for the new 48 volt this new silicon new controllers you know they're the
only game in town they're you know they're they're giving suppliers probably you know a number for next
year and a number that's double or triple of that for the following year and that's only going to be
a very small fraction of the total auto market that's on 12 volt so there is a reality there that
they're going to get tremendous cogs benefits cogs benefits by the raw material reduction they're going to
get some they're going to get some drag on cogs for just being kind of a low volume niche uh volume on
the 48 volt architecture until they can get others onto that or until tesla puts another major you know
one thing like is is you know is the 25 000 car if it's if it's that if that's on that architecture
then they've got the carrot right now in front of that supply base to take that cost structure down
faster so anyway just an interesting conversation on a little bit on the event a little bit where i
see pricing going and you know the reviews are obviously um you know they're kind of off the
charts uh there you know there's some things there are people picking out here or there but in general
they're uh they're very positive on the product so i i think from from my perspective um this is going
to be a very difficult product it the other one other people i'll just take away and i'll turn it
over to others you know adam jonas called this thing an art truck um if you do an art product you're
normally not pouring all kinds of new unique and difficult items into that product if it's if it's
truly art but truly for show the the work that they would have done would have been on the exoskeleton
they would have left the 48 they would have left the 12 volt architecture and they didn't need to do
steer by wire they didn't need to do a bunch of stuff if it was a low volume art truck this is where
i believe he got that wrong the fact that tesla poured all this innovation into this product
uh and they're gonna they're gonna introduce it in a controlled manner they're they have every
intention of massively scaling uh this truck and if you walk through the operation you would see that as
well so i i think i think the analysts are again they're they're almost like they're rushed to get
some hot take out there to get you know i i don't get it this thing is is going to do it's going to be
supply limited in year one and um and it won't be it may be two or three years before it's actually the
demand limit and by then tesla will be meaningfully taking their cog structure down
uh that's all for me thanks really really good stuff there jeff and a lot of strong points and
while you were talking we were getting some comments coming in under the space and i'll flip
this question first to amy if that's okay and then i think some others might want to chime in on it as
well and that is there's this big disconnect it seems like at least on social media from what i see
you can see people commenting underneath the space um evan commented what do you think of the
cyber truck events right people are like it's missing on the metrics it's ugly it's not going
to sell but when you look at it there's there's millions of pre-orders for this thing right are
people just putting that because they can like what do you think is this big disconnect amy
yeah i think that it is just the standard resistance that people have to something that's new um anytime
that something that's new come comes out there's a standard process of what is that and then
you move through uh oh but what is that and to maybe it's like really arresting and then from
that you're like you move to i want one and so some people are just at that first day stage of that
process but as they're out on the roads um you'll people will see why there is a million pre-orders
and we're seeing it already in the videos of the few that are out on the roads how they draw
immediate crowds everybody's taking a selfie with one um it's just such a striking car and then it
does it immediately changes what you think when you look at everything else on the road it just it
has a way of making it look dated making it look like the past and you know a car is a very very big
purchase so when you buy one you don't want something that looks dated before you've already walked out
the door um which is a really critical point um to add into what larry was saying one of the really
big components of the 48 volt uh wiring is the way that it allows for remote distribution units both of
of data and of wiring and this is tesla now being able to work out the kinks of the manufacturing process
that is absolutely going to be required for a 25 uh k vehicle and the unbox process because the new 48
volt system the way it is designed is similar to 787 which has always been constructed in a module
manner so each section of wiring can you could have divide by right front left front rear of the vehicle
and that can be separate wiring systems and then you connect them together so tesla is not going to
get to the 25 volt vehicle the 25k vehicle excuse me where they're trying to do a revolution very
vehicle very low price without having actually already done many of these systems um prior to getting
there which is really a critical point when wall street starts modeling it to figure out what the ramp
time is going to be to figure out if tesla is going to be able to hit this price point um i think that
they're all critical appreciate that amy kristen you want to chime in here yeah the event was amazing um
i i i think this was probably my favorite event walking down the line there you know that we weren't
restricted to a lot of pictures obviously there was only certain areas we could walk but there was
a lot of engineers and um different employees that we had a chance to talk to and there was a lot
of execs out there as well there was a lot of people if you had questions they were there to
answer it um i think i enjoyed sitting there listening to the guy that was talking about the
steer by wire and i mean i think that's going to be in the next gen platform as well i think this is
going to be something that tesla will use moving forward and i think it's i mean we've removed the drive
shaft we've removed different things but i mean we were talking to a general contractor in a spaces
yesterday and the guy said honestly he's had a lot of different trucks and he said the steer by
wire makes a big difference for him when he wants to change and turn around with the radius
and doing different things and also he you know they usually leave their work trucks running when
they then they when they replug their tools like with the generator and stuff like that he said so
it's going to be nice to be able to use the cyber truck and not have all that you know the pollution
and things going on at the work site but um but the factory itself and just the way they laid it out i
really appreciate that tesla took the time to have people there at different stops to go through
everything um and and i mean the the truck is beautiful i i hear adam jonas that he said it's
an art piece elon did give hat tip to sid mead and sid mead back in 2019 said it's a beautiful truck
and it's got a blade runner look but this is a very practical truck and it's got a structure that's like
none other i mean you guys saw that guy from england i don't remember his name that was kicking the truck
sideways that you can't you can't run a shopping cart into this and get a dent which is amazing this thing is
extremely durable and and i think that's pretty cool about it and it's got one of the highest suspensions
in the industry too which is pretty pretty interesting as well and and i agree with the
penny there it was i mean they did the cool rule out rollout where we got to see the truck come down
the line and first customers take delivery but i mean i was by a pole and just holding my phone
up enjoying it through the phone it was a little hard to see but the video the video the video of cyber truck
coming out was pretty amazing i want to go go re-watch that i feel like i was watching like
interstellar alien it was it was pretty amazing so um the whole event was just great i think they did
a really good job i'd like to see a little bit better but that's just is what it is so yeah and i
don't know i don't know there's there's probably a whole lot more to say but any more questions i don't
yeah i think that you make a lot of great points uh i would say uh i might have some more
questions i want to keep circling a little bit here just hitting a few others on the panel and
then i'll come back around i did want to hit hamid who joined up here because hamid i know that you're
a pretty passionate fan of the ev space as a whole uh you've definitely you know lean towards a few but
i've seen multiple posts of you really passionate about getting a cyber truck and wanting one maybe
you can speak to me as to how you think this stacks up versus some of the other options
yeah um i i think uh like k10 i think we took a ride in the same cyber truck on the unveil night
in 2019 if i remember correctly and um i mean like it it was hard not to fall in love with that
vehicle immediately right like uh at first it was just a shocker in terms of like the design being so
different but then once you see it up close and you get in it and it was just incredible
uh and different and you know i think all of that is goodness right like when when you have
people talking about oh people want their trucks to be tough well this is the literally the toughest
truck in the world so i think all of that was fantastic i think they really delivered on the
toughness aspect on sort of a lot of the specs um this is probably like the first time that elon has
under delivered from what he's promised in terms of range and price but that ended up sort of working out
fine um for the amount of demand that they have so they're still not going to be able to make as
many as they need to in order to uh sort of fill the demand over the next at least couple of years
maybe longer because now that the trucks are out uh everyone else who was a naysayer is like
shit i want one of those bulletproof tough trucks so um i think it's all around positive for tesla
um now in terms of financial performance for tesla though it still might be rocky over the next year
right because uh they're not going to be making uh a profit on these trucks at least for probably a
year or longer based on what elon has already said publicly so uh the cyber truck is probably not going
to contribute positively to their um to their profit numbers to their earnings per share and that might hold
the stock back for some period of time it's probably going to have these wild swings of up and down
based on people who really believe in the company long term being the bulls that's people like me
but also people who are like naysayers and a huge amount of uh tesla bears who are going to take a look
at every single corner results and they're going to scrutinize it and say they're not making any more
profit now than they were two years ago or whatever and they're going to be correct for at least a year
right so the stock might still be in this sort of volatile state for the next uh some period of
time maybe as much as a year and a half until uh 2025 that that would be my guess if i had to guess
um also the pricing that they released was not a bad thing for rivian you know i'm i'm also a fan of
rivian and one of the concerns that a lot of rivian shareholders had or rivian fans had is that if the
cybertruck gets priced at uh just 10k above what uh was originally promised starting at let's say 49
000 um and going up to like 79 or whatever it would uh it would be a major hit to rivian because if
you could buy a cybertruck for 20 grand less than a rivian that would be a problem but it turns out it's
not as big of a problem and the range is in line with rivian's range so all of that sort of works out
well for rivian as well so i'm a fan of both of these companies i think both of them are going to
do really well obviously i'm a bigger fan of tesla if i had to pick one but in terms of the stock the
stock of rivian seems to be sort of like a lower priced stock right now so that would be sort of my
whole spiel perfect appreciate that rundown yeah i just wanted to get your thoughts as someone who's
really been in tune with both of them all right ryan appreciate you being on here i want to jump
over to you i know you're with us on friday for a little bit but there were some great thoughts
here shared especially by you know larry and jeff digging into the technical items and the event
itself um would love to hear from you you know coming away from it what you're excited for how you
think this affects the stock price both short term and long term maybe some other pieces there
yeah thanks for having me on um i think it was really cool to hear about like penny's experience
jeff's experience all you guys who k10 um everybody who attended the event uh it sounded like it was a
little bit more like uh up close and personal where you got to really see more on the tour than in prior
events um so you know that excitement that they shared reminded me of how cool it is to have
walked the fremont factory line um i know like when i was in palo alto i would sometimes go over to
fremont and just be like for some work reason or another i would be at the factory and i would walk
the line and um i felt like there any any time i got the opportunity i would invite other folks who
were friends in the bay area to come and and do a factory tour and i'm thinking of two guys in
particular that are my age that invested in the in the stock simply because of that tour that they
they got at fremont um like the the tour guys that that ran those tours were absolutely amazing they just
went into great detail um they you know expressed the enthusiasm they have for tesla's mission
and just demonstrated or i guess articulated it well enough to to my friends that um they felt
compelled to buy the stock so you know if anybody has the opportunity to go over to fremont and i assume
also austin now um they're probably doing publicly available factory tours and would highly recommend
doing those if you get the opportunity um as far as like the future of tesla and and where the stock is
going um i'm really excited about the future robo taxi uh i know others on the panel had mentioned
that once cyber truck manufacturing is fully up and running uh this should bode well for the future
future robo taxi i i believe uh i haven't watched the sandy monroe interview yet um but i believe they
mentioned the upcoming manufacturing for robo taxi um and you know like it's like once tesla is able to
mass manufacture a vehicle that's under thirty thousand dollars it's it's just gonna completely
be a game changer like imagine you could get something that's much cheaper than a honda accord
uh that's electric and doesn't require as much service the long-term value of the car is higher
um it drives better like the performance is better the ride is smoother the tech is far and away uh more
advanced and it can drive on its own it's just like i just can't imagine um what the demand will be
so i'm i'm quite excited for them being able to mass manufacture that vehicle um and then as far as
the stock um one of the insights that i got from other folks who were on different teams at tesla was
the the sales uh quite closely correlate to movements in the stock price actually so it's like during the
time of 2017 to 2000 to mid 2019 when the stock was kind of like bobbing up and down slightly trending
downwards um especially during that time people were a little bit concerned about bankruptcy risk
and they were a little bit hesitant to buy the car um and potentially they have uh like less funds to
to to purchase a vehicle at that time um but when the stock runs up and it you know goes 10 to 20x from
mid 2019 to 2021 all of a sudden people who were really into elon and into the stock now they have
like more money than they knew what to do with and like the first thing they think of is yeah i want to
buy a tesla they buy a tesla and then they're all like people who were also on the fence they're no
longer concerned about bankruptcy risk so they're not concerned about like purchasing a vehicle that
may not be serviceable by a bankrupted company um so during the next year and a half or or two if the stock
you know bobs up and down or or declines due to macro environment or due to the macro environment or
i don't know whatever other causes um i think that could affect sales a little bit um you know
fortunately tesla's been a unique situation where they've pretty much been uh supply constrained since
the since the company was was started um so it's like whether they have um like fewer sales of model
s in the future than they expected or fewer sales of cybertrek than they expected i think it's likely
that they're gonna make it up in sales of other vehicles so it's like model y in particular is the best
selling vehicle in the world um i think that's going to continue for many years like the the
crossover market is pretty much the biggest market in the world uh in in the us i think the pickup truck
market is potentially bigger um but still like and now that they have a product um that's in that market
like i i just don't see how there's any other like auto manufacturers that compete at all with tesla
in any of these markets so um yeah i i guess like i'm i'm quite excited about this the stock and the
company uh i i do think like if if the stock waivers for a little bit the sales could also waiver a tiny
bit but over the long term like it's it's just super clear that tesla's here to dominate and um
they'll probably continue to do so because their team is so great
amazing rundown ryan i love what you're saying as well about the passion that they were having as
they walk people through those tours i think that's within the company without uh penny you got some
thoughts here oh i just love excuse me every time that ryan talks because he's such a believer like
i am that the team is is tesla right um the the recruiting is elon's biggest asset it's his biggest
skill the fact that he gets the most talented people in the world together to work on these projects
uh allowing them the ability not only to make money and use their skills to work on cool stuff but to
also be working on solving a mission right uh working towards something that's bigger than
any individual that's involved uh it's an under discussed aspect i think of elon and even you
know walter isaacson touched on it in his book definitely and there there were some cool quotes
there um but it wasn't the theme right the theme was like uh maybe he couldn't get it done without
demon mode uh and i think he he maybe missed the boat there right like maybe he couldn't do it without
the mission would have been the theme for me uh so so yeah every time ryan talks i get excited about
that hearing him talking about the factory at fremont and and all the people that were influenced by that
as well uh super cool so i don't have anything new per se i was just yeah uh again i get excited every
time ryan talks me too oh i see one of our friends who was on stage had a drop down i wanted to get to
them okay evan do you want to jump in here with some thoughts any questions that you had
um i don't have too too many questions i thought it was an interesting release i actually liked
marquez brownlee's uh review video after it was like 40 minutes or so and i thought it was pretty solid
there was some interesting stuff in there that i had not seen before the prindle or whatever we
want to call it that being on the roof and not on the thing next to you i thought that was pretty
random and we'll see how that goes and i think there's a lot of other interesting stuff with the
turning radius being more of a you don't have to turn the wheel two times or whatever it is it's just
a 90 degree turn and it will go all the way uh so it seems like there's a lot of new stuff in this
one and i'm excited to uh to learn more about it i would be lying if i said i was blown away by what i
saw at the uh on the live stream and kind of coming out of it on the website now um i don't know how i
feel about the the cybertruck itself in general i definitely don't think it's disgustingly ugly
like some people do uh but i also don't know if it's the craziest thing i've ever seen i think i
am still in the middle so well we will see what happens over the next year or so but i feel like we
already knew a lot of information and all the new stuff that we got after release event again i was not
there so i didn't get the luxury of getting to walk around and the the uh the manufacturing of
it and i think that would have been very interesting and maybe could have changed my opinion but i think
everything that i personally learned on that live stream was not something that got me super excited
um it wasn't something again my level of excitement was kind of everything we already knew before and i
think it is a pretty cool vehicle i think it is new stuff but the price came in above expectations
i'm not going to drive it 400 or 300 miles i don't care about the range that much but it did come in
a little bit below um but mostly the big thing for me was the price which i thought was a little bit
disappointing and everything else i kind of already knew what it was going to look like and knew to be
excited about it so it's not me saying i'm disappointed in general about the whole thing but
i'm disappointed about the new stuff that we learned uh last week you see evan you didn't get excited
when you saw the cybertruck towing the 911 in the drag race i lied there's one thing i got excited
about and it was that one that one was that was so crazy the room like erupted that was when that
happened i don't know because that one was pretty cool i would give you that um but also think about
it porsche has never been a company that does go for straight line uh speed so i'm not totally
surprised and i wonder what happens if you drag that out further but uh i will say that was one of the
the more exciting things but even like them throwing the baseball at the the car oh that
was a terrible throw uh we need a metal ball and a pitcher or something um but uh i don't know like
i said i was not overall disappointed in general i was kind of just the stuff that i didn't know
already didn't make me super excited i would be lying if i said it did um and yeah i had to learn
over the next year two years whatever happens i think as we've talked about here a little bit
they're still going to be supply constraint for the next couple of years so uh they really do have
a good amount of time before uh a lot of the stuff actually really matters we're going to say
and the truck market tends to be a more premium area so they do have a little bit more leeway
so as jeff was saying i expect them to bring their cogs down i expect the price of this to come down a
little bit uh but if i'm being totally honest i don't care about any car that tesla releases all i care
about is fsd and not getting solved and uh and yeah but yeah sorry i cut you off honey
oh no i was cutting you off no problem i'm curious uh if you've got a chance to see one at a mall or
somewhere in person yet one of the things that is like that that occurred to me when i saw it in
person for the first time is that it actually matters not to see it in isolation but next to other
current and and previous cars the the biggest impact is that it makes it's not what the cybertruck
itself looks like it's that the car next to it all of a sudden looks super dated it's like you it's
like this new car this new truck is in the future and everything around it is from a previous era in
the past where we made things different i get like a weird vibe like that when i see a cybertruck next to
any other car or truck so i think uh that's something that we'll hear a lot more in the future
i'm excited to see what the next couple years look like in this arena um if this ends up to
being something that it really takes on i think that you're going to see other truck companies come
in and copy it but there will be a couple of years behind so uh we shall see uh i think it's something
that you know we have to actually see the numbers how it sells and that's going to take a little
bit of time because they're going to be supply constraint as they build up the supply chain for
it and the manufacturing chain which is really difficult especially when it's a completely new
vehicle with so many new features in it uh like i was just watching through the video of a couple
of reviews that i've seen of it and they they definitely came in here and did a bunch of new
stuff so i definitely do like seeing a company that's overall i'm a fan of innovation and um you have
to try different stuff for that to work and maybe this is it maybe this isn't but uh i always get
the confidence when i see a company shooting for the stars and uh some of it's going to stick some
of it will not and and uh yeah we shall see but i thought it was definitely um but like i was saying
like i i have good thoughts about the vehicle itself already but a lot of that came before this event
and i will say you did bring up the point about it towing the porsche and beating it in a drag race that
was something that you're right that was new that i didn't see before that i was like wow that's actually
cool but uh yeah when i first started watching the drag race i was kind of rolling my eyes a little
bit because they they said porsche 911 right and i'm like okay well they didn't say porsche 911 twin
turbo this is probably not like the most juiced out porsche all right well that's cool that a truck can
be a race car uh but i wasn't that impressed and then all of a sudden it panned and you saw it towing one
and that's just i mean to me that's next level right like the truck already is so much heavier
than the car so to even like pretend to compete with a sports car is crazy but then to tow it
was just just absolutely wild another thing that no one has mentioned yet that i thought was really
cool from the event was actually the accessories right like when we went outside after the event
they had like the the cyber quad out there and they had a little like uh i don't even know what
you call that like a power wheel that was a cyber truck that that a kid could drive around in
and the tent on the back of the cyber truck was so super cool um i think that accessories like that
coming from the factory are going to be really popular another thing that i haven't heard anyone
talk about yet was we got to get up real close to like the crash test cyber trucks and we got to see
you know in a head-on collision what what does this truck look like afterwards and there were barely
bends in the body panels i mean you you saw like the whole front end smashed up
but the entire cab anything that mattered uh i mean it almost looked new it was pretty wild
uh it's got to walk up real close to the cyber truck that was full of bullet holes from the tommy gun
i mean i know that leaked and we all sort of knew that was coming but to get right up next to it and
see it what was also awesome so i mean i i was a huge fan of the truck from the beginning i have
five minute one reservations because the website was airing when i was hitting that button
as fast as i could i got five email confirmations the next day i've been a cyber truck fan
since the release but i am more i have more conviction uh that this truck is going to be a
massive success after having been to the event than i did before i i i'm super fired up yeah i want to
talk about um this is larry i i want to talk about these production predictions i saw this morning an
analyst saying that he doesn't think that the price matters because they're only going to
do 35k next year i don't know where he pulled that number from but i wouldn't like to have been
where it wherever it did he did pull the number from the fact is not the fact i believe that even jeff
is going to be surprised by the product production numbers that are going to come forth next year i think
uh elon is sandbagging i think he's sandbagging quite purposely um i think we're going to see a
very very strong production next year i predict far in excess of 75k i think we will trend above the 100k by
and and we will be at the 150k plus mark by the end of the year i expect at least 200 plus
the following year and i expect to see a second production line in action in the second year so i
think um everybody who's downplaying the production particularly uh elon is really sandbagging and i
think this is going to be a volume product at a very high profit margin that's my prediction i do
wonder how much interest rates will play into how quickly they ramp up this line because you know i think
it is in my opinion a fact so i don't know if that actually makes the fact um but there's going
to be a lot of people who have their orders already reserved and they don't necessarily care too much
about price but there will eventually come a time where that will matter and i think having lower
interest rates will be a big help for that so i wouldn't necessarily want to see you burn through
the people who aren't as cost cost conscious and then you get to the point where you're done with
them and the rates are still high so i wonder if coming down would um make them accelerate a little
bit more yeah but out of three out of two million or 1.5 million pre-orders of which we can count on
probably 700 000 500 000 you're not going to burn through you know the guys who've got money
under 100 150 000 so it's not an issue for the first year or two i i really don't see it as a major
issue i think demand is going to be through the roof i'm i'm actually projecting that prices will
go up from here not down from here just on the basis of demand
yeah kristen yeah back to what penny was saying i think tesla has a lot more accessories that are
coming out that they haven't put out i mean they were talking about camp mode and the tent before but
i think we're going to see things like you know we're going to see we're going to see a grill we're
going to see different accessories that hook up and we didn't a lot of people didn't talk about the
the two the two the 240 the 120 volts the different tools that we can connect to the different vehicles
but i think it's interesting there was a lot of talk i mean hamid was talking about how we how we
rode in the original cyber truck and a lot of people kind of poopooed and said there wasn't going to be a
single motor there wasn't going to be a lower lower end vehicle and i know that there still
is the rear wheel drive unit and there's the orders for that but i think that's going to be a very big
success i think when we were looking at different statistics for people who have trucks a lot of
people don't use their trucks actually for what you know for for towing they don't use their trucks for
a boat they don't use their trucks for work a lot of people just use their trucks around town and
this this is kind of it's cut it for people who don't like trucks they like the cyber truck it's a different
look and i think i agree with what penny was saying about evan seeing it in person i think it changes
it changes a lot for people like seeing it i've seen a lot of people who are gung-ho huge truck people
like the cyber truck ones they saw it in person
oh yeah go for it first jeff and then we'll go to city
yeah i was just gonna come back to um first i agree with the accessories comment i think it's going to
uh play a huge factor in the gross margin of the product line as well um the thing i want to hit on
was the production for next year um i think larry brings up you know good points when you see the
analyst comments around next year um tell you oh this is domain constraint it has put a
number out of number out there and as i logically like think through the ramp
you know these things are hard to gauge we're on the outside we don't know what the inbound
supply issues are we don't know what the station efficiency issues are in the factory i know
people were trying to land on a number of 60 or whatever that's that's one station that's not
um necessarily you know everything balanced and running that takes uh a period of time to get to
that point uh just long story short um it would be amazing if they could do you know north of 100k
i'm somewhere in the kind of 70 to maybe 85k range but you know if they break through if they have
breakthroughs on some of these key issues whether it's the i think remember the other thing to keep
in mind when you think of product ramps right now every tool every operation is running at low speed
it may be running at 10 of the speed it may be running at 10 of the input volume as soon as you
start taking those that that input and output that process time and speed up and you start loading
things continuously is when you start seeing um material that's discrepant or you start seeing
breakage or you start seeing downtime so i don't think they've gotten to that period yet of experiencing
that and that's going to take some time for them to get to so the final thing is i put my kind of former
chief quality officer hat on you know i've done this at fortune 100 companies i actually think
an approach of a controlled it's called a controlled launch or controlled rollout
is really important when you ship a product that has all this new stuff inside of it
because what the worst thing that could happen is if tesla splashed you know 25 000 of these out there
you know didn't have the the consumer engagement that they have they probably have a one-to-one email
consumer engagement right now everybody who's got a truck if you don't do that in a controlled manner
and the probability of failure is pretty high at this point as the the number of trucks increases
out into the marketplace so that rate or that slope of consumer deployment uh usually should correspond
with how much newness is in the product if everything's brand new i think a little bit of a slower
approach and this is what they're kind of doing right now maybe it's out of necessity from a
supply perspective but i think a slower approach is going to yield better results from a quality
perspective as well because unlike any other company they have the ability to find an issue
in use in the field and and be able to get that thing fixed and you know the engineering change and
cut over into the line faster than anyone else so just think about the concept of a controlled
rollout because this is going to be a product that's going to live for 80 to 120 months or more
and probably a variance coming off of it for for many decades to come and you wouldn't want to like
you want to get it right and you and in this social media hyperbolic kind of place we're in right now
where everything gets amplified a million x i think it's really important to be kind of controlled
a little bit slow in the beginning only to go faster a little bit later on that's it
i appreciate that jeff uh city did you have a thought you want to throw into the mix here
before we go over to amy yeah absolutely thanks for having me up um we'll do some great spaces and
i just want to pop on this morning to just kind of listen penny's a legend love your docs how that
turned out man that was awesome turned out to be like very very cool and i've been a fan of the
cybertruck for a long time i actually ordered one a while ago i mean who knows when i'm going to get
it i do have a tesla and when i first ordered it you know they told me it was like a year or two and
i actually questioned in my head i'm like am i ever going to see one of these i was just going to
actually hit the road because it's so unique looking um when and i've been driving porsches most
of my life so when i did see that porsche thing i know somebody said porsche is not a
straight shot whatever but let me tell you something i had i had a turbo s and that thing is a monster
and to see this car that weighs seven thousand pounds take on that porsche that got my juices
flowing right when i saw that i think penny posted it i contacted uh tesla i'm like hey can i get it
early please i want my truck i really want this and um a lot of my friends i have friends in the car
business high-end car stuff and they are so excited to get these fix them up uh put them in in their
magazines do stuff so you're going to see some really cool aftermarket stuff that's going to come
and differentiate here too so we haven't even talked about this stuff but um you know there's
i just want to say it's a great space man and uh i'm i'm really excited to get mine and uh put some
pictures so maybe penny can say how cool mine is going to look you know um but i got i gotta hop off
i'll listen for a couple more minutes but i know you've got some awesome people here and i'm enjoying
the conversation yeah i'm loving it i appreciate that penny as well yeah we're just going to do about
three four more minutes here another chat coming up after that i do see people requesting unfortunately
there's like 10 people requesting and uh we just have about three four minutes left of this convo
but we do these tests of spaces weekly so when people do come towards the beginning i'm always
happy to bring them up all right with that being said amy i see your hand up yeah let's uh do a quick
shout out to penny for um filming his face i met him before i knew he was a good looking guy but now
everybody else gets to see it as well um well done penny and when we look at the cyber truck production
i i think that there's a lack of appreciation jeff knows um everybody on this panel knows but
just to reiterate how many parts that they've been able to take out of the vehicle through the new
data structure through the new wiring harness and these wiring harnesses was one of the most
traditionally difficult parts to install in a car it was it was something that got in the way
of automation so the cyber truck line should require a lot fewer raw materials specifically
copper which is hard to source it should require fewer workers a lot more should be able to automate
it should require fewer steps and then when people like 50 was just talking about they go in
uh and try and modify the vehicle later later they're they're going to be able to do that
a lot a lot easier because there's going to be fewer fewer steps involved oh i saw sawyer just
popped up on the panel i'm interested in his thoughts
hey guys i'm late at a meeting uh what's the topic of a discussion
yeah well we've definitely just been running through thoughts from the event mainly how it went what
people uh enjoyed what they liked best what they thought could be better stuff like that so
yeah i'd i mean we're coming towards the end here but great timing i'd be happy to turn it over to you
to share the next few minutes here so were you flexing on everyone with your special badge when
everyone just had the one yours was nice someone came up to me like wait are you an employee because
like i don't have a metal badge like no i'm just a refer um in general it's i i get the sense like a
a lot of people think tesla missed on a lot of their promises from 2019 i mean really they only
missed on the cyber beast the tri motor i mean the range was above expectations for all the wheel
dry same with the towing the payload was a little bit below and of course the price was like way higher
than people thought but you know i don't think people expected a rear screen there were a few other
changes that they put in there like we weren't expecting steer by wire um 48 volt system we weren't
expecting so there's a lot of things that they actually added that they didn't promise in 2019
um and again like they're gonna lower the price eventually right it's just like they got to figure
out with two million reservations where the real demand is what should the clearing price be so and
that's probably why they say estimated on the cybertruck pricing page which is something i don't
think we've ever seen they start deliveries and it says estimated price probably because it's gonna
be really difficult to sort of gauge where they should price this thing at um but you know for the
the most part i'm happy um it's gonna be unfortunate that only like rich people will get this thing
first but over time us normies will be able to get it too yeah i i noticed obviously you got a lot of
great behind the scenes details there and really an in-depth look and chatting with the team and
pieces along those lines overall was it pretty much stacked up and you know to be what you expected
going into there were there any features or things that end up coming out really surprising you
price uh other items like that maybe you know the power bank ability in the back of the car stuff
like that so once i saw that the the list of like um like checking time in the actual start time i knew
this was going to be a really short presentation like 20 30 minutes max um so i wasn't expecting a
lot of detail in the actual presentation i was a little worried at the end when elon didn't tell us
the price and range but then we checked online and it was there so that's fine um it was mostly what i
expected of course i was expecting an all-wheel drive to come in at 65 grand and it's closer to 80
but it still meets the federal tax credit guidelines so um so that's good but i i got the sense in the
crowd that a lot of people were disappointed and i think mostly mostly that is the price
um i think a lot of people were disappointed that the tri-motor didn't hit 500 miles of range
um and you know with the range extender it still only gets 440 not 500 and you're probably looking
at 120 000 truck to even get to that 440. so that's quite a that's quite a bit for a truck
um but again i think prices will come down i i i think it's a decent solution to the pack i mean
obviously it takes up a lot of the bed um and i don't want to make excuses but like most truck buyers
don't tow all the time or even use their bed they just buy it because they think it's a badass truck
or they want a big vehicle um having said that i do think tesla needed to meet on a lot of their
specs that they promised and i think they mostly did the towing for the tri-motor is 3 000 pounds
below what they promised but you know not the end of the world sounds good sounds good well we're
right past the top of the hour here i am going to roll into my next one in a second here but
i'm glad that you were able to hop in and make it omar is actually traveling back to the west coast
today but he'll be on with us next week big thank you to all of our regulars of course kristin and
amy larry making the return great to have you on thank you to penny and sawyer and of course jeff
lutz uh and amid and ryan joining up here as well just a great panel all around we talk tesla weekly
we're gonna do one more space here but after this one ends at the top of the hour this space will
turn into a recording and i know all of our tesla peeps like to listen back to those so you can just
hear the recording right here as well uh so yeah hopefully everyone enjoyed and stick around if
you're here with us we've got one more space coming up gonna be talking about some stuff more
on the investing side of things and the markets and some other pieces so we'll keep things going
and maybe we'll even talk a little bit of tesla retta speaking of which you know as a nice smooth
little transition here what were your thoughts on the tesla event are you going to be driving a
cyber truck around over at headquarters man that's uh so i've actually look i'm uh uh before before
aries before anything i'm uh i i was uh i don't know i think i just like new cool shit so i had i
had i think i had the first generation of the model three i drove a model s for a little bit and uh you
know i think that the cyber truck is really fucking cool i think it looks like i have yet to see one in
real life i i think you know in the meatpacking district of maybe a year or two in new york city i
walked by a showroom and they had like a i'm not sure if it was a working version or anything but
this was like really really close to the original announcement so i think it's really cool that
they're just starting to roll out i think it's going to be interesting to see the adoption right
because there's it's i think it's the first time that we're seeing kind of a car with no curves um
and there's a lot of like maybe this isn't the right word but there's a lot of like uh like just
like vanity value it's like oh i get this cool car that that that looks cool and i wonder how
long it takes for something like that to wear off because you know for anyone in here that you know
maybe had a really nice car or um you know like like saves up for a while and ends up buying some
kind of like supercar it that that it kind of like the the fad kind of goes away or at least it did for
me with anything that was like uh or i'm i guess maybe i'm not that big of a car guy the fad kind of
went away for me like after six months and i wonder what people are going to think after six months with
the cyber truck is it still going to be like you know how many people are that drive trucks are going
to want to keep a cyber truck after six months versus how many people that just like the way the
thing looks um you know buy it and then six months later realize like you know like hey like i i the
fat kind of wore off so i guess that's the only thing that i'm pretty much interested in from a
spec perspective i guess i'm not sure i think that the event went pretty cool i think it's nice to see
people sort of excited i'm extremely excited to to see one out in the road but no i will not be
driving a cyber truck anytime soon i i uh i'll stick to my my 2017 buick for uh for until until
the wheels fall off did we mention it goes zero to 60 and 2.6 yeah that's pretty cool i don't know
i remember so i remember the original or maybe the second generation model s was like mind-blowingly
fast when i originally what when i was driving one because i i went from like a really old chevy
cobalt to yeah to to uh to a model s and then right after that i went to a model three performance
and that was like i mean those these electric cars are just mind-blowingly fast and i can't imagine like
sitting you know driving a truck kind of feels like you're driving a huge couch so i don't know like
imagine a couch going zero to 16 2.6 anyways i think it's gonna be really fucking cool to see
these things out and uh in person but i'm not sure if it if it has any special place in my heart
besides looking you know really really fucking cool i love it well one of these days we'll all be
riding in a cyber truck together it's coming up i have a feeling uh with that being said though i do
want to keep us chatting here a little bit on the investing side of things retta joining us on stage
obviously here he's the ceo over at trade aries trade aries is the brokerage that i actively trade
on plus thousands and thousands of other investors actually have two open trades right now i've been
trading a lot this week on trade aries i gotta say um i was literally uh i was at my uh cairo earlier
just trading like in between doing my exercises and stuff so that was fun as well but the reason
that we're pulling retta into the mix today is not only listen i mean the brokerage is great i
encourage everybody to try it it's free to try they give a nice little signup bonus that's not
really what we're diving too much into today uh the other side is they're actually allowing
retail investors like you and i and i've already gone ahead and participated in this as well as evan
to actually invest in their round right now that they're raising there's only 15 days left in this
round they've already raised 478 000 it's a pretty big no-brainer for me uh you know i i've seen more
and more often that these major gains listen i love trading the public markets love trading options
stocks stuff like that but these major gains often happen before companies even get public
and aries is definitely in that private stage at this moment but they have a fantastic product i
would know i use it all the time and in addition to that a really dedicated leader reddick can talk
a little bit about his background but super experienced especially in this space so wanted
to talk a little bit today about the round that they are raising and just give our audience an
opportunity to participate in as well i did go ahead and i pinned a link to the top of the space i
encourage everybody to go ahead and check it out if you haven't just yet again reasons that i
invested insane execution speed free options flow data they have a nice hundred dollar signup bonus
that they give to everybody that tries out the brokerage i feel like that's going to help them
really get a bunch of people and of course being able to get in early you often can't get in early
in rounds like this they're not accessible right like we couldn't invest early into like nvidia and
other ones like that or uh even a robin hood you know uh stuff along those lines but this is an
opportunity to get in early so i am carpe diem seizing it with that being said reddick let me
turn it over to you for a few minutes here you've been raising this round it's kind of coming to the
end 15 days left what do you want to share with people about the opportunity that you see here some
of what you're building and maybe a little bit on your background as well yeah i mean look i'll put
it plainly i obviously i i don't think this is something for everyone from from our from our perspective
we we you know at the start of the year we we're a venture-backed company um we sat down and we you
know we went to the board and we were like hey we grew 586 last year we're growing really really fast
right now um but we're kind of hypocrites we call ourselves the people's broker but really the only
people that stand to make any considerable gain if this thing were to ever continue to grow or go public
or get acquired um is is us right and the thing that sets areas apart is i this is this is my second
uh this is my second uh fintech company the first of which had roughly 70 000 end customers we were
a b2b primarily a b2b data company we would sell all sorts of uh like basically largest wackiest trade
data stuff like that we had about 70 000 and retail customers and we did a push survey at the end uh
right as we were nearing sort of the close of the sale and we asked those customers we said hey what's
the biggest problem you guys have almost every single person came back with a problem with their
brokerage right um a lot of customers outside the us were like hey we can't even access no
commissions brokers and then even inside the us customers were like hey no commissions brokers
suck like i would much rather pay commissions my execution speed sucks at robin hood i feel like i'm
paying for it in inadvertently so we that's what we set out to fix today aries is a commission
free stocks and options uh trading platform in 130 countries in 124 countries we are the only
no commission trading option and uh you know i mean furthermore we kind of flipped the model on
its head we make money charging for futures index options etc um and that pays for extremely premium
execution on the stock and option side and we i mean it's the reason we have i think we have some one
of the best deposit bonuses uh in the industry open up an aries account deposit 500 bucks you'll
get a hundred dollars and just kind of check out that that um that that execution speed you can see
it for yourself and anyways long story short we decided that we were gonna we were gonna take a
really small portion of our stock i think it was up to a million dollars and we were gonna put it
up on on start engine we were gonna we went through this extremely egregious diligence process with
the sec and start engines compliance team and we listed our stock on start engine and made it so
that anybody can buy a piece of our company and i mean it's just been wonderful like in i think in
like four four and a half months we've raised five nearly 500 grand far exceeding our expectations um
from regular people and the cool thing about that is now inside of our discord channels or inside of
our feet or any of our other feedback channels we have you know we have thousands and thousands of
customers that are already giving us feedback but now we have thousands and thousands of customers who
are giving us fee or you know uh we we have hundreds of customers who are giving us feedback
who also own a piece of our company they're incentivized to come help us make it better they're
incentivized to use the product because they know like hey if this thing goes on to do what i think
it's going to do you know i i stand to make a 40x a 50x on my money and i can help in that process and i
think it's a really really unique point because equity crowdfunding in general hasn't been around
for like two or three years it's only been around for like really two or three years the way that
it's around right now where you actually can own a piece of the company and i think it's something in
our space that sets us apart from like a weeble or a robin hood because you know unfortunately i'm
not a billionaire i i cannot compete against their their sort of their their cash flow these are
multi-billion dollar corporations but what i can do is get people you know is get is get people on
my side with you know transparency and and sweat equity and kind of giving people a piece of the pie
so yeah i mean there's 15 days left and we decided to do a couple of these spaces to sort of just spread
some awareness answer some questions whatever perfect i love that start off from it so i think
you're covering a lot of pieces uh i think whenever somebody's making a potential investment the first
that they should do diligence into that investment right nobody should be blindly investing in
something simply because they heard about it or their friend likes it or something like that so
let's talk to diligence here what is the next couple of years looking like for this company
what's the game plan how does this turn into something that makes people money by investing in
this round yeah that's a really good question i think you know it there are a couple of things that
you should probably take into consideration if you're going to make an investment you know i'm
i'm sort of a tech junkie so i i've made a variety of pretty large angel investments throughout the
years and the kind of the questions that i always ask when i um when i sit down with a company and you
know i i spent about a year as a consultant to a vc firm and we would kind of sit i would sit down and
i would just be like hey what is it that you guys do that nobody else can do right like why why
why would i want to invest in what you guys are doing and you know the the problem that we see in
the space today is that the the barrier to entry for stock retail stock market innovation is really
high right um it like it i mean the short the short version of this is brokerages are
we're still dominated by by by 30 year old brokerages you know robin hood set out to disrupt
this industry but what ended up happening is robin hood just became a customer funnel like
robin hood's growth rate is less than two percent um while schwab fidelity interactive brokers they're
growing at 15 20 a year and those you know the the latter the latter few legacy brokerages are still
charging high commission rates and all that means is that the end customer gets fucked over so you get
introduced to the stock market through robin hood and then uh all of a sudden you know you're paying
thirty dollars for this education group you're paying two hundred dollars for this stock market
research tool you're paying a thousand dollars a year to your brokerage and the way that you were
looped into the stock market was through commissions free trading and we think that that creates a really
really high barrier to entry when it comes to innovation and the reason nobody solved this problem
is it's extremely expensive to start a brokerage you know you're probably you're looking at at least four
or five million dollars to build a full service brokerage in the united states of america and if
you want to start an options flow service for example if you want to start a data company if you want to
start a trading view a good trading view competitor you're talking about thousands and thousands of
dollars a month and just extraneous exchange data fees and what that means is again the retail
customer gets fucked over because you know what what's happening is that there is there if you can pay
for innovation you're going to get access to the best tools and what happens is the institutional
play you know the stock market's an open game so the people that you compete against right you know
people like like call them like algorithms or hedge funds or whatever the people that retail investors
are competing against simply have the money to go out and buy a you know buy data packages and
fuck around and try to figure out new ways to make money whereas retail investors are kind of forced
either you go with a really cheap um you know easy to use brokerage or you go with a really
sophisticated expensive brokerage and the end goal for aries is it is it is it is a very transparent
and seamless product that can take you i mean you can you can download it today it's it's the engine that
it's running on is just as powerful as any other sophisticated brokerage on the planet while the ui can be
take it you can take it from really simple to really sophisticated you can start with a line graph
and end up with an options flow tool and trading view charts and and and you know sort of uh uh you know
fancy futures orders etc and really that that's the goal right i i'm not betting that aries is going to
create some sort of financial revolution i think that that would be crazy what i'm what we're betting on at aries is
retail trading is growing eight out of ten of the last you know of the largest options trading days by
volume happened in the last 12 months on top of that i mean people just generally love more and more
leverage but the only like like you know like in in crypto people trade perpetual futures options
why because they like leverage and the problem is as people get more sophisticated the products end up
funneling all the way back down to legacy brokers that the new solutions we're trying to fix and
that's all we're trying to do i mean at the end of the day the way that aries becomes very successful is
like aries could be cool um it could be a great product that you use that's fine like you know we're
launching a desktop platform that hopes to compete with thinkorswim here in a couple of months
that's fine that that like you know you can use our products that that's great but more importantly what
aries is going to do here is open source the infrastructure to build stock market software
in eight months from today every single feed from our infrastructure all the way up to how our
widgets are built even on our pro platform will be listed publicly on our website you'll be able to
apply for an api key and and and basically copy our infrastructure you can build you can build the
same tool that's you know you're going to be able to build aries pro with the aries infrastructure
api you're going to be able to get access to market data you're going to be able to get access to
execution data and our goal is connecting the people who are building and trying to solve the
problems for retail traders the innovators connecting those people with the stock market
and the way that aries becomes a really massive idea is we are the last mile for trading infrastructure
and execution that's the way that aries becomes a massive massive idea i mean yes look we're going to be
you know obviously we're going to be a platform where i mean we're a platform today where we're
actually uh you can you can use aries to you know trade you can download aries you can chart on aries
you could uh we're going to be launching aries pro that's one side the other side of it is that
we're going to open source all this infrastructure from the ground up show you how we're routing our
orders show you how you can use your our api to build your own order box or your own indicators
in your own native languages it's not going to be like you know like thinkorswim has uh yeah um
easy language or or or or or pine script or or whatever people are going to be able to build
on top of the on on top of our infrastructure in their own languages in their in like very
piecemeal solutions and we think that that's kind of the key to aries becoming a really you know a really
massive success is people building cool around it and sharing it with their friends
um versus you know aries pro is going to be great of course obviously um our our mobile app is is
is pretty is pretty good right now but those are short-term solutions to a problem that we think
can be a lot bigger as customers get more and more sophisticated over time
really nicely put there retta we got some great people in the panel here i want to go around maybe
hear what people like to have in their brokerage some of the things that are important for them
uh some just different ideas along those lines genots we got you up here would love to hear kind of
what stands out to you the features that you feel like you need things that you really use and if
you've used aries maybe some thoughts on your experience there
it might be doing the thing where it doesn't let them unmute that often does happen nate you want to
jump in here yeah uh good stuff as always and uh when it comes to a training platform i mean yeah
everybody's got my attention here because uh speed execution of speed is definitely uh right right
near or if not right at the top of the list um and you know when you mentioned that you'll be uh
launching a platform to try to compete with thinkorswim uh one of the things that i think of is um
point and click trading so being able to excuse me being able to you know as i'm looking at the tape
uh you know have presets and and be able to just basically one click of a button enter and exit
trades so i'm sure you guys are way ahead of the curve and and looking at all of that so uh just the
the speed of execution the speed of being able you know the user interface user friendliness um if you
have any points you can uh kind of comment on with with with respect to the interface and then um
yeah you know customer service is always top top of the list for me uh you know early early on in my
career uh you know pre going to university and all that uh you know spend some time in customer service
and so now i have my thoughts and i don't get good customer service i kind of uh it's one of those
things that stands out so be curious you know what what do you guys offer there if it's going to be
you know people manning the phones or um you know early on i know sometimes it's just email and and
that's fine just curious you know what it's going to look like and how you plan to progress there
overall yeah really excited to hear about uh all the things going on with aries
yeah those are some really good questions i think you know to tackle the first one um
um execution speed is quite important for for a variety of reasons but the most important reason
is that if everyone else is really slow and you're even just a bit faster you're you know the the the
the micro the micro percentages that you can beat people out by add up and in in for options for in
options for example uh right now we're at 199 milliseconds per contract and what ends up so what
that ends up being is about two times as fast as uh traditional modern brokerages you know think
robin hood weevil etc and what that means is in comparison to the average our customers are being
filled um two times as fast and that basically boils down to on average and this was done by a separate
firm uh um on average we're saving customers somewhere between three and nine dollars per contract
so uh you know three nine you know obviously not nine hundred dollars or three hundred dollars i'm not
multiplying by 100 i'm talking about three to nine dollars per contract um you know per trade and what
you see there is that with each and every microsecond is is is sense and that means uh and in this in
this game sense equal dollars and on top of all of that right when i mean really what's important i think is
to show people that there is a difference in execution speed like there your success is
correlated to your execution speed to some degree like if like for example if you're trading a really
far out of the money spy call and spy decides to come down by eight points right and your order happens
to be third in line versus uh you know versus two other orders and the price changes from 150 down to 130
well you know tough luck right like um yeah yeah you just took a 10 or 15 percent hit because you
were not as fast as those other two orders and that's all like that that's a big deal and it's
not going to happen every time i'm not saying that it's going to happen every time what i'm saying is
it's it's so it's so important that you will notice the difference and i encourage everyone in
here to give it a shot make an aries account right you don't have to take my word for it but the numbers do
not lie 70 over 70 of our customers after they after they open an account and place one trade
will stick around for the rest of their trading journey that's unbelievable you know that's about
two and a half times in comparison to even our closest competitor and the reason for that is you
can very clearly see the difference and then to add on top of that right the customer services i i think is
very important um as we move away from trade station which is you know the engine that we're built on top
of today um as we move away from trade station we are propping up 24 7 um uh phone and in-app chat
support that will be live here hopefully in the next about month and a half where customers will
be able to chat with support agents live in-app 24 7 um on all trading days and that also includes
you know like uh you know you know bond holidays etc
nate you got any thoughts on that i got a couple questions from the crowd
yeah just appreciate those uh comments and that's exactly what i would hope to be here and so as far
as you know quality uh platform and and you know not pulling any punches so yeah thanks again for the
answers yeah no problem yeah dave you want to jump in here yeah for sure thanks wolf um hey retta um
thanks for obviously coming on this is awesome um question for you so well two questions one uh so i
know you mentioned that uh like commission free and it's not like the um robin hood citadel deal like
is there any payment for order flow like other than like what you mentioned in terms of like futures and
uh and everything else is there any kind of like equity like pay for for for order flow or no
oh that's a really good that's a really really good question right so something i i kind of want
to mention is payment for order flow often gets very you know it's a very sticky subject so we are
in 130 countries in 124 of those countries we're the only no commission option the reason for that
is because in many of those countries payment for order flow is banned the aries business model does
not rely on payment for order flow um we charge kit the way that aries works is we charge commissions for
for very high-end derivatives futures crypto index options things like that and that pays for every
options trade you know that pays for people to access no commission stocks and options so the math
behind that is it costs roughly three cents to route an option um you know to route an option to the
fastest route that's available now if we're charging 50 cents for a micro futures trade really what it adds up
to is about every single futures trade both ways so in and out pays for somewhere between
18 and 20 um uh uh uh you know 18 and 20 options trades to get pushed through that's it that's
regardless you know regardless of the contract amount or whatever and there are sometimes if i push
your spy order to the fastest route possible sometimes that's a payment for order flow route right but
would you want me to push it to the fastest route possible even if it's a payment for order flow
route to get you filled as fast as possible our our guess is yes right our customers what we think
is important is customers get filled as fast as possible at the price that they want and that's what
we prioritize sometimes that means that customers orders go to payment for order flow routes sometimes
it means they don't go to payment for order flow routes but in general the thing that we are prioritizing
is getting customers filled at the absolute best price as as fast as possible um for their if you
know you know for for the entirety of their lot so how do we avoid another game stop issue with aries
right like is it are you that are you exposed i guess enough or rather like is there i because i get
like best execution right like that's that's a no-brainer i guess i'm curious like how do we avoid
or like you know what i mean like how do we actually avoid another situation like we had with
you know citadel gamestop and the massive massive manipulation that went on there yeah that's a
really really great question so i think you know it's you know we launched pretty much throughout
the probably maybe we launched our private beta two months uh uh you know probably two months before
that gamestop situation uh you know that gamestop situation happened and we obviously you know we were
a very small firm uh we only had a couple hundred beta customers so we were not affected at all but
in general there's there's a couple different parts to that gamestop problem the first part is
uh just settlement times i think robin hood did could did not have the money to actually
deal with the settlement time so because they were offering uh you know instant they were offering
instant deposits before you know during times where there were only really ach deposits available
so they're giving you your money two days before they get your money in app so they just ran out of
money that's that like that that's one really really big part of it so they had a two billion
dollar bill and they have no billion dollars uh you know zero billion dollars in the bank so that's
part of the problem the other part of the problem is that robin hood obviously was probably getting
pulled by the i mean their leading revenue drivers citadel securities citadel securities has
probably hundreds of billions of dollars in interest around the gamestop solution uh situation so you
know they get a phone call they get a phone call and i'm sure that that's part of it whether they
want to agree to it or not i like the i don't i don't think very many humans would be you know
not not be persuaded in that situation that being said um it's it would be very unlikely in this time
and day for two reasons the first reason is we're actually rolling out areas with real-time payments
which is a new clearinghouse solution so instant deposits instant withdrawals up to any amount 24 7 365
um and that includes settlement so you're not only are your funds being pulled from the account that
you're depositing them from they're also being settled so you're getting your at your cash in real
time but there are no loans there's no margin involved they're not it's not coming from our books or our
balance sheet it's real real-time payments so that's one part of it which kind of settles the the deposit
problem the other side of it is like it's just i think that in that situation in in the gamestop
situation in particular it was a very like they just handled it so poorly with a fucking email to
everybody i think it should have been done like live in a forum just like this i think you can get
on and you can say hey this is the situation i'm we're like we're like working with our clearinghouse
we're getting this done and we're trying to get past this i mean from my perspective i don't i don't
know how they let the math get that far because it's like it's something that they should have been
able to see probably a week in advance it's not like game stop just came it kind of came out uh
overnight and it's it wasn't just them it was every other clearinghouse on the planet so there there
were definitely some ways to avoid it i i i kind of want to make sure that i'm not dogging robin
hood here in any any any any way uh in any way but the truth of the matter is in this day and age
with with the real-time payments with the risk model that we've built i i very hot like it would
have to take probably 50 or 100 times the volume that gamestop saw during that time for us to
experience even a slight variation of that problem and to carry on top of all of that aries is backed um
you know so we're we're not just working with one clearinghouse aries is backed by a variety
of liquidity providers so you know robin hood they clear their own trades so they're they are kind of
they are victims of their own liquidity problem um anybody that was clearing on top of apex well
they only clear on apex so they are victims of apex's liquidity from our perspective because
we're agnostic and we're pushing to you know because we're agnostic and we're trying to be as
transparent as possible with where we push things like if you know you would like you would have
like it would be a huge liquidity problem you're talking about like probably again like i said like
50 or 100 times as big as what was uh happening with uh gamestop before so i can't promise that
i cannot promise that something like that is impossible what i can promise is we have very much put a
lot of thought into uh what a black swan situation would look like and we i mean you know like i mean
those those are the numbers about 50 to 100 times larger than gamestop is before we would ever see any
real problems and even if we did see some real problems there are still things we could do we could
raise the liquidity very quickly we could move on and uh you know we could move on and work with the
clearing houses directly i think the entire and then on top of that there are real-time payment
solutions now so it's not just oh and plus the entire industry switching to t plus one so i don't
know you know like the gamestop situation is a very one-off black swan event i think that it's avoidable
for sure i think it was avoidable by robin hood given that same scenario today i we probably need
somewhere between 50 or 100 times any anything anything that happened there before we start to see any
issues i appreciate that answer i don't think there's many people that would come up and just
be as blunt as you were just now so i appreciate that and not saying it will definitely not happen
and it's kind of crazy and since i've i've gotten into crypto it's it really amazes me how so many
people on spaces can like speak in these absolutes but i really i appreciate like that answer is like
yeah that's the way you got to answer that question but um talking about crypto um tell me about
how like what do you guys how do you like what do you offer in crypto um and i kind of want to go
back to the t plus one thing like after this maybe if possible but how do your rates um your maker your
maker fees your taker fees like how do they compare to coinbase uh and like what are we going to be
paying on the crypto side that's a so i i want to preface this with saying that i'm a i'm a massive
massive crypto junkie i think i've gone to i you know i've gone to pretty much i got my start in finance and
crypto um i've been to pretty much every uh i think since 2014 since the first bitcoin event in miami
um i've been i i have i have sort of i've been at these conferences i saw the rise of uh you know i
saw the rise of ethereum i saw the rise of uh bankman i i saw the right like i we you know we saw the rise
of uh you know binance but uh and a lot of these leveraged uh you know like uh uh you know bitrex and a
lot of these uh leveraged solutions um the truth the truth is what i'm a big believer in crypto i
think it's going nowhere um that being said i think that there's a lot in crypto that makes me
being a regulated and registered entity very hard to deal with because in the united states there's
kind of this um oh we don't know how to regulate it yet so you know you guys figure out how to regulate
it and we can we can sort of come in and and and say that you committed a crime before we even gave
you any regulation and that's kind of what coinbase is going through right now that being said um you
know aries is building an in-house crypto product that will launch on top of our post a post trade
station build um it will be a you know it will be wallet based uh it will be an exchange you know i
don't want to i don't want to say that we're going to be better than coinbase that's probably not true
i think coinbase is uh has a very very large lead and in but customers will be able to trade crypto
in the same spot that they trade stocks options futures wherever else they're going to be able
to deposit and withdraw crypto to trade those assets just like they can do today so right now
our maker and taker fees um you know we're charging about uh you know 30 basis points on the taker side
up to 100 000 um and and 30 basis points on the maker side um up to 100 000 and then obviously if
you're going over 100 000 we drop down to you know uh uh 10 10 basis points by 20 basis points and then
you know five by 10 if if it's over a million that being said we're probably going to eliminate that
here pretty soon i i i think that from my perspective especially just seeing crypto like
the way that we're running right now going into the so going into the um going into the having
been going into the bitcoin etf there's i i think there's a lot of opportunity and i think that the
first person to capitalize by building a legitimate i mean sam bankman was trying to do it with ftx us
like ftx us was pretty good before before everything collapsed i mean and by the way i hate the ftx guys
i you know i lost hundreds of thousands of dollars uh in solana or actually you know i'm not down too bad
now but i still i still lost quite a bit of money but so it but the product that they had was pretty
good i think anybody that used ftx or ftx us kind of can unanimously agree that the product was pretty
great and i think that um there is going to be there's going to be a run by people in my industry
to try to emulate that hey you can trade crypto alongside everything else experience and that's what
i'm gunning towards right now we sort of have it like you can trade you know you can trade bitcoin
and ethereum you can deposit withdraw them um and trade them along also all the other assets but
it's definitely nowhere near where i want it to be i want to open it up to some of the more um
you know like some of the other coins in the top 100 i've got about 26 on my list right now
um i i don't think i'm allowed to share it just yet but eventually what's gonna what we're planning to
launch here is a is as close to a full crypto solution as we can get in a regulated space
did you say like it's it's it's gonna be wallet like custodial wallet or non-custodial like are you
guys or how are you gonna how are you doing that yeah so you're you're so there will be wallets
associated with your account right you'll be able to deposit and withdraw it won't be like um
it's not like you're going to be able to create a wallet right within the app like you're going to
be able to create an address you're going to be able to create different wallets but you're not
going to it's not we're not giving you access to the to the keys right the the custody will happen
by a third party like a zero hash or uh or a backed or something like that i have so many more questions
but wolf go ahead i i can i could probably talk with red i could probably talk to you all day
the good work i love the back and forth uh let me remind everyone real quick if you haven't already
taken part in the round i pinned the link to the top of the space it's on start engine what's
beautiful about this is that it's not uh you know hey i'm throwing in money and i have to
know that this is locked up for the next 10 years start engine actually creates a secondary market so
you could go into this you can see the value throughout uh it shows you all the information i do
encourage everybody that's in the space to click that link uh it'll roll you through
the terms of this you can go through the financials of the company you can look at the
discussion page where it's people that have been asking questions back and forth with the firm
right there's a variety of areas to do due diligence but what i really like is that it does create that
secondary market so it's not leaving you out in the cold basically you actually have the opportunity
to say hey you know if i want to sell these to someone in the secondary market i have that opportunity
there's over 300 unique investors that have already participated in this round to
to get to that 500 000 number right around it and so you know undoubtedly there's people that are
extremely bullish on this and be happy to buy i would think your shares now not financial advice
but it's something that i like better than it just being hey you're putting your money in and you're not
going to see it for 10 years something that appeals to me the other thing that i do recommend
people do as well is look into some of the valuation items you can see comps there's a bunch of different
fun pieces and also deep dive that team i think that we all understand that nowadays investing in stack
teams is pretty much the number one way to come out on top right the products there's a lot of products
that are similar i think this one has some competitive advantages but ultimately the team
is going to be what drives it in my opinion so if you can't find it people always have trouble with
this just dm me the word brokerage if you dm brokerage i'll know that you want to check out the
round and i'll send you over the information on it make things nice and simple now one of the
questions i got rid of is why uh because someone asked they were like can you trade spx on there and
i was like yes you can trade spx and they were like oh yeah i can't wait to trade spx commission
free but i believe that there are commissions on spx so why is it that the indexes have commissions
versus the stocks don't can you just explain that yeah that's a really good question look so indexes
have higher routing routing fees way higher routing fees they also have um they also have some
different regulatory fees so um the index fees uh you know um we don't get we don't keep all of the
all of the commissions on index fees what ends up happening is that in order to route you the
best way possible we just it need you need to charge somewhere between 15 to 20 cents like
otherwise it kind of fucks things up that being said because of the situation we sometimes if
somebody's only trained trading index fees we will drop them all the way down to the regulatory minimum
um uh you know regulatory minimum obviously there is no regulatory minimum when i say regulatory
minimum i mean the minimum to make sure that we are being transparent when it comes to routing
all of that being said we are playing so uh you know we just recently i got our broker
dealer's license we're moving away from trade station and we are playing with trying to modify
some of the parameters and and see what see what it looks like if we route things on our own
all of that being said right now the fees exist a to pay for everybody else to access options
without having to pay fees b um to make sure that you're getting routed as fast as possible
to the best route possible that being said we are actively looking at pricing index options because
you know we're we're um we're going to be releasing a new pricing structure when we leave trade station
nothing is going up actually most things are most things are going down for like futures are going down the
margin minimum is going down things like that um and we're looking at index options in specific
because actually what we found is um we could we could make index options fees zero and eat the
complete fee because a lot of our customers are starting to trade futures so uh uh you know that
that's some background there i i'm not sure if that answered your question in its entirety but
we're actually looking at possibly cutting them in half or even you know uh or even by like 60 or 70
percent here in the coming months but for right now they are that price because a we need to make
some we need to make some money so to pay for the other options routing and then b to um um to make
sure that you're getting routed as fast as possible
beautiful hey did you see this stuff around uh charles schwab getting rid of the td ameritrade app i've
just seen a lot of anger on my timeline yeah i think look i think it's pretty funny i think
not only are they getting rid of the td ameritrade app they're kind of they're also getting rid of the
td ameritrade um they're they're having trouble moving over the td ameritrade api and i was i was
talking about this with my team actually i was talking about this with an investor so i'm i'm about
to i'm you know i'm flying out to the bay area here in a couple of days um and by the way the reason
we're never going to be coming back to crowdfunding people keep asking me this crowdfunding sucks you
have to go through a bunch of due diligence you have to file with the sec it's like why would i
like i've i've checked that box off in my head right there are people like i'm going to be able
to say if areas goes public one day i'm going to be able to say that there are people who joined us
on day one and they are also making an egregious amount of money i have checked that box off in my
life that there's no reason for me to spend a hundred thousand dollars again and go through a due
diligence process again to raise money from the crowd when there are vcs i mean we're a venture
backed company and there are venture firms that are willing to write half a million dollar checks
million dollar checks five million dollar checks without like you know with the same level of
with the same level of diligence so i you know that's a question that i've been getting a lot um but
to sort of to sort of pedal back on the um uh onto the td ameritrade question it's like look brokerages
legacy brokerages suck so developers built thousands of services and tools and communities
to help people become better stock traders the problem is those tools cost a lot of money
and all of those tools have one thing in common that you can't use them to trade stocks
and what we've come up with at aries is is uh you know we're leaning really heavily into api
and we find it really interesting that schwab is discontinuing you know the td ameritrade app they're
probably going to discontinue the td ameritrade api because the way that we see it is like nobody's
using schwab to use schwab they're using schwab because they're they're you know their employer
uses schwab they're using schwab because now they own you know they own thinkerswim or they're using
schwab because somebody built an auto trading bot that lives on the td ameritrade api and that's sort
of where we're leaning in is like okay if we know that these brokerages don't care about these things
like they don't they don't really care about hugely upgrading thinkerswim it's been the same
for 30 years if they don't care about other people developing on top of their api then that's an
advantage for us um you know moving forward uh here like when we launch aries pro we're going to be
open sourcing our entire infrastructure and architecture so on our website you're going to
be able to see on the right hand side you'll see a widget from our app um and then on the left hand
side you'll see the apis that make up that widget um uh you know you'll you'll see exactly how the
architecture is built um and how it works with some really heavy documentation and what that will
mean is people will be able to get an api key and build their own widgets and build their own tools
and build their own stuff and uh um i you know i'm pretty i'm pretty excited for that uh especially to
see you know thinkerswim and i'm sorry especially to see schwab kind of divest away from those those
products i'm i'm excited to be investing heavily into them beautiful uh evan you got some thoughts
you want to throw into the mix here i know you invested in the round as well yeah i definitely
do appreciate you coming up here and joining us right there is a link up above where you can
do some due diligence for yourself if you're down below and hanging out and i definitely uh would tell
you guys to go in and at least download the uh the broker get your hundred dollars or sorry
trading platform get your hundred dollars um for depositing the 500 you don't even have to make
a trade although once you do uh their customer retention is pretty impressive and then uh yeah
you still have a little bit of time to go in and try it out and then do your due diligence and
and get yourself into the round definitely uh take that time to look into it don't just throw some money
at something um and we uh have all done our due diligence into it and it was something that i thought
was pretty interesting but uh make sure you make the uh the thesis your own out of it i've asked
this before but i would love to get your thoughts around you know there's a lot of really big ideas
coming here and you have to have the right people to make that those ideas come into reality so first
of all i would love to hear a little bit more about some of your team members now uh what some of
their backgrounds are and and why you think that they are the people that can uh drive you to be a
a very successful business and hopefully go public one day and then some of your strategies for for
finding top talent retaining top talent and uh all that stuff yeah you know our team has our team has
doubled this year and i think that um you know if you're talking about the core team you know my
co-founder for example was the lead scrum master at the canadian imperial bank of commerce the largest
bank in in canada for about a decade he was leading uh you know a variety of their development teams
building out the mobile app building out the website things like that so he's kind of a uh
he's very much a tech nerd and and you know he helped me grow my last company to uh uh i would
millions and millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue and then eventually to a sale so the two that
you know the two of us have definitely had a lot of history in building you know consumer fintech products
uh and then on the other side of our the team is like uh we just recently added um bill broadhead
to our board of directors uh as well as just coming on as a director in the company and you
know bill is for anyone who's not aware bill is a pretty big political consultant um he spent a lot
of time basically political marketing believe it or not he spent a lot of time working with the biden
family he spent a lot of time working with uh he spent a lot of time working with very you know
various congressional uh presidential candidates and his the addition that he's brought is pretty much
just figuring out our core messaging and making sure that we stay stuck to the vision because as
you said evan uh a lot of what a lot of what we're trying to do they're all very big ideas and bill's
job is basically to make sure everyone is aligned to whatever we're focused on for for you know for
that quarter or for that sprint and then um there's a couple of you know keith and sod who work with us
as well keith uh both of them just recently joining the company on a full-time basis you know up until
the start of this year they were they they were not full-time employees um you know they were just
heading up the the partner program but keith spent uh you know keith spent eight years in utilities at
in new york city he a lot of just utility portfolio management so things like system emergencies or in
the middle of hurricanes keith was in charge of deploying who gets power back first
um uh but uh uh you know he he does our business strategy and then sod uh he the the most you know
the most recent contract he did he's a he's a consultant he uh the most recent contract he worked
on was ai powered school bus safety technology that it's a company called bus patrol which you know he
he was there and he helped triple their revenue over the course of uh i believe it was a year and a
half and you know he leads our partner program which is our fastest growing segment at aries it's it's
it's what took us from just a couple hundred customers you know you know at the start of last
year to north of 11 000 customers today so i think it's a pretty ragtag crew obviously like uh we we've
all we're all traders all of us are engineers but uh one thing we all have in common is that we've been
doing this for quite a while and we have a pretty deep passion right um you know everyone brings
something different to the table but the one overwhelming thing is that every single person
is a trader and everyone at some point um had a thinkorswim account or had an e-trade account
and just sort of knows the pain of having you know starting trading paying 500 for a trading discord or
paying 200 a month for some service and then paying commissions at each every one of us knows
that pain and we're sort of dedicated to trying to make sure that people have better experiences
yeah really well put there retta we've got about 10 minutes left here if anybody does have
questions from the audience feel free to dm me directly i'm happy to take them in addition with
that uh feel free to uh again dm the word brokerage if you want me to send that link over to you and i'm
happy to get it to you there as well so we'll make it nice and easy all right i think we've run through
a good amount of stuff but we haven't talked with kim yet kim i'm curious what are some of the
important features to you on a brokerage what do you look for i know that your husband's been in
this area for a long time so i'm sure you are pretty familiar with them and of course you're an
active trader huh i was saying i was saying and of course you're a super active trader yes um investor
and trader um yeah i've really enjoyed listening to uh you guys talk about your platform and i think
a couple things are important to me is it being really clear your and this is something i never
liked about think or swim it wasn't clear if you were doing like different option strategies what your
actual profit loss was it just wasn't always easy to figure it's one reason why i left think or swim
it wasn't easy to roll your contracts at least at the time that i was using it i always found it
difficult um and so i really like it to be clear like where am i at in the trade if i'm using options
where is my profit loss in that even if i add or i add a leg to it being able to see that really clearly
being able to see ahead of time like what's my risk in this trade and uh where you know at what at what
expiration date would this trade be you know the least profitable with theta decay etc the thing i
like that you guys are really talking about oh and futures i i trade futures probably more than anything
more than options and so ease of trading in and out of your futures trades and seeing another thing i
didn't like about think or swim is i made so many mistakes on think or swim because it just it was so
easy to hit it the wrong way or fat finger something and so where i'm at right now i won't name the name
it's just much easier for me to i make way less errors it's super clear whether i'm buying or selling the
futures contract and you know when you're going really quickly that needs to be you know it needs to be
blaring red at you or green at you right but what i really like about this conversation is the cost
where you are all talking about not paying for these extra you know like your options flow your charting
that gets so expensive and i think it's consumers we're in a stage right now we're beat where we're
being nickeled and dimed on everything with the breakup kind of of the cable and you're having to
stream you know netflix and peacock and apple and all these fees start to add up so much that i'm i'm
feeling nickeled and dimed everywhere and i'm not liking it so i'm just i'm i love that you guys are
looking at how can this be all inclusive versus i've got to go get this and this and i like having
things on all one platform the more there is on a platform the actual better trader i am because
i'm not having to go in between so many screens and look for information on so many different sites
so that's kind of my feedback and then about it great feedback there kim any thoughts on that rata
yeah um where where did you end up where do you trade now after you left thinkerswift i'm with tasty
got it and you do you use tasty primarily because um like what makes you think tasty is just a better
overall user experience for active traders for me it is and what i do yes and i i mean i love the
people over there too and it seems like you guys are amazing so you're you're asking me so i like
the people a lot but the user experience so the customer service is really good me being from the
customer service industry you know i was at nordstrom uh costco you know being in the customer service
industry that's a really important thing to me and then but also just the overall user experience it's
super easy to see when you're in a trade and i'm not trying to promote them so that's all i'll say about
it i mean in your guys space no no i'm happy to hear right i think i think tasty does a lot of
great things it's a it's it's been a great example for my team as we sort of um take a look at the
landscape it's it's quite interesting right tasty works has 156 tasty works is one of the most expensive
uh uh by commissions rate brokers um and they have about 160 active customer a thousand active customers
um and they've been around for a really really long time um and i think that there's a lot to
learn there so i i appreciate the insight yeah i also think it's like they have a really good training
and it's also trust knowing they're pretty like and it sounds like you guys are as well i think
trust and so i trust the people there so building trust is really another piece of it um i think that
might even be the most important thing to me is trust and the education that's available
that's my thank you thank you
love it but i love this conversation i'm super interested learning about it
dave did you have one more question here probably got time for one more um
um no it's probably going to be a drawn out one so if you could you could wrap up if if you need
to i just want to kind of shoot the shit with retta for a minute about um just like the whole t plus
one thing i was just really curious kind of what his thoughts were there and it's like he like how he
was going to adjust but totally fine we're going to be doing more spaces together with fredda so i'll
just invite you on them uh nate you got our last one here yeah you guys mentioned uh you know just
kind of a little bit about tasty trade there and i was curious if there would be any you know down
the line thoughts about doing kind of what they do with respect to uh the youtube channel maybe you
already do it i'm just not aware um but there you know there's a lot of live streaming and content
education that you know as kim alluded to and i think that points a lot towards trust like i almost
feel like when you go to that platform you are you're you know who you're dealing with because
you see them on you see their faces all the time everywhere and they're very friendly and outgoing
so i'm curious if you guys have that kind of stuff in the plans at all yeah i think you know it's a
good question i was actually so i was at the i was at the new york stock exchange a couple weeks ago
with john nigerian um he was announcing he bought a small stake in aries um uh and he he was sort of we
were out there we were sort of announcing that and i walking around the new york stock exchange i was
like holy shit this is like a movie set like you have like the cnbc little booth and you have the
streets little booth and you have like i was like man it would be so cool if someone could take the
people from spaces on youtube or on twitter if you could take those people from spaces and put them in
this environment and just have it be like shoot the shit sort of content instead of like really really um
um instead of like really well you know produced really like uh kind of bullshit i don't know if
you guys ever watch like cnbc all day it's kind of like really drawn out content that maybe doesn't
make a whole lot of sense for retail active retail traders it might make sense for investors and what
have you but it doesn't really make sense to watch it all day every single day and what i thought would
be cool is if you could get a booth at the new york stock exchange and can kind of compete on the
opposite turn by getting people that people by getting the people that everyone listens to here
on on you know you know there's another guy on on x here uh with you know like thousands of
listeners there's wolf with uh with hundreds of listeners then you have evan you have these guys
who have so many listeners on a day-to-day basis i i bet you that that could be scaled if you could
put them in an environment like the new york stock exchange or something and have it be somewhat
produced and have different segments maybe a segment for charting and a segment for swing trading
but less pretentious more retail active trader lingo in the same environment um that being said
it's it's not something that's on my roadmap right now i actually i did call the new york stock exchange
and try to figure out how much it would cost and surprisingly not as expensive as you think it would
be so it's like um i you know it's something that i think i'm going to work on here uh at some point
next year and i i want to do it in a way that makes it really really interesting but um right uh as of right
now we're we just have so much to work on when it comes to product and and obviously we're closing
this public round and i'm in the bay area getting the rest of the money so uh uh there's there's a lot
to there's a lot to work on but uh it's definitely something that i'm thinking about perfect we're
right here at 2 p.m eastern i gotta jump over to another space that jordan's in right now red always
a pleasure having you on we'll have you back on later this week actually thank you thank you
you thursday it's gonna be 2 30 p.m eastern on thursday feel free to join that one as well dave
retta thanks so much for coming on we'll talk with you again soon thank you
