- Today, we're on the slow coast of California,
Santa Cruz County.
We're announcing my fund initialized,
led a funding round for Jupe,
a new startup working on universal autonomous housing.
Jupe today, makes a structure for under 20 grand
that can be put up or taken down by
a few people in a few hours.
Right now, it's solar power,
a bed and good shelter for temperate climates.
But, this is just the roaster to their Tesla vision
of making billions of acres of land on our planet habitable
for 1.6 billion people.
I spent a night under the stars in a Jupe,
and this morning, we're hanging out onsite with the founder,
Jeff Wilson.
(soft music)
Jeff, thanks for having me here.
You know, bringing us all the way out here, where are we?
And what's happening here?
- This is a special place.
There was a guy named Wallace that had a house here.
Just last year, in the middle of the pandemic,
a fire came through, wiped out his house,
which is right behind us and left a place that, really,
there was nothing but memories.
It was a home he built with his own hands.
The day his daughter went off to college, it burned.
- Yeah. And so you can see that in the trees here.
They're all burnt to a crisp on the bottom part, but-
- Yeah, this was just August of last year.
I mean, it really is a Phoenix rising out of the ashes here.
He wanted to do something different on the land,
rather than just rebuilding another house.
He really wanted to have a space where
folks could have a deep experience of nature.
- [Garry] So how do you actually live in a place in nature,
but off the grid?
Without being sort of connected to the things that
might've brought the fire here in the first place?
- With what he wanted to do was also,
have something that wasn't going to require
a lot of infrastructure that could be set up
and moved quickly. - [Garry] Yeah, that makes
sense. - [Jeff] So if a fire
was coming through again,
these Jupes that we've got set up out here,
could be picked up and moved.
- Meeting you, it was so interesting to watch,
like how do we make one of these things?
How do we make housing, but in an (indistinct) sort of way,
the best for the most, for the least?
- Right.
By making things smaller, it brings into focus, experience.
- [Garry] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. - And by starting
with something small and over a short period of time
of experiencing that we can really dial in
the experience of nature.
- Well, I slept in one last night.
And I have to say,
it's probably the deepest sleep that I've had in,
I don't know, ever, ever, maybe.
Waking up to the babbling brook.
There was a crazy rain just last night.
- [Jeff] No sirens. - Yeah, exactly.
We're not in San Francisco right now. That's for sure.
- Why do you think you slept so well?
'Cause I hear that. - [Garry] Yeah.
- We've had really high strung people out here.
Like one of the first employees at Tesla,
I think maybe one of the first five employees said,
he had never slept this well in his sort of memorable life.
- [Garry] Yeah. - [Jeff] It's kind of crazy.
- It felt like sleeping in a spaceship on my way to earth.
And the commentary of that is like,
maybe a lot of us don't actually spend a lot of time
connecting with the earth ship that we live on, actually.
- [Jeff] Right. - Even just standing here,
I saw the photos on the internet, right?
The second I actually stepped foot
and saw one of these things.
The scale of it is a different thing, right?
- Yeah, it's almost like it's sort of bending space
a little bit.
The design, you know, we're very much a design led company,
to where we started with folks that had designed things
like cars and solar panels and said,
"Think about the space as if it was a product, right,
that you literally lived in."
I think the closest thing it feels to actually,
is almost like being in a cave on an $800 mattress.
Right? - Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
- And that opening with the light in front of you
and the darkness sort of around you,
I think that's triggering something fairly deep
and old in the brain, but not by design.
- Right. Yeah.
The interesting thing about it, it was instant, deep sleep
that normally if I'm at a hotel,
even like a really nice hotel,
you don't ever actually sleep all the way.
Like actually, I read someplace
that you actually need to sleep like two or three nights
in the same place for your body to even get to a point
of like, oh, "I don't have to be in a state of
any anxiety at all, about a place."
It's deeply primal,
but sort of feels like just being at home. (laughs)
- Yeah, maybe it's just like a lot of the variables
of why we don't sleep, are removed.
- Yeah, well, I do know that I couldn't access Twitter
from here.
- (laughs) I know. Are you okay?
- And that was a very good thing.
That was a very good thing. - The universe survived.
It was going to be there when we were back.
- I hope so, you know. (both chuckling)
- Talking about that. Right?
So we want to put these Jupes in like
the very deepest parts of nature.
There are infinite places like this on the planet
that have just never been accessible in a comfortable way.
Well then if you can have the option
to add some of that tech back into the equation, right.
I mean, it won't be long before
we'll have Starlink here, right?
- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. - So that, you know,
you can make sure if you need to get on a tweet storm
about the babbling brook or how good your sleep was-
- Yeah. Yeah. - That you'd be able
to do that.
So we're at your crib. - Yeah, this is exactly
where I had the best night of sleep in my life.
- It's a pretty nice spot.
- Yeah. Let's check it out, man.
- [Jeff] So we just, zip these up.
There you go.
- [Garry] So the amazing thing is
this is actually really durable material.
- [Jeff] One of the materials we've used is like
out of the yacht industry.
- [Garry] Right on, right on.
- [Jeff] You have to have something that you know,
is resistant to moisture and UV.
Alright. Let's check your crib out.
- [Garry] It's beautiful. Thank you, sir.
- [Jeff] Get the mosquito net up.
- [Garry] This is the cave.
- Hey, you did a pretty good job at making your bed.
I have to say, you know. - Yeah, trying, I'm trying-
- Yeah. - Mama taught me right.
- [Jeff] These things are off grid.
- [Garry] Yeah. Yeah.
- [Jeff] Because we want to be able to pop them up anywhere
and don't want to have to plug 'em in.
So we've got lights here at the front door,
or I guess you could have turned 'em off right there
on the headboard.
And so this is all powered by a couple of batteries
and four solar panels that we've got outside.
- Yeah, I mean,
that's one of those things that's really interesting.
Like there's a really strong why now?
You know, same reason why you got van life going on
and you know, this sort of new wave of living outdoors.
Well, after one night, I'm like, well, I could probably,
I could get used to this, this is really beautiful.
And my favorite thing though,
is because there's electricity,
you have this electric blanket set up
that is dialed in perfectly.
- Yeah. Yeah.
You know, there's something about
being this deep in nature and having an electric blanket-
- Yeah. - On a really comfortable
mattress.
- Right. - And something about that
in this very thin, like layer,
this very thin barrier,
that's almost not there between those worlds-
- Yeah. - I think that's something
very interesting that we're playing with here.
Folks don't really believe it till they're in one.
I think also these black ones suppress
and block the light so, well-
- Yeah. - It's almost like
you're in some sort of sleep chamber when you're in here.
It's easy to sleep 10 hours.
- So, everyone comes in and sort of, you know,
sees all of this and this is beautiful,
but the real secret is actually down here.
This is the technology piece.
- Yeah. The real magic really happens right under your feet.
Our original Y Combinator application
for this company didn't have anything to do with this.
It was actually just the gadget.
What we call the chassis. - Yeah.
- Actually, our company was actually just named after,
it was named Foundation when we originally applied.
So the idea here is that you have this shippable,
flat packable brick that acts as the foundations,
you don't need to pull one,
but also has all these like modular elements in it
that we call like entra modular.
So, we've got all of these cavities like this,
that we can store stuff in or put these implements.
This is one that covers all of the solar.
So, underneath there, there's a couple of big batteries.
We have our inverter and this whole module just slides in.
So we could slide in, make this thing one huge battery.
We could take out the bed and make this a dining room.
And then we can also do different things with the top.
We could 3D print on this because all the guts of the home
are in the floor. - Yeah.
- Stick, build whatever you want it to do.
- Well, Jeff, I mean-
- Wait, did you grow up in a barn?
You know, you got to turn off the lights
when you leave the house. - Oh shoot.
(both laugh)
- [Jeff] That's a very-
(indistinct) (both laughing)
My dad used to say that to me.
"Did you grow up in a barn, son?"
- [Garry] Oh my God. - [Jeff] I'm glad
you slept well. - Yes, I mean,
I'm going to bring back my family.
We're going to bring all our friends.
I could just see this being a thousand times better
than camping alone right now.
But I just have to thank you
for letting us be on this journey with you.
Like, you know,
getting to work with you on this.
I'm super psyched about this
like universal autonomous housing idea.
- Yeah. It's going to be awesome.
I, you know, when we were thinking about
who we wanted to work with, my co-founder and I,
one of the things we talked about was like, "Okay,
this glamping thing's profitable, it's working.
It's pretty cool.
But we don't want our legacy to be a Coachella."
- Yeah. Yeah.
- Alone. Coachella's fun.
But, and I think- - If anything,
it's like how do we turn that into something
that is even greater? - Yeah.
And what you guys,
you and Kim specifically were interested in
was this much larger thing, right?
Which is this 1.6 billion people
that don't have adequate housing in the world,
which is crazy.
- Yeah, I mean, I think what you're doing here,
is actually like if Airbnb and Tesla had a baby,
because there are a lot of like Tesla roadster, like things,
about what we see and what you're doing here,
where it's like the powertrain of a house, right?
- That's right.
- And then how do we go from there to, you know, for Tesla,
it's going to electrify every vehicle in existence,
and you know, bring about this new future.
And housing to me is a right.
We're fighting tooth and nail for like
these tiny plots of land.
Human beings are just screaming at each other
all day about this. - And arguing about how tall
they can be, who can live there.
Even the space, the airspace above them-
- Yeah, and then- - People are arguing about.
- Look at this! - Yeah.
- Look at this!
You know? Like look at this.
- If you wanted this to be a Titanic moment,
I can like get...
(both laughing)
- This is a very special place.
- [Jeff] Yeah. - But also it's astonishing,
how many places in the world can be this special, right?
It's not special on its own.
On its own, this is a valley, right?
When you put this here with this power,
with this bed, with community, right.
And that's the other piece
that I think is really important here.
Like this, isn't just a powertrain, it's also an experience.
And it's design led the way Brian and Joe
at Airbnb have done it.
- Right. Yeah.
And I mean, on that design led tip, you know,
one of the things we tried to build into this,
was a form that was aspirational
that really sort of got burnt into your retina,
and you couldn't forget, right?
- Yeah. Yeah. - Almost like the cyber truck.
You can't really unsee it. - Yeah.
- And so the use of the angles
and the sort of impossibility of the structure,
also adds to like some of that magic
that we're trying to curate.
It's weird, when you're out here,
it's like they so much don't fit with the geometry
of the space that they kind of do.
- Yeah. - Right.
This is very much an Adam's thing of hard tech play,
but there's also a whole software platform
that we're developing out,
that's going to allow folks to do the basic things, right?
Like, you know, book,
and for landowners to like look at
how things are being booked on their property.
But also, you know, you'll have an app
that you'll be able to hit when you get onsite, a button,
and your Jupe will light up. - Yeah.
- When you walk into the room, the Jupe,
your Spotify will load up on the speaker.
- Yeah, it's personalized.
Okay.
I got to stop right there because I forgot to say something.
We're investors in this amazing mix of Tesla and Airbnb.
And I wanted to mention that Jupe is hiring
a CTO and software engineers right now.
If you want to build this community-based web
and mobile experience or join this team
to build the future of all autonomous housing,
you have to visit jupe.com/jobs right now.
All right, back to the video.
I mean, the cool thing about this stuff is
how do we actually bring just this type of wealth
and housing and experience to basically everyone?
I mean, Mark Andreessen talks a lot about reality privilege,
sort of in contrast to basically the Metaverse,
like everyone's spending pretty much all of their lives
on the internet now, right?
- Watching these YouTube videos.
- Watching these videos right? (both laughing)
And you know, they do that at least partially
because now I realized that's what wealth is.
Wealth, lets people have reality privilege.
And wealth inequality means that like
people don't get to live really good lives
in like meet space. - Right?
And then we're descending into like the internet in a...
Like we're sort of receding into the internet.
- Right. - And then at the same time,
I'm like if we have good engineering
and we have unlimited money,
how could we not invest as deeply as possible
into making our current reality,
this reality, as rich as possible for one another.
If you look at the world as an engineer,
then you start trying to pick apart
what are the constraints?
We are fighting over like the same tiny scraps of land
in cities all over the world.
Why do we have to scream at each other all day
over that, when this world is so big, it's crazy.
- Yeah, and why do we need to be there?
If everything else is decentralizing,
if we could decentralize the grid, right?
The guts of a home and the infrastructure required in a city
and the community, right,
which is already largely decentralized-
- Totally. - Then maybe,
have a new way of living. - Yeah.
I think it's easier to design the future
than to engineer the future.
- Yeah. - Right?
So when you're talking about solving really big,
hard problems, you have to tell stories
and design needs to inform those stories
about what the future will look like.
So here's a couple of the panels that we have.
I actually have a background,
not just working in design, and this sort of space,
but I was an environmental science professor before this.
- Yeah, yeah, I heard you were the top rank most loved
professor in-
- I don't know about that.
I just handed out A's, right?
So, you know, one of the things
that's really important to us
from both a philosophical standpoint,
but also just a really practical one,
is that we operate off grid. - [Garry] Yeah.
- So, there are no power lines
that come through this valley anymore.
The only running water is this stream here.
And so we needed to design a platform for living
that can literally pop up anywhere, give you a, you know,
good living experience and then give you internet, right,
from something like Starlink.
- Yeah. - The idea we were talking
about earlier last night,
we were sitting over here under the stars, right.
Looking up at these trees and this whole idea
that a lot of folks are talking about
going to the stars. - The Metaverse.
Yeah. Oh. Going to the stars.
I mean, that's the thing.
Either, we are retreating from the earth
that we should really cherish
or we're retreating into like our phones right.
- [Jeff] Right. - Into the Metaverse, right?
- Into the Metaverse.
And it's like kind of look over here-
- Yeah. - A sort of look at this
shiny thing over here,
but all the while the earth is kind of burning, right?
- Yeah. - And it's going to be pretty
hard to load six, seven, 8 billion people
onto a ship just yet. - Yeah.
- I think we should support the cause right.
Going to need to do it eventually.
But we're trying to build a sort of living platform
for those of us that are going to have to stick around
a little while longer. (chuckles)
- That probably goes for pretty much all of us.
This is where you brought us last night,
(indistinct) and the whole universe.
- Yeah.
You wouldn't have really probably noticed this,
until it's pointed out,
but there are Jupes over here, up here, back here.
And they all point to this very sort of central space
where we were all sitting last night.
And I think this is the real core,
the real heart of Jupe, the real soul of it, right?
I mean, we spend a lot of our time,
like either here or sort of here, right, in the stars,
going to Mars or wherever and the real, real,
the real reality happens here.
Here and in the now.
- Well, I just want to thank you for building this.
And we're just all really lucky and thankful
to be working with you and what Jupe will be.
(soft music)