Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table

Summary

Two hardware founders, two very different frontiers. In the first half, Jason Calacanis interviews Brynn Putnam, CEO and founder of Board — a “face-to-face gaming console” built around a 24-inch touchscreen that lies flat on a table and recognizes physical game pieces. The pieces contain no electronics: Board uses a proprietary blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic plus an in-house embedded-AI software stack to track unlimited touch points and objects in real time, breaking past the 10-touch limit of conventional screens. Putnam — who previously founded the smart-mirror company Mirror and sold it to Lululemon roughly a week before COVID — walks through how she raised on a “hacky,” barely-functional prototype (“fundraising is storytelling”), why she manufactured Mirror in Mexico but this product with a tier-one CM in Thailand, and Board’s business model: a $399 console with seven games, ~$35 games with custom piece sets, and a forthcoming creator-tools subscription.

The conversation keeps circling back to Board’s real thesis — category creation and getting families off isolating personal screens and back around a shared table. Putnam frames Board as “Nintendo meets Roblox meets Lego meets a great collectibles business,” describes her daughter designing a mermaid piece in the Creator Studio, and explains her deliberate choice to steer away from simple ports (Monopoly, checkers) toward native IP experiences co-developed with the big franchise holders. Board sold out its 10,000-unit launch run in weeks and is now available at board.fun, with a Dungeons & Dragons tabletop product and a larger “board” on the roadmap.

The second half is Alex Wilhelm’s interview with AJ Piplica, co-founder and chairman of Hermeus, which is building autonomous hypersonic aircraft (Mach 5). Piplica lays out the North Star — Darkhorse, a reusable uncrewed jet faster than the SR-71 — and the iterative Quarterhorse program that de-risks “one miracle per year,” from a jet-powered go-kart (Mark 0) to a 30-second first flight (Mark 1) to a first supersonic flight (Mark 2.1) just 364 days later. He explains the Chimera combined-cycle engine (a pre-cooler that lets an off-the-shelf gas turbine survive Mach 3, then a transition to a ramjet), commercial dreams of cargo and trans-Atlantic-in-90-minutes travel, the just-closed $350M Series C led by Khosla, and the SpaceX-style “greatest hack in the book”: getting customers (the DIU / Air Force) to fund your R&D by paying you to fly.

Highlights

”Board is the first face-to-face gaming console”

“Board is the first face-to-face gaming console. It’s a 24-inch touchscreen that sits on a table. And what we’ve done is we’ve trained the touchscreen to recognize physical game pieces. So it delivers an experience that’s like board games meets video games, where everyone can sit around the same shared display.” — Brynn Putnam, 0:58

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”We’re sort of like Nintendo meets Roblox meets Lego”

“We have so many businesses in one. We’re sort of like Nintendo meets Roblox meets Lego meets a great collectibles business… over the weekend, my daughter used the creator product to make a piece that looks like herself that is a mermaid. And I sure as heck am going to pay whatever it takes to get that piece delivered to her.” — Brynn Putnam, 15:58

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”This is new category creation”

“This is sort of the area I always play, this is new category creation… our North Star is we’re looking at fun, accessible, full-family entertainment. So regardless of your age or your gaming experience or your taste, you should be able to sit around together and have a really great time where the screen is not dominating.” — Brynn Putnam, 16:55

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”Darkhorse… operate basically with impunity in almost any airspace”

“Darkhorse is a hypersonic reusable aircraft, faster than the SR-71, smaller than the SR-71 with no person on board. So as you can imagine, put that in the hands of our military leaders, the ability to operate basically with impunity in almost any airspace in the world. That is the type of asymmetric advantage that our Air Force and our allied partners are used to having.” — AJ Piplica, 41:33

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”Across the Atlantic Ocean in 90 minutes”

“The real way to think about Mach 4, Mach 5 travel, it really makes the world… sub-regional. Across the Atlantic Ocean in 90 minutes, that’s the same time from like Miami to New York today. So you’re really taking these economies and you’re bringing them closer together. And any time in history that you’ve done that… it’s always driven economic growth.” — AJ Piplica, 48:45

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”Get your customers to pay for it. It’s the greatest hack in the book”

“The way that they did it is because they effectively got their customer to pay for their R&D by paying them to fly rockets all the time… How do you get the data to learn how to land a rocket? Well, you fly rockets a lot. And you get your customers to pay for it. It’s the greatest hack in the book. So for us, we get paid to fly our airplanes by our customers all the time.” — AJ Piplica, 1:03:00

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Key Points

• How Board sees pieces without electronics (2:34) — Pieces use a unique conductive pattern in a special blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic; a custom embedded-AI stack tracks them from the touch sensor’s raw data. Standard screens only recognize 10 touch points.
• Proprietary, in-house models (3:00) — Models are trained on Board’s own custom dataset; open-source frameworks are leveraged but the platform is built “entirely from the ground up.”
• Two years to launch with “the right Avengers” (4:15) — Putnam’s Mirror background plus CTO Orion’s computer-vision / self-driving experience gave a head start on screen-recognizes-pieces.
• Manufacturing: Mexico then Thailand (9:41) — Mirror was produced in Mexico (weight/size made Asia shipping uneconomical); Board uses a tier-one CM in Thailand experienced with display products (Peloton, Portal, Nook).
• Fundraising is storytelling (11:22) — Do the bare minimum to show the customer experience; don’t over-engineer early startups.
• Pricing and model (12:27) — $399 console with seven games, ~$35 games with custom piece sets, plus a creator-tools subscription launching end of year.
• Engagement metrics (13:46) — Hardware sold at low-to-no margin; 85% of members are active monthly, playing 30+ sessions per month; LTV built on games, accessories, premium pieces, and creator membership.
• The genesis of Board (21:37) — A blended family of wildly different ages (a 3-year-old to 22-year-olds) that couldn’t find one game for everyone; games like the Overcooked-style kitchen game let each age play a role.
• No Kickstarter; sold out 10,000 units (25:31) — Launched D2C for last holiday, sold the launch run within weeks; available now at board.fun.
• Community marketplace (30:09) — First community game (a pinball title) launches next month; a review-gated marketplace with per-game rev-share or outright buyouts.
• IP strategy: native, not ports (31:54) — In talks with all the major franchise holders; a “Monopoly Go” approach reimagining beloved IP natively for Board rather than porting Monopoly or checkers.
• Darkhorse / Quarterhorse (41:33) — Darkhorse is the uncrewed hypersonic North Star; Quarterhorse is the iterative de-risking program building ~one new airplane per year.
• Why uncrewed (42:58) — No pilots to be shot down and captured (the SR-71 existed because Gary Powers’ U-2 was downed); decision-makers stay “on the loop,” not in the cockpit.
• The Chimera engine (50:00) — A pre-cooler chills Mach-3 intake air (which would otherwise hit ~800°F and melt aluminum) so an off-the-shelf gas turbine survives, then transitions to a ramjet that uses shockwaves instead of mechanical compression.
• Iterative flight progress (56:08) — Quarterhorse 2.1’s first supersonic flight (Mach 1.21) came 364 days after Mark 1’s first flight; weapons rack already integrated.
• $350M Series C and the SpaceX model (1:02:21) — Khosla-led round; plans to stay private via extreme capital efficiency, getting customers (DIU / Air Force) to fund R&D the way SpaceX did with NASA’s COTS contract.
• The structural opportunity (1:06:26) — No new US fighter-jet manufacturer since the 1950s (General Dynamics); the F-22 and F-35 each took 20–25 years and $30–60B to develop.

Mentions

Companies

• Board (0:58) — Brynn Putnam’s face-to-face gaming console startup (board.fun).
• Union Square Ventures (USV) (0:12) — Investor; Jason recalls its lineage from Fred Wilson’s Flatiron / Acme Ventures.
• Mirror (4:15) — Putnam’s prior company, an interactive smart mirror.
• Lululemon (25:00) — Acquired Mirror (roughly a week before COVID).
• Whoop (11:47) — Cited by Jason on subscription-abstracted hardware pricing.
• Hermeus (39:53) — AJ Piplica’s hypersonic aircraft company in Atlanta.
• Boom (39:53) — Supersonic passenger-jet company, contrasted with Hermeus.
• SpaceX (55:06) — Model for rocket-people building airplanes and customer-funded R&D.
• Anduril (1:03:00) — Cited as a company that raised ~$11B of private equity financing.
• Khosla Ventures (1:02:21) — Led Hermeus’s $350M Series C.
• Raytheon (1:05:41) — Defense prime and Hermeus investor; used as a foil for legacy speed.
• Lockheed / Aerojet Rocketdyne (53:04) — Demonstrated a turbine-to-ramjet transition in the lab (~6 years, ~$250M).
• Scyronix (43:39) — Uncrewed-systems company (Dino) that Alex and AJ praise.

Products & Technologies

• Chimera engine (49:29) — Hermeus’s turbine-based combined-cycle engine (turbojet → ramjet).
• Quarterhorse / Darkhorse (41:22) — Hermeus’s iterative test program and its uncrewed hypersonic end goal.
• SR-71 / U-2 / X-1 / J58 engine (45:31) — Aviation reference points for speed records and propulsion.
• A-10 Warthog (46:37) — “An airplane designed around a gun.”
• F100 engine / AMRAAM / Sidewinder (57:16) — Quarterhorse’s engine and the weapons it can carry externally.
• Overcooked (21:37) — Cooperative cooking video game; inspiration for Board’s “Chop-chop.”
• Board’s game lineup (27:04) — Chop-chop, Omakase, Gloogs (Lemmings-like), Spycraft, Mushka, Thrasos, Heist.
• Mancala / Settlers of Catan (20:38) — Traditional games referenced on onboarding friction.

People

• Brynn Putnam (0:00) — CEO/founder of Board; former founder of Mirror; ex-New York City Ballet.
• AJ Piplica (39:53) — Co-founder and chairman of Hermeus.
• Alex Wilhelm (39:53) — TWiST co-host who conducts the Hermeus interview.
• Fred Wilson / Jerry Colonna (0:12) — USV founders Jason has known since the 1990s.
• Orion (4:15) — Board’s CTO, from computer vision / self-driving cars.
• Kelly Johnson (54:05) — Skunkworks founder; “one miracle per program.”
• Peter Thiel / Elon Musk (1:06:26) — The “no successful US car company since Jeep in 1941” anecdote.
• Gary Powers (42:58) — U-2 pilot whose downing motivated the SR-71.

Surprising Quotes

“Touchscreens recognize 10 touch points… So our challenge was recognizing unlimited touch points as well as physical objects… They have a unique conductive pattern built into the surface that uses a special blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic.” — Brynn Putnam, 2:05

“We actually sold about a week before COVID, so I think it would have been a more interesting outcome if that conversation had happened a year later.” — Brynn Putnam, 25:04

“Any dancer I’ve ever hired has been incredible success, so it’s been number one on my hiring criteria… You’ll run through walls, so it’s a good fit for startups.” — Brynn Putnam, 35:44

“Where in the world could we hire people who had built a brand new airplane a year in their career today? Nowhere. They’re all dead. We used to do this back in the 50s and 60s, but they’re all dead.” — AJ Piplica, 54:31

“A ramjet is literally the simplest air-breathing propulsion device you can think of… it’s a tube with fuel injectors and a nozzle. That’s it.” — AJ Piplica, 51:52

“There is a reason there has not been a new fighter jet manufacturer founded in this country since the 1950s… everybody saw that as a reason not to do it. And yet the inverse is actually paradoxically the correct thing. This is the opportunity.” — AJ Piplica, 1:06:26

Transcript

Note: TWiST seeds the transcriber with the previous hosts’ names, so the raw transcript JSON labels the second (Hermeus) interview as “Jason Calacanis” and “Brynn Putnam.” Those segments are actually Alex Wilhelm (host) interviewing AJ Piplica (guest), and are attributed correctly below. Timestamps are unchanged from the JSON.

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, welcome back to TWiST, this week in Startups. Very excited to have Brynn Putnam on the program. She is the CEO and founder of Board. Welcome to the program.

Brynn Putnam: 0:11 Thanks for having me, Jason.

Jason Calacanis: 0:12 I saw you going trending. I think my friends over at USV, Union Square Ventures, did your Series A, I’m assuming? Or a big seed? Congratulations on that. I’ve been friends with Fred Wilson. He hired me to read business plans for him in 1995. Just to massively date this. Yeah, he was doing something called Acme Ventures with Jerry Colonna, which became Flatiron, which then became Union Square. But he’s been at it for a long time and I’ve known him since I was 24 years old. Great investors. But my lord, what an amazing demo sweeping the interwebs. Maybe you could tell everybody what Board is, and maybe we could look at a launch video or whatever you have here, because I saw this and I was like, oh my god, I’m buying three of them.

Brynn Putnam: 0:58 I love it, that’s what we want to hear. So, Board is the first face-to-face gaming console. It’s a 24-inch touchscreen that sits on a table. And what we’ve done is we’ve trained the touchscreen to recognize physical game pieces. So it delivers an experience that’s like board games meets video games, where everyone can sit around the same shared display, interacting with the screen using these incredible game pieces.

Jason Calacanis: 1:23 Okay, so it’s a giant iPad, but it has some sort of way of knowing what’s on the screen that you put on there, whether it’s a chess piece or whatever it is. And this technology’s existed in iPads for a little while, yeah? What is that? No, it hasn’t. So what is the underlying technology here that lets the Board know about the pieces? Because touchscreens have existed for a long time, obviously. What is the technology that’s having these pieces, because I know I saw something that worked on iPad, but I’m not sure how the technology worked. And it might’ve been like a decade ago, it was some sort of a Disney thing, but I can’t remember. You tell me.

Brynn Putnam: 2:05 Yeah. So touchscreens recognize 10 touch points. So if you put 10 fingers on, it recognizes 10 fingers, but the 11th or 12th finger it doesn’t recognize. So our challenge was recognizing unlimited touch points as well as physical objects. So the way that we do that, we actually made you a special piece, a special Jason piece.

Jason Calacanis: 2:28 Oh, look at me. I love it. Jason straight up perfect.

Brynn Putnam: 2:30 Put me in coach Brown. I’m going to be-

Jason Calacanis: 2:31 I’m going to be in, I always wear a pair of high tops just in case coach Brown puts me in the game.

Brynn Putnam: 2:34 You’re ready to go. Um, so the way that our pieces do that, they don’t contain electronics or sensors. They have a unique conductive pattern built into the surface that uses a special blend of capacitive and non-capacitive plastic, and a unique manufacturing process that we’ve developed in-house. And then our custom software stack processes the raw data from the Board’s touch sensor using embedded AI to detect and track the pieces. So it knows, um, this is the Jayson piece, it’s over here facing this direction, it’s shooting a basket. And so we can play games where the pieces are actually controlling the digital screen in real time. And all of that is built entirely from the ground up. So our models are proprietary, trained on our own custom dataset, um, you know, we leverage open-source frameworks, but really everything is, is unique to our platform.

Jason Calacanis: 3:27 How many years have you been building this, and what does it take today to build a hardware product like this to the level of refinement you got to? Because people used to always say hardware’s hard, I don’t want to touch a hardware startup. Most hardware startups failed brutally. Now everybody’s like, oh, hardware’s the moat, this is amazing. Can you add hardware to your SaaS product? And it’s like Slack, I don’t know what hardware would you like me to add to HubSpot? You know, it’s, but it’s funny because Square had that little hardware device that Jack was way ahead of his time. So tell us a little bit about how long it takes from, you know, prototyping, you know, getting out the first thousand Kickstarters if you took that route, and building a modern hardware company in 2024.

Brynn Putnam: 4:15 It took us about two years to get to launch, which was remarkably fast. I think, frankly, because we had sort of the right Avengers building the product. Um, my last company was called Mirror, and it was an interactive smart mirror that streamed workouts to people in their home. So I was very familiar with screen technology and how to get those types of products, um, built. And then my CTO, Orion, um, has a deep background in, um, CV and machine learning and worked in computer vision, self-driving cars at his previous startup. So he sort of brought his, his team with him, and we had a bit of a head start as it relates to kind of solving the challenge of the, the screen recognizing the pieces. Um, so I think we were fortunate just to have that kind of unique combination of experience.

Jason Calacanis: 4:57 So let’s take Mirror and how long that took and how long it took to build that hardware footprint versus this one. What’s changed, and I’m assuming you’re going to Shenzhen or somewhere and working with these hardware, you know, intermediaries or consultants. Maybe take us inside that piece of the business when you have to go find contract manufacturers or a factory to build this. And, and what it was like when you did Mirror, which was, I think, like, that was a pretty decent time ago, yeah? 2017? And I know Shenzhen has changed a lot since I went there 20 years ago to ask my wife’s father if I could marry her. You know, it was 20 years ago, 22 years ago, and there was one hotel in Shenzhen and just huge swaths of open dirt plots waiting to be building stuff. But it’s changed a lot, yeah?

Brynn Putnam: 5:52 It’s definitely much more evolved. Um, with Mirror actually, um, I had no experience building technology at all. My background was a professional ballerina here at the New York City Ballet and then I uh moved into bricks and mortar gyms, fitness studios and sort of took that IRL knowledge and turned that into Mirror. So Mirror was my first tech company, tech product and it was really a- a napkin sketch. You know, I had the idea for the experience and we built a prototype that uh was completely non-functional but just to validate that you could see a screen through a piece of one-way mirror and that the experience was really engaging. And so from there, I’d heard a lot of sort of horror stories about people spending all this time sort of designing these- these pieces of hardware and then by the time they got to manufacturing, they had either run out of money or the manufacturers couldn’t make the designs because there was a mismatch between what a factory could do and what had been conceived. And so pretty early, I started working with a local manufacturer just to build a prototype just to understand how we would tackle some of the challenges of our custom mirror and the framing and things like that. And then eventually, we produced actually in Mexico because with Mirror, it was such a large and heavy object that uh sort of the shipment from Asia really cut into sort of the benefits of- of producing overseas. So we produced um in Mexico.

Jason Calacanis: 7:12 That was cost-competitive because of the shipping issue?

Brynn Putnam: 7:14 Because of the weight and the size.

Jason Calacanis: 7:16 Yeah. And the- but the quality was there? I’ve heard mixed things about like people trusting, you know, maybe Vietnam or Shenzhen versus Mexico or other labor forces. Uh and I’m not sure if my information is outdated, but high-quality manufacturing of tech items in Mexico, yeah?

Brynn Putnam: 7:33 Incredibly. And the- the factory there had worked on a digital picture frame prior so they had sort of a similar experience with a smaller product and they did a lot of digital signage. And it was um actually a- a factory run by a woman, operated almost entirely by women. So as a- as a female-operated company, it was um really an incredible experience to feel like there was this um amazing workforce of- of Mexican women kind of driving our growth.

Jason Calacanis: 8:00 Well, and if- you know, not- this isn’t a political show, this is This Week in Startups, not This Week in Politics, but when you think about it, if we’re trying to have more resiliency in our supply chain and not, you know, and if there are geopolitical issues with China in the future, it does create a pretty resilient way for you to get product, avoid the shipping containers, and avoid tariffs and other issues if it’s that close. What did it take to build this product in terms of like timeline compared to that first time? Is it half as much time now to build a hardware product? Is it half as- you know, what- what would a founder listening to this say is the minimum amount of money required to get to like a functional prototype that you could show to users and get feedback or show to a VC and get a big check?

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Brynn Putnam: 9:41 This time it did make sense for us to manufacture in Asia and we work with a tier one CM out of Thailand, who had a lot of experience with display products, working with folks like Peloton or Portal or Nook. And so we were fortunate to be able to leverage kind of their experience with the core element of our product, the touch screen. And so this time we worked really closely in collaboration with the manufacturer to get to a prototype more quickly, leveraging their experience as opposed to the first time where we were owning the entire supply chain and sourcing and managing every single component that went into the device. And so that definitely shaved a large amount of time off of our process. I think for me, perhaps because I’m not, I don’t come from a technical background, I’ve always focused on trying to validate the experience for investors. And so really we built early days a product where the technology wasn’t fully there, but it really showed off what it was to sit around a shared experience playing with physical pieces as the controller. And we did that through a series of hacky hacky ways. And that’s how we raised our first round. And so I generally recommend that you don’t overengineer your early startups. You actually try to show and deliver the experience that you’re trying to give to your customers and then build into that once you have more capital.

Jason Calacanis: 11:04 And so you did a seed round before the USV round, I’m assuming. And in your mind, if you can basically show the product and people can get excited trying it in a VC boardroom or an angel investor’s boardroom or, I don’t know, a seed fund’s boardroom, that’s enough to get you the money you need to get to that next stage, yeah?

Brynn Putnam: 11:22 Yeah, and to make the experience come alive, the brand you’re creating, who your customer is, the, you know, it’s storytelling. Fundraising is storytelling, just like talking to your customers is storytelling. So you have to build what you need to tell that story and you obviously need to have a clear understanding of how you’re going to build the end product and make it fully functional. But we’ve always sort of leaned into, you know, do the bare minimum to show what the experience will be like for the customer.

Jason Calacanis: 11:47 Yeah. And the cost of this item, and then I’m assuming there’s an app store where I either rent or buy games or I get some sort of a subscription with some number of games? Tell me about how you price things in today’s world. Obviously I’m wearing a Whoop… Whoop is ungodly expensive compared to like buying a Fitbit back in the day where you didn’t even have a premium account, you just bought it. These I think are $300 a year and they were upselling me on having like four members of the family. And I was like, wow, if all five of us were on this thing for $200, I’d be spending $1,000 a year just on Whoop for my family. And I said, cheap actually, for the value I’m getting. So how do you think about pricing in 2026 for a product like yours?

Brynn Putnam: 12:27 So the board is 399 and includes seven games so that you get a flavor for the experience. From there, we have a game store where you can buy individual games at around $35 and they come with their own custom piece sets. And then we have a subscription product that’s launching at the end of the year that gives you access to basically creator tools to allow you to create your own games and custom pieces on board. So right now people are using our SDK with, you know, their favorite AI coding tools to build their own interactive experiences and we’re building a more formal product around that that will be a subscription product as an add-on to the base.

Jason Calacanis: 13:06 So it’s not cheap, it’s value, it’s priced, you know, 400 bucks is like buying a Chromebook or, you know, an Android phone. But, if you were to divide it by the number of hours, which is how I look at entertainment, like Netflix, they always say like, this is the greatest value. I mean, if you played with this thing for 10 hours a month, 100 hours a year, you know, now you’re at $3 an hour, it’s free basically, is I think the way to think about it. Why make people pay upfront? Do you have to do that because of the hardware or could you eventually just do what Whoop does and, you know, abstract the hardware into the cost of the subscription and you must have had a debate about that internally, yeah?

Brynn Putnam: 13:46 Yeah, I mean, we’re definitely trying to get the hardware down to the lowest price point possible and obviously we’re only about seven months out from launch now, so the price will continue to gel over time. So for us it really has been about, you know, selling the product at low to no margins and looking to the games, the accessories, so things like cases and piece storage and premium pieces that unlock new experiences in the game, as well as the creator membership as a way to really build long-term LTV off of the customer. But I think agreeing with you, you know, 85% of our members are active monthly playing over 30 sessions per month. So for us, you know, if the average trip for a family of four going to the movies is $100 or $150 once you factor in popcorn and candy and more, I think it’s really a really high-value experience.

Jason Calacanis: 14:37 Yeah, I think that’s something the movie theaters have to really reconsider and the studios is the how accessible their product is and they haven’t figured out subscriptions yet or how to utilize down times. I mean it would be so commonsensical for them to just come up with a $99 a month plan for families to go to the movies two or three times a month. If they get there before you know, not on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, they just you know, a weekly thing or whatever it’s just…

Brynn Putnam: 15:07 Yeah, off peak hours.

Jason Calacanis: 15:08 Off peak hours would be such a great utilization I mean if it worked for Cloud Code and music tokens, like what does the movie theater think? They’re dying and they have no ability to innovate. Um, hey, there was something kind of sneaky in there that you dropped that I caught on which is, sneaky in a good way, like sneaky brilliant, clever, which is the unique pieces in the game. My daughters were addicted to this Shopkins thing for a little bit or popping cooking and you know, a lot of folks are unpacking packs of baseball cards, cracking packs or whatever they call it on live streams, etc. It’s like a hobby. This could be amazing if you were able to do a deal with Lucas Arts for Star Wars and make the famous Millennium Falcon, you know, game, the hologram game, or you know, add other pieces…

Brynn Putnam: 15:54 Holographic chess.

Jason Calacanis: 15:56 Yeah, ooh, that could be really fun, right?

Brynn Putnam: 15:58 I mean, I think it’s just, we have so many businesses in one. We’re sort of like Nintendo meets Roblox meets Lego meets a great collectibles business. And that’s obviously the challenge of running the business, but also the incredible opportunity. Particularly when you start to think about creation. So, you know, over the weekend, my daughter used the creator product to make a piece that looks like herself that is a mermaid. And you know, I sure as heck am going to pay whatever it takes to get that piece delivered to her because she sat there and she created it and she used her imagination to come up with something and then that piece is going to unlock new games and experiences for her when she’ll be able to create even further.

Jason Calacanis: 16:31 There’s a lot of orthodoxy in this space, like the Wil Wheaton crowd and you know, they play board games on podcasts, the Dungeons and Dragons crowd. And I did see some of the feedback being like, ‘Well, technically it’s not a board game if you you know, have a screen and you can’t do that.’ And there’s like the whole like, ‘You can’t do that’ crowd. You have to have your conviction. You’re not going after these board game lunatics who are, you know, oh, this is sacrilegious to them. Yeah? You’re trying to expand the board game market here, I’m assuming.

Brynn Putnam: 16:55 Yeah, this is very much - this is sort of the area I always play, this is new category creation. So we take the interactivity of video games and we take the tactile feel of playing with physical pieces and sitting around a shared experience, but we’re creating something that’s fundamentally new. And I think for some people who are in the board game community or in the video game community, we don’t fit what they’re looking for. But I think for lots of people, what they’re looking for is a really fun way to build memories with people that they love, and this fits the bill. And so that’s really our North Star is we’re looking at fun, accessible, full-family entertainment. So regardless of your age or your gaming experience or your taste, you should be able to sit around together and have a really great time where the screen is not dominating into your own isolated experience, but really bringing you together. And so, um, you know, there’s- there’s obviously so much value in- in all sorts of play, but we’re creating something new.

Jason Calacanis: 18:10 (Ad — Northwest Registered Agent) Okay, so you have identified a real problem and you put together a solid solution and a business model that you believe in… Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/twist for more details, and the links are in the show notes.

Jason Calacanis: 19:03 You know, I think that’s kind of the brilliance of it. If you think about this on a generational basis, I’m Gen X, you know, I’ve got two 10-year-olds and a 16-year-old, and then there’s- you know, my nieces and nephews who are millennials. We- we all know we’re using these devices too much. And the fact that the device goes in between you and I and you know, just kills the facial expressions, the… this is very troubling for parents. Parents are trying to get their kids off devices. I’ve got all the controls, the number of hours, which devices for my 16-year-old. I’m down on the app level, like, okay, I’m going to give you eight hours a day of Audible. You can have unlimited Audible, Spotify for two hours. I’m like thinking about this. But what I most of all want to do is bring back the memories of doing things together. And I think the young crowd also… I don’t know, I was talking about it with Sue at the top of the show from Brilliant, and you two are both brilliant. You should make friends. I- I should have done a little crossover here and had you… um, because she’s one of my favorite entrepreneurs of all time. And what you’re both doing is kind of using this technology for good. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the fact that you’re both female founders and that you’re thinking, ‘Is this good for society or not?’ as opposed to ‘Is this good for the bottom line of the company?’ Uh, yeah, maybe there’s something a little bit there. But I love the brilliance of it’s on the table, we’re all looking at it, and there’s like silly practical things. I was just playing a board game with my daughter. It’s like some game where you move beads around from these 10 different little crevices in a piece of wood. It’s like some ancient game.

Brynn Putnam: 20:38 Mancala.

Jason Calacanis: 20:39 Mancala. Thank you. Yeah. She’s 10 years old. She played Mancala at home. She doesn’t know exactly the rules, but she’s like, ‘This is the rules I want to play.’ And I’m like reading the rules and trying to understand Mancala. I’ve never heard of this. I know Go, I know chess, I know backgammon. And uh, we had an amazing, hilarious time doing it with her rules. But eventually… Strategy games have rules for that reason, and this just for the tutorial portion of, you know, Settlers of Catan or whatever that’s called that everybody gets into. Like, I tried to play that two or three times with people. It’s just way too much. It’s like learning to snowboard or golf or something. Like, the first five games are going to be brutal, and then I’m sure you have some opening-up moment. But maybe you could talk a little bit about the skill level and onboarding people to these games, because that seems to be the hardest part of getting into a new board game, is getting five people around to learn the rules.

Brynn Putnam: 21:37 I mean, that’s the genesis of Board, is I left Mirror, and my life looked very different when I started Mirror. I was pregnant with my first child. Now I have a three-year-old, a nine-year-old, and three stepchildren, 18, 20, and 22. And so, you know, trying to get that range of ages and interests together for family time is virtually impossible. You know, we would try to play video games, and I don’t know if you’ve played with a modern controller, but there’s about 20 more buttons than the last time I played Mario, which was, you know, incredibly challenging. And then, you know, we’d play board games, and it was the exact experience that you said. We’d sit there and we’d either play the same game over and over again, or we’d read 20 pages of rules to try and find about them to try to get to a game, and then invariably, it would be too hard for the youngest or too easy for the oldest. And so we really think about that when we’re making games. We want, for example, we’ve got a kitchen game similar to Overcooked, where you’re all collaborating to manage a busy kitchen. And my little—my littlest one, she’s the cleaner, she manages the sponge and she has a great time, and the oldest girls are there trying to memorize the recipes and think about the strategy of sequencing the tickets to get the optimal payday. And so that’s really kind of where Board shines, is experiences where everyone can come together without too much setup and no one feeling left behind.

Jason Calacanis: 22:56 All right, do me a favor. This is like the third time I’ve heard about Overcooked. Explain to Unk. I’m like—people are starting to call me Unk now, I think it’s like a compliment slash joke. It’s like 57 or something like that. But what is Overcooked? Because Jalen Brunson was playing Overcooked after a Knicks win, I think, and I’m just like, well, the captain’s playing Overcooked, and my daughters are telling me I’m cooked all the time. I need to know what’s going on here. What is Overcooked? It’s a phenomenon here.

Brynn Putnam: 23:26 It’s a cooperative cooking game. So you’re working together to manage a kitchen, and—there we go. So you get guests who come in and they have specific requests, and you have to figure out, you know, who does what in the kitchen to deliver these dishes before the guests get angry and leave. And so you’re rewarded for the speed with which you’re able to deliver on the guests’ satisfaction. Ton of fun.

Jason Calacanis: 23:47 Oh my god, this is like The Bear! Yes, Chef! Yes, Chef! Oh my god, I—funny, I was at the French Laundry last week, and we had a party for Planet and this liquidity event conference we did, and they were putting, like, they let us walk into the kitchen and they created stations. So I just went in and I just started service, hands, and I just started, like, expediting. And they thought it was either hilarious or total cringe. But my understanding is now, I don’t know if you’re, I think you’re a millennial, but the you should embrace cringe is what I’m understanding now. Like, embrace your personal cringe.

Brynn Putnam: 24:24 This is what my, this is what my teenage stepdaughters say, that you should lean into what makes you a little bit odd.

Jason Calacanis: 24:29 That wasn’t what I grew up with though, so I’m I’m burdened. No, you were supposed to hide the odd stuff.

Brynn Putnam: 24:33 Exactly, hide the crazy, try to be normal. Here you can just be like, ‘I love board games, I’m going to do this.’

Jason Calacanis: 24:42 So when will this be available? How do people get one? And how do you think about distribution this early on? I like that you have premium pricing for the first year or two, you know, make sure the company’s profitable, you don’t run out of money. Everybody, oh man, every hardware startup I’ve ever been involved in is like, ‘We want everybody to afford it.’ I’m like, ‘So you want to be the Sony Walkman in year 40, and it’s month 4. Like, always a bad idea.’ And you probably learned that lesson, I think maybe with Mirror, which was a huge success, right? You sold it for a half-billion dollars to somebody, I can’t remember.

Brynn Putnam: 25:00 Lululemon.

Jason Calacanis: 25:01 Lululemon. So you felt good about that? I mean, it was a good sale.

Brynn Putnam: 25:04 Yeah, I mean, I think people don’t realize we actually sold about a week before COVID, so I think it was certainly, would have been a more interesting, an interesting outcome if that conversation had happened a year later.

Jason Calacanis: 25:14 Timing is everything. Yes, that would have been a different timeline, but no regrets.

Brynn Putnam: 25:19 No, but an incredible experience and to be able to watch a public company that’s that beloved sort of operate from the inside was really fascinating.

Jason Calacanis: 25:25 So tell us a little bit about, like, availability and how you think about distribution. Did you do a Kickstarter for this? That seemed to be, like, a requirement for hardware companies back in the day, is to run some sort of a Kickstarter.

Brynn Putnam: 25:31 No, I mean, I think we, we felt like we didn’t want to use a Kickstarter to fund development. Um, you know, we really, we wanted people to have confidence that the product was going to ship and that the product was going to be really high quality. And so we didn’t, we didn’t do a Kickstarter. We launched D2C for holiday of last year. And, you know, we sold out of our, our 10,000 launch units within a few weeks of our launch, which was really exciting. And then from there, you can get boards still at board.fun on our website, which is the core channel.

Jason Calacanis: 25:55 Is there a wait for these or can I just buy one of these to take on my summer trip? Is this available now?

Brynn Putnam: 26:00 Available now at board.fun.

Jason Calacanis: 26:02 Amazing. I am so stoked for this. I was like, oh man, I’m gonna have to like, I’m gonna have to use my, my celebrity to get my micro-celebrity to get one of these early because I was talking about it with my daughter, with one of my two twins and they were losing their mind over it. Uh, but I don’t need to try to leverage a tweet or something to get one. That’s good to know. I’m gonna order one now for our trip. Um, the games that are on it, um, Omakase, that’s your cooking one I take it?

Brynn Putnam: 27:04 Chop-chop is our cooking one. Omakase is um a strategy game where you’re sort of building different sets of sushi. Gloogs is um sort of our interpretation of Lemmings, this great uh physics puzzle game where you’re trying to save these little blue characters um in this reverse platformer.

Jason Calacanis: 27:23 I remember that, yeah.

Brynn Putnam: 27:25 Yeah, and then we have a retro arcade game, so things where you’re shooting asteroids with spaceships or trying to use robots to steer snakes to eat fruit. Um, Spycraft is like our escape room in a box, so it’s a puzzle game you’re working as spies to um unlock this kind of global mystery. Mushka’s our virtual pet, a sort of similar to Tamagotchi who you have to care for and play with um and in a couple weeks our next game that’s launching is called Heist where you’re using uh mirrors to route lasers uh to try to to sort of get burglars in and out of various heist puzzles.

Jason Calacanis: 27:52 (Ad — Deel) Founder scale faster on Deel. That’s the Deel. You can grow your company without borders and you can set up payroll for any country in minutes… So visit deel.com/twist. That’s D-E-E-L.com/twist.

Jason Calacanis: 29:05 You know what’s interesting about what you’re doing? I remember getting pitched early on about casual games and it didn’t fit in a box, right? Like there’s gaming and like okay you have this Nvidia card and you get your keyboard and then you know consoles and it just didn’t fit anywhere. And then it became bigger than everything, Candy Crush, Plants vs Zombies, all that stuff. I kind of feel like you have that potential here which is it’s hard for people to understand where it lands, but um once they do, it’ll probably feel to them like an obvious use of thirty bucks. Oh Tharos?

Brynn Putnam: 29:43 Yeah, Thrasos is um Greek for ‘to risk’.

Jason Calacanis: 29:47 Oh to risk, perfect. So yeah this is one of the interesting things about gaming, you know any of these formats like a recipe not copyrightable, the name obviously is but not the game functionality. So you can make these, but what about… And you have an API, anybody can put a game in the store. Great. So that’s an App Store. You take half the money, 30% of the money? Do you have a model yet?

Brynn Putnam: 30:09 So our first community game launches next month, it’s a Pinball game using the robots and spaceships from our arcade game. And the model differs based on game by game. In some cases, it’s a rev share, in some cases, we’re buying the game outright. But it’s a marketplace where people submit their games for review and then they get posted in the community section.

Jason Calacanis: 30:28 Got it. So TBD like what the sustainable business model there is, in terms of like, you have to be careful that it’s since you don’t want it to be an open platform, you want some level of quality.

Brynn Putnam: 30:41 I think for us, we feel really excited about the fact that building a game on Board to some degree is one of the most fun games on Board. But I think for lots of people, they’ll use the Creator Studio to build experiences for themselves and share them with their friends. And then for people who want to share it with the broader community, it’ll go through our review just to ensure it meets sort of our quality and safety standards, and then that will be in most cases a rev share model.

Jason Calacanis: 31:03 Fascinating. Yeah, that that is going to be great potential. Now talk to me about like premium IP. There’s huge businesses out there licensing IP constantly. LucasArts was probably one of the most famous. Marvel, before they were inside of Disney, was a completely licensing and tragically so they licensed their characters across five movie studios and had to go re-collect them all. But how do you think about IP here? Because LucasArts loves people to make games for them. And my lord, I mean, if we could have an Ahsoka, Mandalorian, Grogu game, I mean, we probably wouldn’t leave and there’s 10 different games you can do because you could give me a chess game for that. There’s Lord of the Rings. There’s so many different amazing collections of IP. Is that like down the road or you’re talking to folks already?

Brynn Putnam: 31:54 Yeah, we’ve been in conversation with sort of all the large players that you mentioned. I think for us we are really excited about sort of like Monopoly Go strategy where you take IP and characters and worlds that are really beloved and you reimagine them for Board in a way that feels native and true to the technology, you know, where the pieces and the digital worlds really make sense. Um, so early days I think, you know, investors and and customers even were encouraging us to do sort of more ports, just bringing Monopoly over or bringing checkers over, and I think we’ve we’ve steered away from that really in service of trying to figure out places where IP partnership can really deliver something that is new and native and authentic to Board, and um, those those will release um in the next few years.

Jason Calacanis: 32:40 Oh man, I this is going to be such an amazing uh startup. I think like don’t sell this one. Never. Never sell it. I think you’re going to crack I think you’re going to like you said earlier, like you’re going to create a new category that on a platform basis, you know, as you could just I mean look at what Services has done to Apple. Apple was kind of stagnant and then services just layering, layering, layering on all these different opportunities so yeah you this has got to be the patient go for the IPO never sell this company um…

Brynn Putnam: 33:14 One of the benefits of selling a company is I think you’re probably less likely to do it again you’re more excited about other outcomes.

Jason Calacanis: 33:20 It’s funny you say that I now own 100% of my firm and the projects I do have complete control don’t take on investors and go for a 10 20 year vision like why not if you and you have patient investors in USV I mean they were in meetup.com Scott Heiferman’s company for a long time you know patient capital is super important I don’t think you’ll ever need to raise money again you know the way you’re doing this if people are willing to buy the next version ahead of time and you’ll release a new version every year or two I would assume you’ll have some sort of a cycle and the size could get bigger or different you could build a table I mean so many different hardware profiles you could do and wow.

Brynn Putnam: 33:59 Yeah we launch a D&D product so a table table-top product comes out in July which obviously really lends itself to a larger you know a larger surface a larger map so I think we’re excited to see how that community receives it and if that’s positive there’s definitely an opportunity for a much larger board.

Jason Calacanis: 34:17 Did you ever play Dungeons and Dragons when you were young or were you…

Brynn Putnam: 34:21 You know I didn’t young but my son really got into it and so we had a DM who would come to our house with a bunch of kids and they would do sessions in our you know in our dining room and it’s been really fun to watch him just use his imaginations to create stories it’s incredible.

Jason Calacanis: 34:36 I remember when I was like 11 12 or 13 growing up in Brooklyn and we would play Sunday nights and I would just be counting the hours I would wake up thinking about playing Dungeons and Dragons on a Sunday morning and then we got together at like 3 or 4 o’clock for this Dungeons and Dragons game I would just be on pins and needles I can’t wait to play kind of like poker now like if I’m going to go to Commerce to play poker I’m going to play poker in a game all this talk with my friend Sky and we would be at work 20 years ago and thinking about going to the casino in LA Hollywood Park down in Inglewood and he’d be like texting me and we’d be like oh two more hours to go and we can go to the casino and play poker and learn you know strategies there’s something just great about playfulness and my lord what a brilliant idea and man if I had a nickel for every founder that came through Stanford MIT or Juilliard and the dance program it’s like seems to be the three major paths to being a successful founder it’s either you’re a scientist from MIT GSB or a ballet dancer those seem to be the three big funnels and now you’re one of one from ballet…

Brynn Putnam: 35:44 I’ve been loving my any any dancer I’ve ever hired has been incredible success so it’s been number one on my hiring criteria any ballerina out there love hiring dancers.

Jason Calacanis: 35:54 Hiring? Really? They seem they seem to be a bit obsessive yeah? Like and resilient and deal they’re able to deal with pain… It seems like an incredibly painful thing to do.

Brynn Putnam: 36:03 You’ll run through walls, so it’s a good fit for startups.

Jason Calacanis: 36:07 All right. And now, is this back… I have to ask. Is this background… are you in Paris right now? Is it a fake background, or do you have an extremely cool bistro office that looks like it’s fake?

Brynn Putnam: 36:20 No, I’m… I’m in New York, so just… just a wall.

Jason Calacanis: 36:25 Just… it looks like… you might be in a Parisian cafe. Uh, listen, I’m ordering one like literally when I get off this… actually I don’t even have to do that. I have people. Hey, can somebody buy me one of these and ship it to the ranch? I’m going on this great vacation with my kids and I’m like thinking of things to do in between going to the Louvre and getting a croque madame. You know, I want to sit in the park or do something at night in Hawaii or in Paris or you know, two of our destinations this summer and this is like the perfect thing to travel with.

Brynn Putnam: 36:54 Yep.

Jason Calacanis: 36:55 And man, a larger version, ooh, for like Dungeons and Dragons, that would really be cool. Um, you should look at the poker table space. There’s like… anybody who’s into poker buys a- a specific poker table, like there’s the octagon one, there’s the nine seat one, and like you can get them all customized and stuff like that. And there are some Dungeons and Dragons and board game ones, I think people are going to want like… uh, there’ll be an aftermarket. You were talking about like accessories?

Brynn Putnam: 37:31 Really, lux- lux tables. Yeah, embedded.

Jason Calacanis: 37:34 There’s gonna be some- you know, some idiot whale like me is gonna be like ‘Is there a thousand dollar version or a two thousand dollar version that make all the kids in the neighborhood want to come over and play with my daughters?’. That’s what I’m always trying to do is have our house be the hub. Like I- I want the version that’s like absurdly large and all the kids can’t wait to come over.

Brynn Putnam: 37:50 I love it. I love it.

Jason Calacanis: 37:52 Yeah. All right, listen. Continued success. Everybody go to board.fun, is that it? Board.fun?

Brynn Putnam: 37:58 Board.fun.

Jason Calacanis: 38:00 And a fun- uh, what a fun domain name. I didn’t know .fun existed. It’s the first startup I’ve ever heard. Listen, continued success with this and everybody go buy one.

Brynn Putnam: 38:09 Thank you, appreciate it.

Jason Calacanis: 38:11 My lord. Uh, it is so great to see all these great entrepreneurs making new products and uh, a lot of lessons there from today’s interviews for founders. Number one, uh, really understanding your customer and finding spaces where maybe it’s not clearly defined, which means idiot VCs or entitled VCs. The- the issue with venture capitalists in a lot of cases, not all, and- and you know, people like to dig on VCs which is kind of lame in and of itself because they dedicate their lives to supporting founders and getting a bunch of capital from around the world and providing it, so it should be a little more symbiotic and there should be a- a love of VCs and, you know, the part they provide in the ecosystem. But there is a valid criticism that if it doesn’t fit into an existing TAM, very hard for- I think some young inexperienced VCs to understand this. When you look at these two companies, like online tutor doesn’t exist, digital board game doesn’t exist, and the people who like the existing board games hate this, and the, you know, serious gamers, it’s not serious enough, and the Dungeons and Dragons people, they think it’s sacrilege. You have to ignore all that, and you have to ignore people who are trying to create a TAM for something that doesn’t exist in the world. The TAM for Airbnb was basically zero, they induced a market to exist. The TAM for ride sharing, the TAM for eBay, you know, eBay was like flea markets, but you couldn’t really assess it to flea markets because it was global. All of this is to say, listen to your customers and build a product that delights them and everything will be fine. High order lessons here.

Alex Wilhelm: 39:53 Hey everybody, welcome back to TWiST, my name is Alex. Now, if you’re watching this show, listening to it, I presume you are interested in technology and that means you know about great human projects like the Concorde, the world’s first supersonic passenger jet. Now, that’s pretty far in the past, but some companies are trying to bring it back. One of which is called Boom, had them on the show a couple times. They want to build the modern supersonic passenger jet. But what if you wanted to go faster and with fewer people? That’s what Hermeus is working on. They’re trying to build a hypersonic autonomous jet, and hypersonic means five times the speed of sound. So we’re not just going over the limit by a little bit, we’re blowing past it. I wanted to figure out how they’re building this, what technology still needs to be put together, when it’s coming to market, what the use cases are, and also how much more money do they need? So please join me in welcoming to the show its co-founder and chairman, AJ Piplica. AJ, how you doing?

AJ Piplica: 40:43 Great Alex, happy to be here.

Alex Wilhelm: 40:51 And just because we can’t start anywhere else, you are currently on camera and you’re in front of what appear to be a lot of truss cranes. So, where are we and what’s being built behind you?

AJ Piplica: 41:08 Yeah, I’m in our factory here in Atlanta, Georgia, and behind me right now is our Quarterhorse Mark 2.2 airplane, so it is our second supersonic jet that the company’s built. Should be out of here hopefully in the next few weeks.

Alex Wilhelm: 41:22 I can’t wait. I’m actually literally counting down until the news about that. But look, look AJ, I want to get to the entire Quarterhorse program and the recent iterative and impressive progress the company has made, but I think what we should do is set kind of the North Star, what you’re building towards, and then we’ll go back to the technology and how fast you’re progressing. So maybe the thing to understand is, what is Darkhorse, which is what you’re building towards, and why is it an exciting and worthy technology project?

AJ Piplica: 41:33 Sure. So, Darkhorse is a hypersonic reusable aircraft, faster than the SR-71, smaller than the SR-71 with no person on board. So as you can imagine, you know, put that in the hands of our military leaders, the ability to operate basically with impunity in almost any airspace in the world. That is the type of asymmetric advantage that our Air Force and our allied partners are used to having. You know, we’ve had that type of advantage for many years through stealth technology and precision-guided weapons and kinds of things. Um, but as we look forward into the future of modern warfare and, uh, especially things over very long distances, dealing with adversaries like China, uh, being able to fly very far, very fast, uh, and efficiently is an important piece of that because it allows you to stay alive. Um, and oh by the way, don’t put your airmen at risk, uh, by putting them in harm’s way. So, um, yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 42:23 I mean, not to be rude about it, but we’ve seen a number of, uh, let’s call them high-profile military aircraft crashes lately. And it would be great if instead of seeing people pass away, that no one got hurt. That would be a dramatic upgrade. The unmanned element of this is very interesting to me because when I think about going faster, I think about the need to make even quicker decisions. And on one hand, it seems like it’d be a great time to have a human there so they can drive the plane. But on the other hand, at that kind of speed, I wonder if humans are even fast enough in reactions. So why, why is it useful to have this be an uncrewed, uh, aerial system and not keep the humans out of this?

AJ Piplica: 42:58 Yeah, so I mean I’ll give you a couple relatively recent, um, you know, pieces of news. You know, we had two F-15s shot down over Iran, um, you know, created a, a really difficult search and rescue operation that thankfully was, was wildly successful. Um, but imagine where we would be today in the negotiations if that wasn’t successful and if, if those pilots were captured and, you know, became POWs. I mean, a POW being captured from an airplane getting shot down is almost the whole reason the SR-71 existed in the first place because Gary Powers got shot down in the U-2. Um, and then, you know, same kind of thing with the, um, you know, the helicopter pilots that were rescued by, um, by an uncrewed, uh, system from Scyronix…

Alex Wilhelm: 43:37 Scyronix. I love that company.

AJ Piplica: 43:39 Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah. Love what Dino’s doing there. But, you know, as you look at the, the modern battlefield, be it, you know, Ukraine or, you know, the conflict in Iran, unmanned systems are by all means the future of, of warfare.

Alex Wilhelm: 43:52 Yeah, so for sure. But when I think about Ukraine, I’m thinking about FPV drones and trailing fiber optic cables, so that way they have, you know, low latency, 100 percent availability steering ability. When you’re going Mach 5, it’s a little bit trickier. So, uh, these systems, are they going to be entirely, uh, autonomously driven or will there be a human somewhere in a bunker or a, a crate with a stick?

AJ Piplica: 44:11 No, they’ll, they’ll be uncrewed. I mean, they’ll, they’ll fly the way that, you know, rockets fly today. Rockets fly very fast, um, in the atmosphere on their way up and on their way down and they do that with no human pilot in the loop whatsoever. Um, now, how they fly is a little bit different. They, they adjust to their environments, you know, within some constraints. Um, you know, modern aerial warfare is, is a bit more challenging and, and that’s why I think you see the type of investment that you see the US Air Force making, um, in its collaborative combat aircraft program, you know, on the software side, um, especially, um, you know, to create, uh, autonomy capabilities that can actually be applied to real airplanes out in, in a real combat. So, um, yeah, I, I do not expect there to be pilots in the loop. Uh, maybe decision makers on the loop, but they’re not there flying the airplanes, they’re, they’re making high-level command and control decisions.

Alex Wilhelm: 45:00 The rocket analogy is very interesting because earlier you called it a reusable aircraft and I’m like of course it’s reusable it’s an aircraft not a rocket and you’re like it’s just like a rocket actually. So we’re kind of between the two it feels in a way because we’ve taken out the humans and we’ve taken away the human control which smells like a rocket but it definitely looks like a plane and it flies like a plane so it kind of walks talks and quacks like a duck. Maybe we need kind of a middle category that’s not just like drone or jet maybe you’re inventing something like a third way if you will.

AJ Piplica: 45:31 Maybe, you know, I always have fights with people on the internet about what’s an airplane and what is not. Um, you know, I think we’re all very eager here to break some records around airplanes, you know the SR-71 speed record is the one that we all see in the headlines. But yeah I mean there are a lot of fundamental differences there. You know like we flew rockets before we flew supersonic jets. Like the V2 flew before we flew a supersonic… we flew a supersonic rocket plane in the… the X-1 was the first aircraft or vehicle to break the sound barrier and that was powered by a rocket because it’s easier to do that in a rocket. So I think it just underscores the challenge and difficulty in building a supersonic jet-powered aircraft. It’s tough, there are not that many companies out there that have been able to do it.

Alex Wilhelm: 46:19 We’re going to talk about how you’re making it go so fast in just a second. But I’m thinking about applications of this because clearly as someone who grew up playing you know Jane’s Flight Simulator and taking a couple hours in private planes and such—

AJ Piplica: 46:31 I think I only flew the A-10.

Alex Wilhelm: 46:37 Well, that’s because it has the world’s best gun in it! Yes. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, look at the A-10 Warthog and two things about it you need to know: one, look at how the pilot is protected in their little cocoon of metal and then look at the gun in the front and look at the stats about how fast it can fire and the amount of lead it can put downrange. It’s tremendous.

AJ Piplica: 46:48 Notice, this is like literally an airplane designed around a gun. Like the main… the nose landing gear is off-center because of the gun. So yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 46:58 Well the gun’s huge! I mean, okay, people joke that Russia is an oil company with an economy attached. I think really the A-10 is essentially a rotary cannon with some wings bolted on. But these things look tough. Now, A-10s: slow, close to the ground, you know I mean these are anti-tank aircraft essentially. You’re building kind of the opposite but I’m curious outside the military context what we could do with this. Now I started off by bringing up Boom because everyone kind of gets that. Uh, I want to go to Paris fast, I’m going to get in a Boom, off I go, viva. But when I think about what you can do with an unmanned hypersonic plane like I mean you could bring like a donor kidney anywhere in the world in like some small amount of time, I’m not going to do the math in my head because I’ll get it wrong. But to me it seems like there’s a lot of applications for what you’re building that are possible if we can get the per-flight cost down. So AJ, I’m really curious, do you see Darkhorse and other similar flight platforms that you’re going to build down the road becoming cost possible for non-defense, non-military application?

AJ Piplica: 48:00 Yeah, I certainly do. There are commercial applications down the road, you know, cargo is the like natural entry point number one because you don’t need to put people on the platform. So like, you know, you’re still flying over people, you’re still flying over, you know, long distances, so there’s certainly an element to safety there, but you know, because you’ve built this military business along the way, it’s not your first rodeo, it’s not the first iteration of the aircraft that’s going out getting, getting certified. So, um, there’s, there’s a handful of things that like to fly around the world very quickly. I, I looked this up a long time ago, it’s pretty funny like the, the things that people overnight, uh, around the world. It’s like, somehow still like legal documents. I don’t know how that’s still a thing and we haven’t got rid of that, but apparently it is.

Alex Wilhelm: 48:39 People say DocuSign is just a vibe coded app with a big sales force, but no, friends, because people are still overnighting documents, so there’s that.

AJ Piplica: 48:45 Yeah, so there’s, there’s that. Uh, flowers and lobsters. These are like the things that people ship around the world and, and they want to, you know, move around more quickly. So, great. And like the thing that’s the really, I think the real way to think about, you know, Mach 4, Mach 5 travel, like it really makes the world to make it sub-regional, you know, across the Atlantic Ocean in 90 minutes, that’s the same time from like Miami to New York today. Um, so you’re, you’re really taking these economies and you’re bringing them closer together. And any time in history that you’ve done that, uh, by whatever technological means, be it, you know, steam power and shipping or railroads or the high, the interstate system in the US, um, it’s always driven economic growth. So.

Alex Wilhelm: 49:29 Trans-Siberian Railway, I mean, just the advent of containerization as a way to move goods more quickly with easier transfer. I mean, faster equals better and cheaper for everybody. And that’s why, like, even though we’re going to talk probably mostly in a defense context today, I wanted to put that seed in people’s heads because I think that what you’re building, and I know it’s hard, you’re not done yet, but once you get it up there and you’re ready for the second version, I’m optimistic that you’ll find some cool, uh, use cases there. Now, uh, you hinted at rockets are good for going fast. But you guys aren’t actually doing that. Instead, you’ve built Chimera, which is a great name for this because it’s kind of a two-in-one system. On one hand, you have the turbojet, which I think people probably understand. And then here’s the, here’s the thing that blows my mind: it converts into a ramjet, uh, mid-flight, and allows you to go even faster. I’m going to pull up a picture of this that you guys put out, but explain to me, one, how hard this was to do, and then two, what it, what it unlocks for your program that off-the-shelf engines wouldn’t have been able to bring to the company.

AJ Piplica: 50:00 Yeah, so in terms of the challenges associated with a turbine-based combined cycle engine, the fancy term, uh, that they, that they use out in, out in the Air Force for these things. Um, number one, you have to get an off-the-shelf existing gas turbine engine up to about Mach 3. So you have to get it to go maybe 30 to 50% faster than it was originally designed to go. Um, and we’ve done that through developing a pre-cooler, which cools down the air that’s coming in so that the thing doesn’t melt, um, and you get some pretty good performance out of those, those high speeds out of the gas turbine. And then the other piece you got…

Alex Wilhelm: 50:56 AJ, can I ask a question about that? So, uh, you’re cooling down the… The air intake because at those speeds the air gets kind of compressed and therefore heats up so you have to effectively air-condition the air before you let it on fire.

AJ Piplica: 51:09 Yes, a little bit counterintuitive. So at Mach 3, if you take air that’s flying at Mach 3 and you slow it down to a stop, which happens at the front face of a gas turbine engine, that air will heat up to about 800 degrees Fahrenheit, which will, you know, melt aluminum and lots of other things. So like, yeah, it doesn’t work super well when your engine’s just like fragging out along the way up there. Not to mention the performance that you get because the way turbojets create thrust is they raise the temperature of this high-pressure flow and then exhaust it through a nozzle. The temperature coming in is already pretty hot. You’re not getting as much, you know, bang for your buck in terms of generating thrust. So, yeah, those two big pieces of that.

Alex Wilhelm: 51:49 Again, once you’re over Mach 3, then the real magic can begin.

AJ Piplica: 51:52 Yes, that’s right. So, actually, I think it’s much more simple. So like a ramjet is literally the simplest air-breathing propulsion device you can think of. It is the first thing in the textbook. Literally, you open the air-breathing propulsion textbook, it’s ramjets before anything else because they’re literally a tube with fuel injectors and a nozzle. That’s it.

Alex Wilhelm: 52:13 It’s a potato cannon that goes very fast.

AJ Piplica: 52:17 Yeah. So you’re using, instead of mechanical compressor blades to compress the air, you’re using shockwaves, which naturally occur when you’re flying faster than the speed of sound. Those do the compression for you. And because you have no mechanical compressor, you don’t need a mechanical turbine to generate the power to drive that compressor. So you remove those two components from the system and there you go.

Alex Wilhelm: 52:40 Kind of. You kind of, you don’t actually remove them from the system, you just route the air around the original turbine, which to me sounds difficult because you’re talking about a lot of volume and a lot of inertia moving very quickly. So, one, has anyone done this sort of hybrid turbojet-ramjet before, not just in a lab but I mean actually out in the sky? And how long did it take to figure out how to swap between modes?

AJ Piplica: 53:04 Yep. So, it’s never been done in the sky. It’s been done in the lab. Lockheed and Aerojet Rocketdyne had a program that did it. Took them like six years and I don’t know, like 250 million dollars to do it. But the closest thing that is existed and actually flown would be the J58 engine, which powered the SR-71. They bypassed some of the turbine but not all of it.

Alex Wilhelm: 53:22 Well, we all know the SR-71 famously worked, so I’m glad you’re barking up the right tree. Now, Chimera, as far as I understand it, has reached the point in which you have these in the air, yes?

AJ Piplica: 53:35 No, we haven’t flown them yet. So we’ve tested them on the ground at full scale. The airplane that you see behind me is the first one where we will fly the pre-cooler. So we’ll do that later this year. And then pretty soon we’ll be flying the ramjet piece too.

Alex Wilhelm: 53:47 All right. So then let’s, because this is a little technical and I’ve already gotten points of it wrong, let’s go back to the beginning and talk about your Quarterhorse program, which is I think a fair way to say it is the iterative process by which you’re adding complexity to your… Kind of smaller sized jets to work your way up to Darkhorse down the road.

AJ Piplica: 54:05 Yeah, that’s right. Quarter Horse is the program by which we’re de-risking the technology for long duration high speed flight. So, um, yeah, we do that in an iterative way building roughly one new airplane per year that de-risks the next step. You know, famous adage from Kelly Johnson, you know, famous founder of Skunkworks and greatest aircraft designer ever to live: one miracle per program.

Alex Wilhelm: 54:25 You’re doing like one miracle per year though, AJ. I mean, that seems like a little bit more.

AJ Piplica: 54:31 Yeah, but like, Kelly Johnson put 41 aircraft into production in his 40-year career. So, like, we’re not—like we still have a ways to go to meet what, you know, the ideal that they set back then. But, um, yeah, you know, like the way we set up the program was like step one: teach rocket people how to build airplanes. Um, that was the first piece because like there was nowhere we could hire from. Like where in the world could we hire people who had built a brand new airplane a year in their career today? Like, nowhere. They’re all dead. Like we used to do this back in the 50s and 60s, but they’re all dead.

Alex Wilhelm: 55:03 So the inverse of Boeing today essentially.

AJ Piplica: 55:06 Yeah. Yes, exactly. Now, in the rocket world, they do this all the time. You know, this is exactly how SpaceX was built, rockets, spacecraft, satellites, um, you know, even you know over at Tesla with cars. Um, but we had to build that workforce and that—that discipline from scratch. So the first airplane that we built wasn’t even an airplane. It was a jet-powered go-kart. It was the size of our first airplane, but the goal was really just to drive around an Air Force runway at 50 miles an hour, um, and do it in a very short period of time. So that was the Quarter Horse Mark 0. Um, and then next step was, okay, now go fly. Um, so that was Quarter Horse Mark 1, um, which flew in May of last year. Um, fly is a—we like I think skirted the definition of flight as best as we could. It was about a 30-second flight, 50 feet off the ground, but it achieved the outcome of: fly the airplane, um, and get all the approvals and everything required.

Alex Wilhelm: 55:57 Okay, so that was the earliest stages. Now, I know that the Quarter Horse program in its 2, 2.1 edition is actually breaking the sound barrier. So what’s the latest flight you’ve done and then what’s the next flight you have coming up?

AJ Piplica: 56:08 Yeah, so the last flight we did with Quarter Horse 2.1 was its first supersonic flight. So that was achieved 364 days after Mark 1 flew. So less than a year. So kind of exactly hitting that de-risk one new thing on an annual basis. Um, the next things that we’ll want to do is we’ll want to push the speed up higher. We hit about Mach 1.21, so want to get that up a little bit higher, maybe 1.5, a little bit more north of that. Um, and then, um, we—we’ve already integrated what we call a weapons rack. So these are the—the racks that you start integrating stores and missiles and things on. So, um, that’s been integrated, want to start flying with those in the relatively near term and start dropping things from the airplane.

Alex Wilhelm: 57:00 A question: so everything that I know about ordnance for jets is so much slower than the speeds we’re talking about here. So, can you rack mount, let’s just pick a missile we all know, Sidewinders, on the wings? Or do they go in a bay because we’re going so fast that you can’t afford the drag on the actual wings?

AJ Piplica: 57:16 Yeah, so one of the nice things about having an F100 engine in there is that we have an immense amount of thrust. Um, so that allows us to carry a lot of things externally still at these high speeds. So, uh, you know, the aircraft will be capable of releasing stores like an AMRAAM. So AMRAAM’s a bit bigger than a, than a Sidewinder, um, but, you know, the longest range air-to-air weapon that we have from high speed and high altitude. Um, and what do you get when you release these weapons from those conditions? They tend to go a lot further. Um, and that’s a pretty big value proposition of these types of aircraft. Um, you know, the ability to extend the range of existing and new weapons, um, because like the name of the game, um, whether it’s like the Ukrainian conflict or out in the Pacific, is range. Like, if…

Alex Wilhelm: 58:01 It’s just like boxing. Like, if you got a longer arm, you’re probably gonna win. Same thing goes with basketball and defense. So let’s talk about range, because I’m really curious about what you think you’re going to get. So let’s go to the future. We’ve handled all the yearly miracles. We have Quarterhorse, the Air Force or the Navy or whomever is going to put it into use. How far can it go on one tank of whatever magic juice it’s going to run on?

AJ Piplica: 58:26 Haha. So the Mark 2 will have a range, it’s actually pretty similar to existing fighter jets, maybe a little bit more, but nothing wild. Um, the, the big thing is the range that you get out of the weapons that it can launch. Um, so, you know, existing weapons, double-ish the range, maybe more. Um, and then we’ve got some other things up our sleeve that go beyond that that I can’t really talk about just yet. So, we’ll have to talk about that next time we come on.

Alex Wilhelm: 58:47 So if this thing is a platform to bring munitions, especially missiles, closer to potential targets, does that mean that it’s really just a reusable first stage? This is—I’m actually legitimately, I’m not sure if you’re building—well, you’re not, but you are, but you aren’t, but you definitely are, but definitely maybe you might be. This is weird. I thought I had your company kind of figured out before the show, but now I’m actually more confused than I was before. Okay, well, anyways, I’ll learn more as you guys keep building. Um, now Quarterhorse 2.3, I think you’re going to bump up the speed to like Mach 3?

AJ Piplica: 59:13 Exactly. Yep. So that one will not only have the precooler in it, it’ll also be—it’ll also have a high-temperature airframe. So these airplanes, this one behind me and the first one that we flew, they’re all aluminum. Um, so the, the next ones will be high-temperature metallic that can take the temperatures up in, up in those conditions, um, in, you know, also have all the fuel that’s needed to get up there. So, yeah, big thing there is get up into the Mach 3 range where you can start a ramjet engine.

Alex Wilhelm: 59:40 And then, I’m just going to stick with your numerical nomenclature here, does Quarterhorse 2.4 bring Chimera up to the clouds?

AJ Piplica: 59:50 So, uh, actually Mark 3 will be Chimera. So the Mark 2 series is just the F100 plus the precooler from a propulsion perspective, and then we move on to the next kind of family, um, still similar scale, but now we bring in the full Chimera engine with the Ramjet and the precooler and the gas turbine together, but the airframe itself is actually pretty much the same as 2.3. So that step is actually quite small from, you know, the aircraft that we will fly next year without the Ramjet to the one that we will fly with Chimera maybe a year or so later, um, it’s not that big of a difference.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:00:17 And then after that, once we get the new airframe that can take higher temperatures, once we get the the Ramjet in place that can go even faster, what’s left to sort out before you can start to build, um, let’s just call it 1.0 the final production version?

AJ Piplica: 1:00:32 Yeah, so, um, for the kind of Darkhorse style concept like, you know, high-speed airplane, the the next big thing and kind of the last big thing is long duration high-speed flight. Um, and that’s the single most challenging bit of the whole thing. Can you fly for long time at, you know, Mach 3 to 5, handle the thermal environment in a closed loop, yeah, and then reuse it like quickly and, you know, for many many cycles. That’s the the last chunk.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:00:58 So, when I think about thermal issues, I I think mostly about kind of like orbital reentry. Um, how good of an analogy is that to the heat that we’re talking about when we’re going Mach 3 to Mach 5 for one of your aircraft?

AJ Piplica: 1:01:13 It’s a great question. So, I would say it is an equally challenging problem, but the nature of the problem is flipped. So for orbital reentry, you spend a very short period of time, like you’re only in these high temperature conditions for maybe a few minutes as you’re screaming down through the atmosphere,

Alex Wilhelm: 1:01:31 Right.

AJ Piplica: 1:01:32 which means like the total heat load, like the total amount of heat that comes into the system is not that bad, but the peak heating, the peak temperature that you have to take is ridiculous.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:01:39 But if you’re gonna fly, you’re gonna keep building up heat constantly at that level, so you have to have simply an amazing way to dump heat out of the aircraft.

AJ Piplica: 1:01:46 Exactly. Or avoid picking it up.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:01:48 That’s right. Which which way are you guys going? Dump or just don’t pick it up?

AJ Piplica: 1:01:50 There are lots of ways to do it and likely it’ll be a combination of the two. Um, so, yeah, you gotta you gotta manage it, um, once it’s on board, once it’s in the system and you want to keep it out of the system as as best you can too. So, um, yeah.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:02:01 Could the precooler precool the plane?

AJ Piplica: 1:02:03 Uh, that would be maybe…

Alex Wilhelm: 1:02:05 I don’t know, you have a big old cooler in there already, like can’t you just plug that into the, you know…

AJ Piplica: 1:02:09 It would be, I think it would be like pretty inefficient to do that for long periods of of time. I mean it just takes a ton of energy to do that. So, um, like you could, I don’t know that it would make the the right system level trade though.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:02:21 All right, I want to talk about a couple of other things. Um, first of all, you guys recently raised a $350 million series C led by Khosla, congrats by the way.

AJ Piplica: 1:02:29 Thank you.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:02:30 Um, quite quite a lot of capital, glad to see that venture funds can kind of put up that kind of funding. I’m curious about if you look a couple years down the road if venture capital is going to have enough muscle to provide what you guys need. My guess is that this is going to be an expensive project to get over the finish line, which is kind of a compliment because I think it’s worth it. Uh, but are you guys going to look at other capital sources as you grow or will venture capital kind of take you all the way to church?

AJ Piplica: 1:02:54 Yeah, I think the way we’re building this company, you can build it privately with sufficient access to capital. Capital’s flowing as is good. Today, we’ll do what we need to do. And I think a perfect example of that is like compare SpaceX and Anduril. You know, Anduril has raised, I think, like 11 billion dollars of equity financing in the private markets. So like, there’s plenty of capital out there for these types of businesses. But look at SpaceX. Prior to the IPO, they raised 10 billion dollars. Everything that they did, 10… and like how much of that was liquidity, not actually working capital. Like it’s insane the level of capital efficiency that that company has been able to create. And the way that they did it is because they effectively got their customer to pay for their R&D by paying them to fly rockets all the time. It’s like, how do you get the data to learn how to land a rocket? Well, you fly rockets a lot. Um, and you get your customers to pay for it. It’s the greatest hack in the book. Um, so for us, like we get paid to fly our airplanes by our customers all the time, which gives us the data that we need to move on to the next step and the next step and the next step. And that’ll be- it’ll be the same for production down the road. But like capital efficiency is the name of the game when you’re doing something this hard. So I don’t expect the numbers to be small, like there will be billions of dollars that we’ll want to raise. Um, but the revenue numbers that are coming alongside that, um, will be equal if not more. And I think that allows us to persist in the private markets much longer than, you know, you might otherwise be able to.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:04:14 I’m really glad to hear all of that. You also have some deals with the defense… oh, the DIU. The Defense Innovation Unit. Thank you. Sorry, my brain just… okay, so the DIU recently bumped up its contract with y’all, essentially as far as I can tell just to learn and de-risk hypersonic flight. Does that provide a… an equity-capital-like infusion into the company, or should I think about that deal as something entirely distinct from this part of the conversation?

AJ Piplica: 1:04:43 Yeah, I think- I think you look at that deal as we are monetizing the tech de-risking that we’re doing, um, you know, with the equity capital that we’ve raised. So we’re developing these products with private capital, and then all of the testing that we’re doing to expand the envelope and push beyond what’s been done before, that data’s very valuable. And we’re delivering that data to, you know, to the Department of War, um, under this contract, which is exactly the type of contract that SpaceX set up with NASA in the- like the original commercial orbital transportation services contract. And like, you know, I’ve literally like been walking around the Pentagon like a Jehovah’s Witness with like the- the report from that that says, ‘this is how you do this’. I’ve been doing this for, you know, almost eight years now. And now, like, you know, DIU and the Air Force, um, specifically, are starting to understand this. They’re starting to see the technical progress that’s being made and these like- the tiny, relatively tiny amount of capital that they’re having to put forward to do it. Um, and they’re- they’re seeing what happens. And like, you know, SpaceX wouldn’t exist without that deal. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:05:41 I- think about what… okay, look. I- I don’t want to cast, you know, stones or throw aspersions, but let’s make fun of Raytheon. Why not?

AJ Piplica: 1:05:47 Well, they’re an investor, so I- I won’t make fun of them too much.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:05:51 Uh, name- name a prime who hasn’t invested in you.

AJ Piplica: 1:05:54 That one. That one.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:05:56 That unnamed prime. Imagine how long Raytheon would have gotten this done in… Three days for five dollars, we all know it. But any other prime would have taken so much longer and so much more capital. I wonder if we just have a structural advantage for startups like you guys because you’re not, I don’t know exactly what their ills are other than, you know, inertia, organizational drift, lack of efficiency, poor incentives, etc. But like, it’s just so refreshing to hear that we’re going what feels like three times faster than we used to or five times faster for less money, AJ. Like, that is so jarring.

AJ Piplica: 1:06:26 Yeah. I mean, like, there is a reason there has not been a new fighter jet manufacturer or like large military aircraft manufacturer founded in this country since the 1950s. General Dynamics was the last one. And like Peter Thiel talked to Elon about this, you know, when he was thinking about investing in SpaceX and, you know, he was asking like, ‘Hey, like, you got this Tesla thing over here. Nobody started a successful US car company since when?’ And it was like, well, Jeep in 1941. And people, everybody saw that as like, oh, this is a reason not to do it. And yet the inverse is actually paradoxically the correct thing. This is the opportunity. If you’re willing to take the risk to try. And that’s what we’ve done here over the past, you know, seven and a half years and proved it out. And now I think we’ve got a pretty good moat for ourselves that we hope to continue building. But like, there’s no other help coming when it comes to aircraft production in this country. Like the F-22 and F-35, they each took 20 to 25 years to develop and like 30 and 60 billion dollars just for development.

Alex Wilhelm: 1:07:31 And then they cost gazillion dollars a piece and they can’t make more than two per year and… look, the F-22 Raptor is gorgeous. We can all agree it’s a beautiful plane that took too long to build and cost too much money. That’s why I’m excited about you guys. So AJ, I guess, we’ll have to have you back on every three to six months as you have new announcements, but I’m incredibly hyped and you’re building this here in the United States and I think your last couple of paragraphs are pretty much the distilled pitch for American Dynamism. So thank you for coming on and spreading the good word. Go fly, go faster, and then as soon as you have one with a seat, I volunteer as tribute.

AJ Piplica: 1:07:58 Perfect. We’ll- we’ll put a saddle on for you. How’s that?

Alex Wilhelm: 1:08:01 I’ll hang on to the freaking wing, dude. Let’s go. I- I like things that go fast in the sky. So I- I’m a natural fan. All right, this has been Twist. He’s AJ, the company is Hermeus. Check it out. We’ll see you all next time.