Love a good Qwick-y? Then this episode is for you. That is, restaurant staffing platform Qwick landed a $40 million round to take on the staffing woes of restaurants in the U.S. Not quite as exciting, the boys move on to AtlasJobs, which might make you long for 2009 (or 1999) all over again. Lastly, PaintJet takes aim at the $175 billion painting industry by taking people out of the equation and filling that void with a big-ass painting robot. Welcome to the metaverse, Dorothy! Plus, it's a double-LinkedIn shoutout session and the boys introduce a segment called "Slipping It In." Yeah, what could go wrong with that one?
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
INTRO (1s):
Hide your kids! Lock the doors! You're listening to HR’s most dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheeseman are here to punch the recruiting industry, right where it hurts! Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark, buckle up boys and girls, it's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel (23s):
Oh, yeah. Powerball Jackpot is now $1.5 billion. Value of tuning into this week's show? Priceless. Hi, boys and girls you're listening to the Chad and Cheese podcast. This is your co-host, Joel "Midterm election" Cheeseman.
Chad (40s):
And this is Chad "I'd forget my ass if it wasn't attached" Sowash.
Joel (44s):
And on this week's show, who's in the mood for a Qwick-y? Atlas Shrugs. And we paint it black. Let's do this.
Chad (57s):
So here I am listeners can hear. I don't have my podcast mic before, because I forgot it at our place in Cabanas.
Joel (1m 7s):
You forgot.
Chad (1m 9s):
Yes, Yes. Fucking stupid.
Joel (1m 11s):
Oh man. Oh man.
Chad (1m 13s):
I deserve that.
Joel (1m 14s):
Like I told you in, in the pre-show, you, you've lost that fireside chat feeling that you had, you have on most shows. It's a little hollow this week, but it's okay.
Chad (1m 26s):
Little hollow.
Joel (1m 27s):
I'll make up for the sexy with my own voice.
Chad (1m 30s):
Thank God. Thank God.
Joel (1m 32s):
So you're in Lisbon at this big ass show.
Chad (1m 34s):
Yes.
Joel (1m 35s):
I will interject that. It's cool how they're doing the vendor swap. Talk about that and whatever else takeaways you wanna share.
Chad (1m 43s):
Yeah. So if you go to the biggest conferences in our space, I mean, talk about Unleash and/or HR Tech, and then you think of how many startups they have in their startup booths. There are probably 50 times that here. Now saying that, this is a three day show and they change all of those booths out every day. That's how many fucking startups they're showcasing at this place. The other booths that are out there, like the Indeed Booth, which is just ridiculous, because they're all about wellbeing. They have nothing to do with wellbeing. But anyway, that's their marketing spiel. But these booths are freaking amazing.
Chad (2m 22s):
They've got VR all over the place, but to me, having that many fucking startups and then rolling through different ones every single day is just, it's amazing.
Joel (2m 31s):
Did you say VR? I think you did.
Chad (2m 37s):
Sexy Baby.
Joel (2m 39s):
All right man. You wanna do shoutouts?
Chad (2m 42s):
Shout outs!
Joel (2m 42s):
It's a LinkedIn heavy shout out this week. I'll go ahead and go first. So, you know, I love a good poll. Chad
Chad (2m 49s):
You're always on my poll.
Joel (2m 50s):
Yes. Did my poll reach you in Portugal this week? Did my pole get there this week? Anyway, we're all talking about Elon and Twitter and this week it was announced that Twitter will start charging $8 a month for the blue check and some other benefits like fewer ads and longer posts, et cetera. Well, I was curious how many in my network on LinkedIn would be willing to drop $8 a month for Twitter? Well, with over 500 people weighing in, which I was frankly a little surprised at, 90% said, No way, Jose, to Elon, they're not gonna pay $8 for Twitter or mostly anything for Twitter from what I got. Sounds like a disaster, right? Well, maybe, maybe not.
Joel (3m 31s):
Typical freemium models have five to 7% of its users who actually pay for it. And the ones who said yes on my poll, although I won't mention the names of who was on my poll, it was a large group of CEOs, entrepreneurs, VPs, people at in influential companies like Google and Uber. So if the cool kids do it, does it influence more to follow suit? Probably. Studies tell us worldwide, about 39% of LinkedIn users have paid for premium subscriptions at some point. So it's not crazy to think Twitter could at some point have 25% or so users paying for the service. We'll have to see.
Joel (4m 12s):
Chad, I'm curious, are you ready to drop $8 a month to Elon's Slush fund?
Chad (4m 18s):
No, not even close. Twitter has no to no value for me other than watching people get in food fights. That's it. I mean, literally there's not much interaction. Unless you get like into food fight events and then it happens. So, no, I just, not into it.
Joel (4m 36s):
Yeah, and they totally lost the big boot Latina and bug fight bus. They totally missed that. Miss that train. So that's my poll. Shout out for the day.
Chad (4m 46s):
There it is. So your LinkedIn poll to my LinkedIn audio event. Shout out. That's right. Kids where you can host live interactive conversations with people all over the world. Remember when Clubhouse was valued at about a gazillion dollars for like five minutes?
Joel (5m 5s):
I do.
Chad (5m 6s):
Twitter created Spaces, which actually allows you to record your audio events, which Stupid Ass Clubhouse wouldn't do. But where is Clubhouse today? I don't even know if it's still alive and kicking. Anyways, shout out to LinkedIn for creating their very own clubhouse knockoff.
Joel (5m 24s):
Just a year too late.
Chad (5m 25s):
Yeah. Whatever happened to LinkedIn podcast? They were talking about that.
Joel (5m 29s):
Yeah, I mean, I, I talked to all about their live video product.
Chad (5m 33s):
Yeah.
Joel (5m 33s):
That they should be launching that. And with Microsoft having, you know, a video product themselves, why that hadn't integrated into LinkedIn.
Chad (5m 42s):
Weird.
Joel (5m 42s):
Our friend Hung Lee is big on videos, but you have to integrate it with, you have to integrate it with other services. Yeah. Strikingly our favorite porn star is good at the video services on LinkedIn. Yeah. He's got a few poles of his own, by the way. Yeah. I don't know. I guess what you're saying is, unless somebody writes a really big check, you're not gonna hear the Chad and Cheese show on LinkedIn livestream audio events anytime soon.
Chad (6m 7s):
No.
Joel (6m 8s):
Alrighty. By the way, I deleted Clubhouse a long time ago. I got sick of getting alerts about people talking about stuff I didn't really care about.
Chad (6m 14s):
Yes.
Joel (6m 14s):
And I didn't really have time to just drop everything I'm doing and listen to what they were talking about.
Chad (6m 20s):
I have to say that Twitter spaces, which is kinda weird because the news organizations hold spaces and those are actually pretty good because they have reporters that are on there and they go into the statistics and actual data. So I think spaces, depending on what spaces you jump into, are pretty good. The question is, will LinkedIn be able to pull that off? I they haven't been able to pull anything else off. So
Joel (6m 42s):
Yeah, you need to be able to schedule them, be able to sign up to attend, get an alert when they start and then, and then archive them to listen later. The whole sort of, it's live now listen in or you miss it seems really antiquated to me. Seems really stupid. Yep.
Chad (6m 58s):
We're in a Netflix society kids. It's all about on demand.
Joel (7m 1s):
That's right. And you know what's on demand, Chad?
Chad (7m 5s):
Free stuff.
Joel (7m 5s):
The booze giveaways from Chad and Cheese. That's right. We can announce the latest winners of our booze giveaways. Pretty exciting this month. So our beer winner actually went to someone named Michelle Beer. Go figure. She was happy about some free brew from us. As everyone knows, our free beer is sponsored by Aspen Tech Labs. Thanks to them. Our whiskey winner of the month goes to Warren Sukernek. I don't know. That sounds a little naughty to me. Maybe that's a porn name too. Anyway, he's at Flo Career who we featured on the show before. He got some free whiskey from us that's sponsored by our friends at Textkernel and Rum with Plum.
Joel (7m 49s):
We're doing a free birthday bottle of Good Rum to anyone who celebrates a birthday. And this month our friend Mason Wong at Lyft. It's a nice premium bottle of rum from our friends at Plum. If you can't win liquor kids, you're probably gonna get a t-shirt from us. Head out to chadcheese.com/free. Everyone seeing the shirts on social media, getting rave reviews from people. People love how soft and warm. It's like a hug from us, Chad. Everyone loves it, but you can't get it unless you go to Chadcheese.com/free.
Chad (8m 25s):
Yes.
Joel (8m 26s):
And sign up.
Chad (8m 27s):
And those t-shirts kids are brought to you by our friends over at JobGet. That's right. They're getting all the love at every event. You see the ChadCheese T-shirts, you see JobGet on the way out. It's good. It's love.
Joel (8m 40s):
Yep.
Chad (8m 41s):
It's soft. It's cozy. It's ChadCheese.
Joel (8m 44s):
Yeah. And speaking of Mason Wong's birthday, let's get into who else celebrates a birthday.
Chad (8m 49s):
Yes.
Joel (8m 50s):
This week in addition to Mason Wong, Elizabeth Hill, Dale Grahan, Graham Ferguson, Louis Gleixner. I'm gonna guess on that one. Jarvis Karel, David Roddy, David Jorge, Shally Steckerl, Libby Sartain and Chloe Rada. I'll celebrate another trip around the sun this week. Happy birthday kids.
Chad (9m 12s):
Love it.
Joel (9m 12s):
You're in Lisbon.
Chad (9m 13s):
Yes.
Joel (9m 13s):
I'm going to California in a couple weeks for the iCIMS Inspire conference.
Chad (9m 20s):
Ooh. Fancy.
Joel (9m 21s):
Some of our friends will be there. A lot of stuff going on at iCIMS. Looking forward to digging into that and interviewing some folks maybe to find out the ins and outs of what's going on at iCIMS these days.
Chad (9m 35s):
Yep. I'm gonna be in London for the TA Tech Business Accelerator on November 23rd. That's right. Kids, I'm gonna be doing Thanksgiving in London. So if you haven't got your tickets, get your tickets and buy us a drink. Julie and I will be there and we will be more than happy to sit down, tilt one back and who knows, maybe even get a little stuffing with you.
Joel (9m 58s):
Yeah, I was gonna say, so assuming our American friends don't know that there's no Thanksgiving in London or England. What's the dinner plan? A little shepherd's pie. I mean, are you gonna try to find some turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes? What's the plan for the meal on Thanksgiving in London?
Chad (10m 15s):
Well just good food. London has good food, so we're gonna go find good food and have our Thanksgiving Day. I mean, it could be Indian restaurant, Chinese restaurant. Could be very, you know, Christmas story where we have duck. Who knows?
Joel (10m 29s):
London has okay food. Let's be honest. It's okay.
Chad (10m 33s):
It's okay.
Joel (10m 34s):
But what's better than okay is our Fantasy Football league. Week eight of fantasy football with Chad and Cheese is in the books. Everybody here's your leaderboard. Powered by our good friends at Factory Fix. Number one to last place goes like this. Chris “Who’s Da” Mannion, Serge “Penalty Box” Boudreau. Matt “Western Kentucky” Hill-toppers, Joel “It’s all Gouda” Cheesman, Chad Sowash “Your Hands”, Christy Kelling “in the name of” (uh-uh-uh!), Dennis “Kucinich” Tupper, Jose “One-Eyed” Wilkie, Jason “Kidd” Putnam, Mike “Ditka” Schaefer, James “Dean” Gilliam, Dan Shoemaker’s “Mark” Mark round out the top 12 in our fantasy football league.
Chad (11m 27s):
Wow!
Joel (11m 27s):
Congratulations everybody. Unless your name is Dan Shoemaker. Chad, you're clawing your way back in. I like it. I like it.
Chad (11m 33s):
I'm on my way up. So congratulations to all of those listeners that are out there that can now listen to Chad and Cheese. In German, in Spanish, in Portuguese, in French. That's right. We have four new languages!
Joel (11m 53s):
Oooo French!
Chad (11m 54s):
All by Veritone. No shit. They cloned our voices. Veritone cloned our voices, then they translated the voices and we are working with it because it's not perfect kids. You gotta give us a minute. We are working with, cuz there's so many nuances from language to language, right? So we're working with them on speed, on delivery, on a lot of different things. But we're really excited. We have two podcasts that are out a trailer and two podcasts. Go find 'em on Spotify, on Apple. They're getting distributed to all of those massive platforms and we're excited. I don't know how many people have actually reached out and said, this is fucking witchcraft. And it's awesome.
Joel (12m 31s):
I love it. I get a hot bath drawn, I get some candles, a little, little set, and I listen to us in Spanish. It's very relaxing. Very sexy. Very sexy.
Chad (12m 48s):
Yes.
Joel (12m 48s):
Who's in the mood for a Qwick-y?
Chad (12m 51s):
Me? Me.
Joel (12m 51s):
That's right. Staffing platform Quick, that's Q W I C K, who describes itself as the leading staffing as a service platform that connects service industry professionals directly with food and beverage shifts in real time, has announced the closure of its 40 million series B investment round. This brings the grand total to $59.1 million for the startup founded in 2017. The Arizona based company will use the financing to step up growth, both in its existing markets and by rollout to new cities. It will also swell head count. I love a good swollen head count, you know Chad. At its Phoenix headquarters and in market specific locations around the US.
Joel (13m 34s):
So far this year, the company has expanded from 13 to 23 active markets, more than doubled its client roster, increased its worker pull by nearly 70% and growed head count by 123%.
Chad (13m 49s):
OOO!
Joel (13m 49s):
Chad, you know, a thing or two about Quickies? What's your take on Qwik?
Chad (13m 53s):
What is the definition of a Qwick-y? I mean, is it, how long anyway? Well, we'll get back
Joel (13m 58s):
Before the kids wake up, that's the definition. Or the parents wake up,
Chad (14m 3s):
Get it done. Yeah. So if you're Randstad right now, the number one staffing company in the world, are you trying to sell Monster and then buy platforms like Qwick? I think you'd be dumb not to because these types of platforms are the future of staffing. Now I understand Qwick is focused on hospitality and Randstad does more than just hospitality, but it seems pretty fucking simple. Buy the tech, start with hospitality and then expand. And the beauty of expansion Qwick, remember the beauty of expansion is that you can keep it in hospitality. Focus on that and expand geographically. Get that bigger footprint that way and/or you can start to add new industries like tech, right?
Chad (14m 48s):
Staffing's biggest expenditure is headcount. How many heads do we need to source, place and pay the talent? Everything scales faster through tech and there's less headcount needed, which means bigger margins and ebitda. So for companies who need talent, they want fast and easy. So do people hail cabs anymore? Not generally. They go to their Bolt or their Lyft app and they look that way. This is exactly what's happening in the staffing industry for workers. The exact same thing. Are you looking are you gonna go out to the newspaper and look? Are you gonna go out to some of these other crazy ass job boards and look through scores? No.
Chad (15m 28s):
You're gonna let a system match you with jobs, with gigs, with shifts that are already there and available. I'm also biased though, I gotta tell you because longtime friend Jill Erickson is the CEO or CRO, which means they have industry experience and industry connections that every startup needs. So I love everything about this organization. And if you're a staffing company that's out there, I don't care if you're big, I don't care if you're small, you should be building, partnering, or buying something like this. Because if you're not, you're gonna be gone.
Joel (16m 2s):
Lot of swollen headcount going on in this commentary today. Love that stuff. So this feels a little bit like Back to the Future. Listeners might remember when Snag a Job sort of launched an app-based service industry like on demand, pick your shift, get paid quickly, earn badges around what you do well. So if I have a burger chef badge, I can go work at any burger place pretty easily and command a premium because I can flip a burger like nobody's business. Somewhere along the lines Snag went off the rails and it simply failed. We've talked about Plated before. There's some other businesses.
Joel (16m 41s):
I can't believe that this isn't a business that it's just not going to happen. I have to believe that somewhere along the lines Snag fumbled a great opportunity that it sounds like Qwick is now picking up and, and just crushing it. It gives workers the freedom and flexibility to work on their own schedules. Lets them get paid within 30 minutes.
Chad (17m 2s):
Yes!
Joel (17m 3s):
By the end of their shift it offers companies a 97% shift fill rate and quote, "immediate access to a pre-vetted and certified sharing workforce." Serves thousands of businesses across the US. It's significantly lower cost than what you get a staffing company. There's so many things to love about this model. It's just a question to me of who's gonna get it right. And at least from what I can tell on this news item Qwick is crushing it and they are one to watch. Aaron Matos in Arizona better watch his back. Some of his people might be it at risk of getting poached by the Qwick, the Qwick-y team because they are growing and making things happen.
Joel (17m 44s):
If this were buy or sell, it would be a buy for me for sure.
Chad (17m 48s):
All day long.
Joel (17m 51s):
All right, let's take a quick break and we'll talk about 1998 or 2003 jobs. I don't know, we'll be back.
Chad (17m 58s):
All right. All right.
Joel (17m 59s):
Slip it in, Chad.
Chad (18m 0s):
All right. Yeah.
Joel (18m 1s):
A new segment.
Chad (18m 2s):
I think we're gonna start a new segment called 'Slip It In' because this is something we weren't intending to do, but we've gotta slip this in. Not to mention we were just talking about swelling the head count. So it needs to swell and then slip it in. Anyway, we might make this a segment. This might be a regular thing. Anyways, this week it has been reported that Gem has downsized by a hundred people and layoffs.com has a rumor that iCIMS is reducing staff as well. So I reached out to a few internal to be able to see, you know, what it was looking like and it looks like about 5%. So they're doing a slight reduction, gonna be maybe 70, 80 people, but that's the 'slip it in' for the week kids.
Joel (18m 48s):
Something I'll ask about when I go to iCIMS Inspire in a couple weeks. What's going on with the head count? By the way, the Deel layoffs about 20% or so. They had about 425 employees according to LinkedIn. They laid off about a hundred. I don't think our friend Richard Cho was on that layoff list. He certainly should not have been. If he is somebody grab him real quickly cuz he's valuable. But there were quite a few recruiters that sort of sounded off on LinkedIn about getting laid off at Deel. We talked about Eightfold layoffs not too long ago. I'm guess Oyster, Remote, Velocity Global, like all these unicorns are gonna start announcing layoffs in the 20 to 25% range before the holidays.
Chad (19m 33s):
Yep. Well there's a lot of bloat in the industry, right? And this is what happens. We finally get back to right sizing. Whether you're a company that's been around forever, like iCIMS or a unicorn, that's just, you get bloated fast.
Joel (19m 46s):
By the way, it also looks like, speaking of our friend Elon, it looks like he's gonna land on 50% headcount. Slashing it was 75 than it was much lower. Fifty's a pretty big haircut for Twitter. So I assume a lot of other tech leaders are gonna follow suit and lay off a bunch of people as well. Happy Holidays everybody. Happy Holidays. Yeah. Well let's get to AtlasJobs. Talk about innovation part of, the innovation portion of the show here. All right, Pod the company behind AtlasJobs has raised 2.5 million in seed funding. That brings total funding for the company that does a few other things to 7.5 million.
Joel (20m 27s):
The LA based company will use the funds to expand its customer base in the US and expand globally to support its multinational clients. AtlasJobs was launched in Q2 of this year. The mobile first technology provides job seekers real time access to opportunities anywhere in the world thus the name AtlasJobs. To date, they have around a thousand Android downloads and 15 reviews. Woo, I hope they have servers that can handle that kind of influx of users. The Pod family also includes the STEM connector and Million Women Mentors Network. Chad, give us your take on AtlasJobs.
Chad (21m 9s):
These guys are all over the fucking place. I went just to check out AtlasJobs and they had Jo Webber as their, as their CEO. So I went to Jo Webber's finally found Joe Weber's LinkedIn after I looked at Atlas Jobs and there were no employees under AtlasJobs. So I was like, what the fuck? So I found hers and she doesn't even have AtlasJobs listed on her profile. So I don't know if AtlasJobs is literally just a feature of Pod or what, but when you want to go to the Pod website, it's atlasjobs.com. So I mean they, they are all over the place. There's no continuity here whatsoever.
Chad (21m 49s):
Then I checked out this revolutionary app and I have to say that it is a masterclass on 1998 recruitment technology. It's bad. It is bad. They have a whole, like you said, 1000 downloads on Google Play. I didn't even take a look at reviews. It looks like they're using Google heat maps, APIs or something like that as a search plugin, which is all keyword driven and not context, not skills. Keyword. Hello Atlas jobs 1998 called an online career centers once their job search tech back.
Chad (22m 30s):
This is horrible. I've gotta ask myself what venture PE, VC, who gets sucked into spending $2.5 million on a piece of shit like this? You might as well go ahead and just burn that cash guys because this is going nowhere.
Joel (22m 46s):
So I actually met these folks at HR Tech, they were in the startup pavilion and I kind of had like scratched my head and think, Am I on drugs right now? Is this, am I really looking at like a geo targeted?
Chad (23m 3s):
Yes!
Joel (23m 3s):
Map job site?
Chad (23m 4s):
Nobody searches that way.
Joel (23m 4s):
I was kind of, you know, sort of critical there at the booth and they came up and said, Hey, we're about to announce a round, you know, I think you'll be excited and da da da. So this is the news that I was supposedly gonna be, you know, impressed by. Sometimes ideas are too early. Sometimes, you know, they fail early and then it takes a while for the market to sort of catch up or the technology, you know, there was an iPad before the iPad, right? It just, the tech had to catch up, the chips had to catch up, et cetera. However, sometimes ideas aren't too early, they're just bad ideas. And you'll remember, I won't go as far back as '99 cuz the GPS and the mobile thing didn't quite happen yet.
Joel (23m 50s):
But if this company had launched in '09 or 2010, it would've been kind of hot shit, right? It would've been like, Wow, I can go on my phone and see jobs really near me. We've talked about CareerBuilder's, Pokemon Go, which is a little more of like a VR from where you are. But there were job sites at the time that would sort of show you the jobs and where they were and the address and that was pretty cool. The fact that 10 to 12 years plus later someone is now launching this as if it's a novel idea is, is frankly ridiculous. I mean, most of this geo-targeting happens invisibly.
Chad (24m 26s):
Yeah.
Joel (24m 26s):
If I go to Indeed or wherever, right? Like it knows where I am because laptops have GPS now. So it sort of automatically fills in, oh, you're in this zip code or you're in this area and I do a search and it just automatically shows me jobs near me because it knows where I am. I don't need to like click or go into a map or whatever, right? So even though they're selling this as hip and cool and forward thinking, it really isn't.
Chad (24m 54s):
Yeah!
Joel (24m 54s):
What I got the sense I got from talking to them is that they're really selling this to Gen Z, which I guess means we're gonna try to like put this thing in the microwave, warm it up and sell it to a new generation. The mobile first platform for Gen Z is not this.
Chad (25m 12s):
No.
Joel (25m 12s):
It's big booty Latinas and bug fights like I've always talked about. So this is a quote from their site. "This mobile first platform is designed to meet Generation Z where they are with an intuitive, pleasurable design to improve discoverability of jobs globally." It probably does none of those. It probably does not appeal to Gen Z. It is not pleasurable. It is not improved discoverability. And it's really actually not jobs globally, it's more jobs in the US, from what I saw.
Chad (25m 42s):
Yeah.
Joel (25m 43s):
So I can't imagine Gen Z doing anything other than spending six seconds on this site and then jumping right back into TikTok or going to Indeed or LinkedIn to find their job.
Chad (25m 54s):
So we talked about doing this at Direct Employers 15 years ago and the reason why we couldn't do it, and the reason why you still can't do it. So let's say for instance, Starbucks, tell me what Starbucks that job's at. You can't pinpoint that shit. I mean, you want to, but you can't and you don't get enough. Again, it's garbage in, garbage out. The information that you get from a job description is for the most part is fucking garbage. So just from a technical standpoint, it didn't work 15 years ago, it's not gonna work today. The job descriptions aren't any better. The tech's better, I get it. But we need context, we need skills, we need things more around those areas. Not trying to pinpoint me on a fucking Google map.
Joel (26m 36s):
And if it is, it should be invisible. It should be something in the background that works. There's a great book from that period that we're talking about, '99, 2000, it's called Don't Make Me Think.
Chad (26m 48s):
Yes.
Joel (26m 48s):
And it's a book about designing websites, which is still relevant today about don't make people think this site makes you really think about where the hell am I? I gotta zoom in, zoom out. Like it's horrible. It's horrible. It's horrible.
Chad (27m 3s):
Well I downloaded the app and it's shit too.
Joel (27m 6s):
Oh, you did download the app?
Chad (27m 7s):
Yeah.
Joel (27m 8s):
Oh, good for you. You'll be deleting it after this show.
Chad (27m 12s):
I already deleted it. It is fucking horrible.
Joel (27m 14s):
All right, maybe we can save this show with something that we're excited about. We'll be right back.
Chad (27m 24s):
Robots, baby. Give me the fucking robots.
Joel (27m 26s):
Here we go. Chad, we regularly talk about the automation of, I don't know, everything, baristas, trucking, food delivery, warehouse management. But what about painting? This is a first for the show, but there's a startup out of Nashville, which is in Tennessee and not Texas for our international listeners.
Chad (27m 50s):
Yes.
Joel (27m 51s):
That's going after the $175 billion painting industry. Holy shit! PaintJet, A robotics company has raised 3.5 million in seed funding. The US currently needs more than 100,000 painters to meet demand. And that will only continue to worsen with more than 41% of painters in the workforce expected to retire by 2031. Chad, are you excited about this $175 billion opportunity?
Chad (28m 19s):
Dude, I was so excited. Then I started reading it and watching the videos on YouTube. And here's a quote, "by utilizing a national network of local painters". Those are humans by the way. "PaintJet is able to perform commercial jobs anywhere. It's fully remote controlled system keeps operators on the ground eliminating the possibility of falling from elevated positions." So this seems like the, the the 1.0 version of painting robots. When I thought painting robots, I thought you give it a building, it goes, it scans it, it does AI and all this other stuff. But if you watch the video, you'll see that a person still needs to remote operate the equipment from the ground.
Chad (29m 7s):
Meaning a guy operates the lift on the ground. Yes, it is, there's less risk because the actual robots doing the spraying three stories up. But do you really need AI for that? They're talking about AI and I'm like, this looks like a no AI necessary. I don't get it.
Joel (29m 25s):
So are you a cell on PaintJet?
Chad (29m 29s):
I think PaintJet is, again, this is 1.0, I'm gonna be a buy on 3.0, but I'm gonna sell on this one.
Joel (29m 37s):
Okay. The videos are very entertaining, by the way, very hypnotic, sort of mesmerizing watching these things paint these huge warehouses, which by the way are popping up all over the place and need painting all the time, I assume.
Chad (29m 52s):
Yes.
Joel (29m 52s):
This one to me was one of those duh companies. Like, why didn't I think of that? When you see it produced in the wild. Painting is monotonous. It's time consuming, it's dangerous, it's nasty work, it's hot, it's cold wherever you are in the country. I mean this one is like just built picture perfect for automation. I agree with you that, I mean, it's someone that's there, but I assume the skillset of running a machine is different than the skillset of wax on, wax off with a paintbrush. I think at some point this could definitely just roll up on a warehouse and paint it, whether it's picture the size and width and do all the measurements of it and just go ahead and do it.
Joel (30m 34s):
But how many people are comfortable with that today? Just kinda like with automated truck, you know, self-driving cars, people want people there. Or we talk about restaurants with food. Someone needs to be near the fryer so it doesn't burn down the restaurant. So I don't know if this is gonna be something that's always there, but you can paint a warehouse with a lot fewer people, which translates into a lot of savings for companies that are buying these products. So for me, like this is a buy, automating this to me is a no-brainer. I can't believe we're just now talking about it on the show. It's not as sexy as, you know, pizza deliveries from R2D2, but the profits this thing will make is going to be sexy as hell.
Joel (31m 18s):
And for my money, almost as sexy as big booty Latinas and bug fights. Baby, we out.
Chad (31m 28s):
We out.
Chad (32m 16s):
Thank you for listening to, what's it called? The podcast with Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting. They talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of Shout Outs of people, you don't even know and yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese, not one cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Any hoo be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, that way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. Is so weird. We out.