DAY 01 ADAM GROSSER Keynote

I am so grateful to be here. Thank you for the time. This is going to be a kind of insane 30 minute walk through the landscape of mobility as as as I'm defining it, which is kind of a an unusual taxonomy. So, five years ago, I retired from a long career in tech and investing and decided that I was going to try and merge everything I know with everything I love. And what I love for my entire life has been stuff that moves. And my thesis, my sort of conceit was that mobility had been really stagnant. And I'll define what I mean by that in a minute. But that this idea of linking economies and mobility together was really powerful but also deeply flawed right now. And then if you overlay the sustainability angle on it, what you're what you're left with is a real quandry. And that's because transportation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases on every inhabited continent. And perhaps making it even more of a conundrum, you have this problem that mobility and transportation are not only large contributors, but they're the hardest to decarbonize. It's way easier to decarbonize the built environment or agriculture than say jet fuel. So we set out to create something that would solve these problems. And at the same time looking at the sort of global macro, we realized that the world didn't need another investor. There's lots of investors and the world really didn't need another group of people sort of proitizing or trying to sell a vision. So we invented UP and UP is a very strange malange of three things. We we have a group that actually deploys capital. We're the largest investor globally in mobility now. So we have a group of folks that do that. We have a group of folks that builds companies. And the reason we chose to do that is twofold. One, corporate innovation has really stagnated. If you get to talk about large corporations, you know, Exxon or Porsche or or other people who participate in the ecosystem. So we thought we could help them. And the third piece was we realized that to build our franchise, to create this vision that would be globally recognized, we needed to create communities. And so we've created both physical communities where we bring people together, thousands of people over the course of of the last five years. And we also create intellectual communities by publishing interesting research. So what I'm going to talk about today is neither of the first two pieces. I'm not going to talk about investing or the work we're doing with corporates to uh enhance their their their sort of innovation stature. Both of which are flourishing. We've built over 50 companies in the last 5 years and it it and created some astonishing things. But what I'm going to talk about is our communities. And the first thing I'm going to do is show you a video. It's 2 minutes of what one of our physical gatherings looks like. It's sort of the antithesis of a conference that you would go to and sit in a hotel room. Um uh and and this is much more experiential. You're it's much more participatory and frankly it's much louder. So if you could play the video that would be really a great start. [Music] Thank you for traveling all over the world to be here. We have investors, innovators, policy makers. Take this opportunity to have wide ranging discussions bringing your experience to what is something very special which is helping us all go up. Our mission is to transform the moving world to help move people and goods cleaner, faster, safer, lower cost. Humanity's in desperate need of hope and wonderment. And I cannot think of anything that's more hopeful than the physical manifestation of human ingenuity through technology. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] It is awesome to be back on stage. page at UpSummit talking to other mobility leaders. That's what brings us here, right? We are literally the connective tissue of humanity. >> Our mission is really to get to a sustainable future as fast as possible. I'm super excited about where this whole space goes. >> You come to something like this and you see the impact of your work. We've done a lot in the past year, but to see what everybody else has done is really amazing. >> The community day on Sunday was awesome. Just sharing it with people is great. I mean, we got to share it with children, with their parents. You tell them about what we're doing, they get excited. >> It's always exciting to see what's next and what could be next. So, you know, seeing a lot of the other exhibitors out here today and and seeing what they can do just re-energizes what we're doing as well. >> This event continues to resonate in this industry. And I get really optimistic because with the community connection, I think you have roots. And I think with roots and wings, we've actually got a chance of making a difference in the world. Never give up. Follow that dream. Many of the ideas that you have are going to change the world. You're going to change the course of human history. The world needs the men and women in this room, and we need you to be successful. [Music] So, just to give you a sense of sort of how we've thought about this, we brought together there an incredible cross-section of people from 46 countries that have attended the UPsummit. But at that last particular one, we had two former US presidents, six sitting governors, the four heads of the US military, heads of a number of the European uh military leadership, about $3 trillion of sovereign wealth, academics, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, and it's just this crazy two and a half days of chaos, and then people go off to their homes and they remember that they had a good time and and tell us when they see something interesting. Um it is a powerful way to build uh connections across the globe. What I'm going to transition to is one of our research pieces. And you know our our whole thesis is that we want to move people and goods cleaner, faster, safer with lower impact on land, sea, air, and space. We tend not to fund vehicles. We don't think that high capex, low margin solutions. We want to do good while doing well. And so we we've been very very particular about how we think about what that means. And there is absolutely no dispute that changes in mobility are inexorably linked to changes in GDP. You know, if you go back to Shakespeare, you know, the average person in the in the 1600s never traveled farther than three miles from their place of birth. And if you look at the sort of seminal changes in in uh broadly available mobility whether it's steam the automotive uh revolution in the uh early part of the 20th century or or aviation there is this incredible linkage between the free flowing of commerce GDP growth and frankly a sort of economic support and you can see this on this graph because basically everything good that's happened to humanity has happened in the last I don't know 150 years and if you look at sort of the the far right side of this graph what you see is increase in personal wealth increase in longevity increase uh in in uh or decrease in in in poverty decrease in in conflict um and if you zoom into that a little bit and this is sort of a timecompressed scale that's probably incredibly hard to Um, but this is sort of everything that happened up until the scientific revolution. And frankly, it's like, you know, fire a million years ago, the concept of a bed 200,000 years ago, and then in the last 150 years, everything, you know, radio, television, air conditioning, electricity, the grid, transportation, discovery of DNA, you know, it's been an amazing 150 years. And and the cool part is those rates of change only continue to accelerate as I'm sure you're seeing in software and AI and other things today. At the same time that if you look at that again the same time scale the cost of moving something sort of is marginally approaching zero which is really really interesting because suddenly that really speaks to globalization. that speaks to a place like New Zealand being highly relevant to other geographies. If you can get goods and ideas and concepts around the globe. Um, one of the things that Rosalie asked me to to think about specifically was sort of the sustainability aspect of it. And this is why this slide encompasses why we started up. The the the the chart on the left is sort of the unfortunate reality of where we're actually going. So we're we're carbon emissions are continuing to increase in in every sector, transportation slightly faster than uh uh other categories like road or or or base shipping. But where we need to go is the bar on the right. And so the question is can you get there? And the answer really is maybe. And a lot of it has to do with political will and uh other things that I you know perhaps um I I would be less enthusiastic than I was four weeks ago when we suddenly started to uh cancel all uh renewable energy projects and drill the Arctic in the US. Um but be that as it may, we are pushing back pretty hard on our end to try and figure this out. And the reason we're optimistic is that there's this incredible convergence of technologies. There is this nexus, right, that is occurring right now where you have this con concept of inexpensive compute and electrification and autonomous sense systems and sensing and new forms of manufacturing on demand. And all of those lead to some really, really, really interesting ideas. And I'm going to talk about a few of them today. But when we think about the mobility landscape, it quite literally is everything from a bicycle or a scooter on one end to a hypersonic plane and a rocket on the other. And the staggering thing is in five years we've looked at 8,000 companies so far, all of whom have some skin in this game. And I for one am massively optimistic about this. I mean, yes, the vast preponderance of them are not going to see the light of day, but some of their ideas will, and one or two of them are going to pop out the other side. And there's starting to be some evidence that there's a couple of them are are doing amazing things. So, I'm going to talk about a few categories really quickly just from sort of the philosophical or macro perspective, not talk about any specific companies. Um, space is cool. I mean, I I became an engineer because I'm really old and I grew up when Apollo was happening and, you know, everyone my age was just completely captivated by the space race and going to the moon. And I think that continues today. I think when you see a rocket come back down through the atmosphere and land, it's really really compelling. Or when you hear about right now there are two private companies landing uh doing soft landings on the moon in the next couple of weeks. I mean that's remarkable and you can see it in the numbers. I mean you don't have to look at what these graphs say. What they what they represent is both dollars spent and constellations launched. and it it is up you know you can see it's an exponential curve on both sides and I think that reflects the optimism of the community that the space economy is powerful obviously you have rocket lab uh here in New Zealand Peter is a great guy love talking to him but as you can see from this graph it's still quite dominated by US launch and uh the the other piece to think about here is really the cost to orbit But and again if you look at the blue line on the right hand side of the chart it is also asmtoically going towards zero. When I was a kid it was like a million dollar a pound to get something into LEO. Then it was $100,000 a pound. Now it's $10,000 a pound. It's going to be like a hundred bucks to get something into LEO if Starship continues to get move down that path. Um and it's not really just Starship. I mean there are Chinese rocket private rocket companies that are accelerating their own work. There are two almost exact lookalikes of Starship uh as well as Falcon and uh Blue Origin and and and they are launching and they are recovering and and you know I think that they're going to be an enormous enormous force to be reckoned with. So, moving from space to my favorite topic, which is flying things. And again, huge shout out to New Zealand. The plane on the left image there is a beta electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Air New Zealand is the launch customer to do cargo with that plane. Um, it's flying. I have seen it. It is remarkable. But this is really remarkable to me is that 80% of the people on the planet and I guess it makes sense if you think about you know seven or eight billion people have never been on an airplane. So one of the things we're trying to do is democratize that experience and make it available to everybody inexpensively and and on a compelling basis. So that leads you to how do you do that? Well, could it be hydrogen? Could it be electric? And if I asked you when was the first successful, controllable, repeatable electric flying vehicle and and I asked you for years, you'd probably throw out numbers like, I don't know, 1970 or 1980. And you'd be really wrong because the first electric flying machine that worked really really well was the Lef France from 1884. Um, and strangely it it it had a battery that weighed about 900 lb, which is about what a Tesla battery weighs today. and it flew hundreds and hundreds of times um quite successfully. But this landscape is evolving incredibly richly as well. So if you just look at sort of how the the the the the field is changing and evolving and growing, you're you're seeing tremendous investment in electric ve vertical takeoff and landing of electric conventional takeoff and landing, hydrogen-powered planes, supersonic planes, hypersonic planes, and then obviously all of the systems and sensing and perception and ancillary uh electronics that need to go with And again, just like in any facet of the mobility ecosystem, it is deep and it is rich and it is really well populated. One of the things that we have been really I I think excited about and helped catalyze is drone delivery. So we helped support Zipline with what they started to do in Africa with medical delivery. And more recently we have uh helped shape what Google has done in partnership with Walmart. And what's really remarkable is that Walmart is the largest driver of of drone usage in the world besides the military. And that is a really powerful thing. And and in the next year, Walmart will eclipse military usage of drones. Uh just with a 100 stores, they will do on the order of 5 million deliveries this in in 2025. When they reach their full capacity, they'll be doing about 70 million deliveries a year at a cost of about a quarter uh you know, 25 cents each. So the embodied energy of delivering something by drone in the US in particular is less than the embodied energy of cooking a hamburger. So instead of having a guy on a motorcycle show up or a guy in a car show up with a you know a human being um it it is a really really really remarkable way to do it. You can just sort of see the cost curve here. Um again asmmptoically going to zero through the use of technology. So the other problem with planes and air travel is it hasn't changed. And when I was a kid, there was this incredible Cambrian revolution of of air of air transport morphology, shapes, sizes, different planes. It was there were there was a new plane every year. The 737 that we all know that is flown by many airlines around the world is closer to the Wright brothers than it is to today. And yet it is still ubiquitous. And there's a huge problem with that. And the problem is the graph on the left. And that is showing the relative efficiency gains through time. And all of those efficiency gains have come from advances in jet engine and efficiencies. And they are running out of those. And if you look at a 707 from 1960, the silhouette, it looks darn close to a 737 today. And so the question is, what are we going to do about that? And I'm super excited that we're helping this company on the left, a company called Jet Zero. And these are some insanely brilliant aerodynamicists who came out of the biggest aerospace companies in the world, who invented something back in the late 80s called the blended wing body that no one was willing to build then. Um, but that you can build today using advanced composits and new manufacturing techniques. And what's super cool about this shape is you get 50 to 70% better efficiency, better fuel economy with the same engines, with the same fuel. You are not requiring anybody to invent anything magical. You are not requiring a new source of of of stored energy. Um, unless you think this is fictional, the US government has given Jet Zero a very large contract to build this to become the next tanker and the prototype should fly in 27. Airbus is also going down this path with elacrity. It's a really really neat space. All right, so it would be really criminal of me not to mention the word AI because AI is in everything. So, let me tell you how we're thinking about um artificial intelligence. And Michael, who is about to talk next, he and I when we when we were very young, we worked for this crazy Stanford professor named Larry Tesler who ran advanced development at Apple. And he said AI is whatever hasn't been done yet. Um I don't know if that's actually true, but but where we see applications of AI, and we don't really see AI as a thing. We see AI as an applica, something to be applied to. You see it obviously in all forms of autonomy whether that's flying or driving. Um we're seeing it in material discovery, material science, chemistry, uh supply chain and logistics certainly in generative design and analysis uh and and then ultimately in in some of the work that people are doing around humanoids um pressing button. So for those of you who don't live in San Francisco, Whimo is a really really wonderful thing and Whimo went from essentially zero rides to being the preferred uh delivery solution of people in San Francisco and now Los Angeles. Um did four million rides in in San Francisco last year. We'll do 9 million this year. And it it is a better experience. And and I think once people try it then you know you start to see the power of software and the and and the the the in inherent reduction in accidents and and injury. Similarly what we're seeing in generative design you can make parts that use far less energy that that are higher performing and uh able to be manufactured on demand using new techniques. It's a really great space. humanoids. You probably don't see how big this market is going to be. And this was a quote from a a paper that we saw the other day. Total addressable market is basically the entire population of the world because we have mediated the world to be uh addressed by a bipedal two armed object. And it's astonishing how much money has gone in. Um yesterday figure announced that they raised at 20 times their last valuation or $40 billion. Um Aptronic raised a billion dollars this week many others. But what's also incredible is the speed at which the robot uh community is advancing. And if you look at like Boston Dynamics taking 21 years or figure taking 12 months, UCR has a walking robot designed to work on oil rigs that went from an idea to production in three months. So this this community is converging insanely quickly. Again, China has a community that is equally large. And whereas you see Tesla in the US building humanoids, you see Xpang and Xiaomi and other automotive and electronics manufacturers going into this realm. Cars, huge sea change. It's not the US, it's not Europe, it's China. It's an amazing amazing transformation. There's more capacity in China uh right now than there is demand for every car on the planet. Um BYD is probably the most interesting car company. They're building humanoids, they're building batteries, they're building uh autonomy, and it is it has been not only a fantastic investment, but a fantastic ecosystem play. Much like that, you see Tesla vertically integrating and moving from being a car company to a technology conglomerate all the way back to lithium mining, battery manufacturing, robotics for factories. And even with changes in policy, you're starting to see that, you know, the the EV adoption rate is going to continue and it will continue to dominate. It's the fastest growing segment in uh transportation today. The US is woefully behind in sort of all aspects of infrastructure. I have a few seconds left and I'm going to leave you with a concept that one of the people on the panel talked about which is how long it takes to do this. I've been really really lucky to work with some seinal companies that have changed markets. I've had IPOs that take 13 years. I've had IPOs that take 15 years. I had one that took 19 years. This is a chart of Uber and this is the last I don't know 13 years of Uber. It took $31 billion and 13 years before they made a dime of profit. These are really really hard industries to reshape. there's a lot of uh entrenched players who are trying to protect the position and I think it's incumbent upon all of us to push really hard and make the world a much more interesting a much more sort of democratized a much more fluid place and the economies will benefit from that. So thanks I'm around if you want to ask questions later.