Latest / The Dan Show / Day 31 on the Job | Meet Piyush Phadke, Arrive AI's New CFO

Transcript

Day 31 on the Job | Meet Piyush Phadke, Arrive AI's New CFO · The Dan Show

• 0:00
  Dan O'Toole: We're looking at getting the share price up, looking at putting some sales on the books, announcing some major partnerships, looking at some M ⁇ A, and you're gonna be there helping navigate all that, right?
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's that's why I came on board.
• 0:21
  Dan O'Toole: You know, wherever they land, right?
• 0:22
  Dan O'Toole: You have to have a great chain of custody, netification, safety, security, uh, climate assist, all the things that we provide that nobody's ever had before.
• 0:31
  Dan O'Toole: Let's lower everyone's costs.
• 0:32
  Dan O'Toole: Use Arrive AI, right?
• 0:34
  Dan O'Toole: Agree.
• 0:34
  Dan O'Toole: It's just a subscription model.
• 0:36
  Dan O'Toole: You don't have to buy an arrive point.
• 0:37
  Dan O'Toole: I mean, it you can't afford not to use Arrive AI.
• 0:44
  Dan O'Toole: Hey guys, Dan O'Toole, CEO of Arrive AI.
• 0:48
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, welcome to another Dan Show.
• 0:50
  Dan O'Toole: Today is a special day.
• 0:51
  Dan O'Toole: I wanted to introduce Piush Fadke, our new CFO.
• 0:54
  Dan O'Toole: I say new, he's been with us over a month, but uh, this is the first time you're getting to interact with him and meet him.
• 1:00
  Dan O'Toole: So Piush, welcome.
• 1:01
  Dan O'Toole: Thanks for joining our team and great to have you here today, man.
• 1:04
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, we're changing this whole thing around now, right, man?
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, we're working really hard.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's been actually 31 days.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is my 31st day.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And it's been it's been a whirlwind so far.
• 1:14
  Dan O'Toole: It's kind of funny how this all came together, right?
• 1:16
  Dan O'Toole: Sure.
• 1:17
  Dan O'Toole: You know, I always say there's a bigger plan than we even can control, right?
• 1:20
  Dan O'Toole: We were working with Alliance advisors, right?
• 1:23
  Dan O'Toole: Adele, uh, who who's one of our reps on the team, uh, main player.
• 1:27
  Dan O'Toole: She knew that um we were looking for a new CFO uh since our last one, Todd had had turned in his notice.
• 1:33
  Dan O'Toole: And uh she knew you from a public company that you worked with, right?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I worked with Adele a couple years ago.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And we worked on, you know, very similar in terms of size and market cap and trying to get bigger and do some capital markets deals.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so worked very closely with her over a period of you know over a year.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we kept in touch after I left my prior company.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: And she, you know, she actually called me.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: She said, Hey, are you still uh looking?
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I was in a few processes, and I'm like, Yeah, nothing, nothing's finalized yet.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Happy to take a you know, take a call or have a meeting, and you know, it kind of went from there.
• 2:02
  Dan O'Toole: It's all about optionality, right?
• 2:04
  Dan O'Toole: Right.
• 2:04
  Dan O'Toole: I mean, I I like to have a lot of lines in the water.
• 2:06
  Dan O'Toole: You can't afford to turn down one street and find out I was a dead end, right?
• 2:10
  Dan O'Toole: Sure.
• 2:10
  Dan O'Toole: So I called you uh immediately.
• 2:13
  Dan O'Toole: I think it was a Tuesday night, Tuesday afternoon.
• 2:16
  Dan O'Toole: I said, Can you be here?
• 2:17
  Dan O'Toole: You're from New Jersey, New York City area, right?
• 2:20
  Dan O'Toole: I said, Can you be here at 8 a.m.
• 2:22
  Dan O'Toole: or whatever?
• 2:23
  Dan O'Toole: You said yeah.
• 2:23
  Dan O'Toole: So like within 10 hours, you were here.
• 2:25
  Dan O'Toole: And I said, be prepared to stay Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, which is kind of odd for an interview, right?
• 2:31
  Dan O'Toole: Sure.
• 2:31
  Dan O'Toole: But you did it.
• 2:32
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah.
• 2:33
  Dan O'Toole: Thanks to your wife.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, thanks, thanks to the wife and family.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: We were able to schedule it so that I could come here for three days, kind of left it open-ended.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it was, you know, it was it was a lot of fun.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: The good thing was just the way the timing worked, I was able to meet pretty much everyone in the company.
• 2:46
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah, we had a board meeting going at that same moment, so you got to meet the board.
• 2:49
  Dan O'Toole: It was really uh opportunistic to fortuitous, I guess, to have all those things come together at the same time.
• 2:56
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah, and my goal was to get you an offer very quickly and uh and hope that it gave you a night to talk to your wife and come back the next day and accept.
• 3:04
  Dan O'Toole: And if that happened, have some uh overlap with the old uh with Todd, the old CFO, and you being the new CFO so we can transfer some brain trust.
• 3:13
  Dan O'Toole: And I think it largely worked out that way, right?
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I I think so.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: I I give him credit.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: He was uh, you know, even though he was leaving, we did sit down for a few hours, went through some of the key things in terms of accounts and shares and transfer agents and things like that, and you know, just made sure to go know where where I needed to go when we started.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I I really enjoy the energy, not just from you, um, but from everyone on the team.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're just so excited to uh you know to be here.
• 3:37
  Dan O'Toole: Talk about your background real quick.
• 3:39
  Dan O'Toole: And I know you mentioned public CFO, but you know, prior to that, you have a great street cred on uh on uh investment banking.
• 3:45
  Dan O'Toole: Why don't you tell them about that?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I started my finance career in investment banking at Bank of America, Merrill Lynch.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: This was around the time of the financial crisis, so not a great time to get into it, but listen, something was happening every day, right?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: Whether your stock price is going down, you know, 50% or up 50%, and you know, companies like Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, you know, Merrill Lynch, all these companies were either acquired or went bankrupt, and people had never seen that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, it was just a complete learning opportunity.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I had worked at startups before I worked as a consultant and you know, got into banking to try and get into the capital markets and and financings, and I I got that experience at Bank of America.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: They did, you know, they they focus on larger deals, large companies, you know, a billion dollar plus type transaction.
• 4:26
  Dan O'Toole: What was the biggest deal you ever did?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the biggest deal I ever did was a nine billion dollar deal.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: It was the acquire uh acquisition of Safeway, it's a grocery grocery gene um by by Albertsons.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, today that's uh a very big, one of the biggest groceries in the in the country.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that was a that was a great transaction.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot of fun.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um I was kind of one of the point people there as uh I think at the time I was I was a mid-level banker, so I was working very closely with the company and and their private equity sponsor.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I I wanted to get in the bank to get that type of experience.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: I got that at Bank of America.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: I ended up shifting to Jeffries after a few years.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, worked there for a couple of years, helped to build out their financial sponsor group.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then I wanted to get access uh to the to the middle market, to smaller companies, companies like OrivaI, because those companies are good companies, they need capital too, right?
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, the billion dollar deals are great, and obviously there's big fees there.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, a hundred million dollar deal in in a lot of ways is more meaningful to a company, right?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because it might be their first capital, right?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, first external capital, first debt deal, first equity deal.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so uh when I went to BTIG, I helped create their debt capital markets group.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: And there, you know, we worked on very small deals.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was it was around the time where everyone's heard of private credit and direct lending.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: That was just starting to take off in the kind of 2017, 2018 timeframe.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And we had a lot of good companies that were, you know, just one of the profiles would be 50 million of revenue, 17 million of EPITA, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: Really good company, not public, right?
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_00: So everything's private, but they do need they need capital to go do acquisitions.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So we'd help arrange that.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: So my background was in investment banking.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I did that for a while.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then while I was doing that, I was working closely with founders like yourself.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I saw what they did on the other side of the table.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, hey, I'd love to be part of that where you actually have skin in the game.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you what you the decisions you help make and help drive a company as opposed to being, you know, an advisor, right?
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: An investment banker is an advisor.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: If a deal happens, that's great and you and you get a fee.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: But if it doesn't happen or the company goes under, it's not good.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, that's not affecting that's that's not skin off your back.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so to have that buy-in, to have that, you know, to have the shares, to have you know the upside, um, it's just super interesting.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it's a different pace.
• 6:22
  Dan O'Toole: Hey, let's turn to the future.
• 6:23
  Dan O'Toole: We're gonna we're gonna go crazy, right?
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh hope so.
• 6:27
  Dan O'Toole: We've got some big plans, right, man.
• 6:28
  Dan O'Toole: The cool thing is we you and I uh we're almost living parallel lives.
• 6:33
  Dan O'Toole: I mean, uh public company, very similar size, uh same of the some of the same deals with the same principles.
• 6:39
  Dan O'Toole: We know a lot of the same people on Wall Street.
• 6:42
  Dan O'Toole: It was really kind of amazing how how much overlap there was.
• 6:46
  Dan O'Toole: And I think there's a great synergy uh in working together with all the people that we know, some different people within the same groups.
• 6:52
  Dan O'Toole: I think that's been really cool to see how that has unfolded, don't you?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's been great.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, a lot of the same service providers and advisors that I use in my previous company we're we're working with here, uh, you know, obviously meeting meeting someone new every day.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the situations are analogous in that, listen, when you're a small company that you're burning cash, you always need to access capital markets.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to do it, you know, every month or anything like that.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, as a company, we're in a position where we need to continue to raise capital so that we can, you know, fund our burn and fund our product development, you know, expanding our team and you know, to be able to help help the company access the capital markets.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's really one of the core parts of my job.
• 7:30
  Dan O'Toole: Absolutely.
• 7:31
  Dan O'Toole: You know, the we went public May 15th over a year ago, um, 2025.
• 7:36
  Dan O'Toole: And, you know, three things we knew.
• 7:37
  Dan O'Toole: We knew we're we weren't gonna be profitable day one, we knew we weren't gonna be revenue neutral day one, and we did know we were gonna lose money day one, right?
• 7:46
  Dan O'Toole: So it's all part of the plan.
• 7:47
  Dan O'Toole: You know, nobody wants to lose money, you don't want to lose more than you want to lose, or you never want to lose anything, and you don't want to lose for any longer than you have to, right?
• 7:55
  Dan O'Toole: But when you're building a brand new product, building a new paradigm, a new vision uh in a new emerging industry, that's a heavy lift, right?
• 8:04
  Dan O'Toole: Sure.
• 8:04
  Dan O'Toole: But the payoff can be significant, don't you agree?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: I agree, I agree, and that's part of the reason why I came here in that, you know, like you said, no one likes the stock going from a really high number to, you know, below a dollar as we sit today.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I think you know, we we need to get our story out there.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: We need to continue to market and let people know what Arrive AI is all about.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: I think, like you mentioned, you know, no CFO wants to be in a situation where you're burning cash, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: You want to be able to generate cash flow and EBITDA and you know, pay for everything through your operations, right?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: But to me, especially in the AI space, that's for something as a more mature company.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we're not that we're just starting out, but you know, we're we're effectively pre-revenue right now.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: So in a pre-revenue situation, you're not gonna be cash flow positive, right?
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna have losses.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: And we understand that, but we're working towards a goal where we eventually will be revenue positive, cash flow positive, eBath positive, but that's not how we're focused on the business right now.
• 8:54
  Dan O'Toole: No.
• 8:54
  Dan O'Toole: Hey, every metric that we're tracking internally, with the exception of share price, is pegged to the top.
• 9:00
  Dan O'Toole: We are on plan or ahead of plan on every single thing, except our share price isn't caught up to that yet.
• 9:05
  Dan O'Toole: We're working on that every day, aren't we, man?
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: We are.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: We are.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 9:08
  Dan O'Toole: Now, I don't want to get into the world of reverse splits.
• 9:11
  Dan O'Toole: None of us do, right?
• 9:13
  Dan O'Toole: We want to split the other way.
• 9:14
  Dan O'Toole: We don't get this stock so high that we want to split it so it's affordable for everybody.
• 9:18
  Dan O'Toole: But, you know, there may be a need to do a reverse split at some point.
• 9:22
  Dan O'Toole: Well, what do you say about that?
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I mean, listen, as uh one of the positives of being a public company, you're listed on the NASDAQ.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone can go by you, whether you're institutional or just uh, you know, mom and pop.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so you have to have certain listing requirements and you have to follow the rules that what NASDAQ has.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we do have three deficiencies right now.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: We have the ability to cure them.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Uh one of them can be cured going from the NASDAQ global markets to capital markets, which isn't really that big of a change.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's just, you know, it's really the investors don't even see the difference.
• 9:48
  Dan O'Toole: You're still listed on the NASDAQ.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone can same ticker, everyone can trade however they want.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: The other one, and that's a little bigger, you mentioned, is the reverse split.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, NASDAQ has a rule where you need to have a bid price of over a dollar for 10 consecutive business days so that you meet their requirements because they want to have companies on their exchange that you know investors are going to be interested in.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: And that dollar is important to them.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we we actually recently just got shareholder approval to effectuate a reverse split at the board's discretion at a various range at various range.
• 10:16
  Dan O'Toole: We did that for optionality, right?
• 10:18
  Dan O'Toole: Correct.
• 10:18
  Dan O'Toole: There's nothing certain about that.
• 10:20
  Dan O'Toole: That's correct.
• 10:20
  Dan O'Toole: But we want to be teed up, right?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: As you know, stewards of the company, and we have a fiduciary duty to our shareholders.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: We need to be able to protect the company.
• 10:26
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah, we want to stay enlisted.
• 10:28
  Dan O'Toole: That is the that's the number one thing, right?
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: We want to stay listed.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's our access to capital markets, that's our access to investors, that's investors' access to invest in us.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: We'll look at the reverse split.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have until the end of November, is when the Nasdaq, you know, uh when the Nasdaq has the ability to, you know, say they set the notice then.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we're working with them, we're working with NASDAQ, we're working internally, working with our board, and we want to best position company and shareholders for appreciation.
• 10:53
  Dan O'Toole: Hey, if I want to change for a dollar, I had a U dollar bill and you gave me four quarters, how much do you have?
• 10:59
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, it's it's a dollar.
• 11:00
  Dan O'Toole: And I have a dollar, right?
• 11:01
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah.
• 11:02
  Dan O'Toole: Okay.
• 11:02
  Dan O'Toole: It's simple terms, uh, but the reality is there's nothing shifting any value or anything like that if we have to do that, right?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: There's no change in market cap.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: If our market cap is X and we do a reverse split, whether it's one to 10, 1 to 65, whatever the range is, your market cap is still the same at the end of that.
• 11:17
  Dan O'Toole: And there's nothing to say that if we do a reverse split now, we can't split the other way down the road when we get bigger and better, right?
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, listen, you see some mega cap companies, um, you know, some of the trillion dollar market cap companies, uh, you mentioned it before.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: If your share price is, you know,$500 or$600 a share, a lot of kind of mod and pop investors can't invest in that, or they can only make, you know, buy one share or something like that.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, to give the ability for everyone to invest, I'd love to be in that position.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think, you know, let's it's it's kind of let's work towards let's work towards continuing to grow the company.
• 11:48
  Dan O'Toole: Hey, I'm an old school investor.
• 11:49
  Dan O'Toole: I used to always love buying stocks that split.
• 11:52
  Dan O'Toole: That was, you know, bonus, right?
• 11:54
  Dan O'Toole: Sure.
• 11:54
  Dan O'Toole: Uh and I think we were the only company ever during crowdfunding to do a two-for-one split.
• 12:00
  Dan O'Toole: If we do do a reverse, uh, it's not something that I'm excited about, but it doesn't mean down the road when things uh get to work where the sun comes out and everything's doing great, we we're gonna look hard at doing a split the other way as much as we can, right?
• 12:14
  Dan O'Toole: I think that'd be a great strategy as we're going forward to do routine splits in the good direction if we get to that point.
• 12:20
  Dan O'Toole: And that's one of the things I'm focused on.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I think from my perspective, what the capital markets provides to us is optionality, right?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: As you're, you know, as you grow as a company, you grow in terms of market cap and revenue and things like that, there are just more things out there in terms of capital markets, whether you want to do an ATM, whether you want to do an S1 deal or S3 deal.
• 12:38
  Dan O'Toole: Talk about what's available to us right now.
• 12:40
  Dan O'Toole: You mentioned ATM, I think people think you're going to the automatic tower machine.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: So what an ATM deal is, it's it's something called at the market.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: So what that allows us to do is the bank that we're working with, they are able to sell our shares.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Again, they do it based on our instruction.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna say, hey, we want you to sell our shares and generate X amount of revenue or X amount of proceeds over a certain time period.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, they they trade and they do that, and you know, for if there's a market for the shares.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have close to$15 million of availability on our ATM.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's been, you know, we we filed that uh you know recently.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so if we wanted to, we could raise up to$15 million.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Again, you know, it is diluted when we sell shares.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're we're cognizant of that for investors and shareholders.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, our stock price hasn't been at a great spot, so it's even you know, it's even worse because it's lower.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But that's one way for us to access capital.
• 13:28
  Dan O'Toole: We've had that in place for over a month and we haven't done one share sale.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so you know, we it's it's at our option, and you know, when we do those sales, we report them in our financial statements and everything.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: So everything's you know, everything's above board.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: In in terms of access to capital, we do have a hundred million dollar S3 shelf.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what that allows us to do based on you know availability and things like that is we could theoretically go do an equity deal.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we also have uh a line of credit with uh you know with an investor that we that we were with uh prior to our IPO, um where we have 19 million available on that.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we feel pretty good about where we are in the capital markets.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um again, I'd love to have you know$100,$200,$300 million mark cap like we did before.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the goal is to get back there and beyond.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, what do we have coming up this coming week?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we're excited.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Uh next week we're going to, and you mentioned some of the relationships that we had kind of in common at different companies.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I did a lot of deals with HC Wayne, right?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Very close to some of the senior bankers there.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And so they have a conference every year.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: We're going to uh we're going to New York and uh meet you and Nierve are going up there.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um should be great.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: We have two days of kind of in-person meetings.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're actually doing a presentation on uh on the company.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think they have a concert.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: One of your favorite bands is uh is gonna be.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Doobie Brothers, old school.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: There you go.
• 14:33
  Dan O'Toole: So uh we'll uh they didn't get some new band that I don't even know any of the songs that went out and a bummer.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, last year, last year it was sting.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: It was great, a great venue.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so listen, that's a great that that's a great environment for us to not only meet our bankers, but to meet potential investors, to meet potential capital providers.
• 14:50
  Dan O'Toole: Right.
• 14:50
  Dan O'Toole: We're looking for coverage.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: We we're we're always talking that we we do have research with Maxim.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's the bank that helped help take us public.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, and we have a great relationship with them.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then they're on our ATM.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones kind of have the access, have running our ATM.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we want to we're meeting with a few banks there as well, aside from Wayne Right, because we want to meet with uh, you know, not just the investment bankers, but also the research side because we believe we have a compelling story in the AI space.
• 15:14
  Dan O'Toole: As we turn to the new year, upcoming year, we're looking at getting more units on the ground, uh, deployments, sales, announcing partnerships.
• 15:24
  Dan O'Toole: This week, we had a a nationally, internationally known medical company in here.
• 15:30
  Dan O'Toole: We had a major city in here, and we had a major sports complex all at the same time uh that we were doing a proof of concept use case for.
• 15:38
  Dan O'Toole: And I thought it was really interesting to have three big opportunities here at the exact same time.
• 15:43
  Dan O'Toole: And they were totally different businesses, but they all have a view and a vision of how uh arrive AI can be implemented.
• 15:50
  Dan O'Toole: Uh in that that's pretty cool, right?
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it was great for me because I had never seen uh the demo.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, you kind of go from a drone dropping it off to arrive point to a robot taking it out, dropping it off, bringing it back.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: That was super interesting just to see the technology at work, right?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And that was that was interesting to me.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: I I was I was watching the the uh the partners there, they were they were amazed.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, wow, this is amazing.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like we were standing there and the robot was coming towards us and it knew how to go around.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, really interesting stuff.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the the thing I really like about Arrive AI is listen, the market's almost completely untapped, right?
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: There's a huge opportunity for for us, but for uh for everyone.
• 16:25
  Dan O'Toole: Hey, if if you believe that autonomous delivery and pickup is going to happen between drones, robots, AVs, then you have to believe in Arrive AI, right?
• 16:33
  Dan O'Toole: The infrastructure layer.
• 16:35
  Dan O'Toole: I mean, you've got Amazon, Google, Walmart, trillion-dollar market cap companies iterating on what I call the commodity aspect of this.
• 16:43
  Dan O'Toole: I look at us as the monopoly side of it, that little piece of real estate that's a gateway to every home and business throughout the world, where every delivery starts and ends.
• 16:52
  Dan O'Toole: I don't think it's scalable when you're dropping things into a pool on the ground, you know, wherever they land, right?
• 16:58
  Dan O'Toole: Uh you have to you have to have a great chain of custody, notification, safety, security, uh, climate assist, all the things that we provide that nobody has ever had before.
• 17:07
  Dan O'Toole: It's gonna, it's gonna spoil the the uh consumers out there.
• 17:10
  Dan O'Toole: They're gonna wonder how they ever got by without it, right?
• 17:13
  Dan O'Toole: Just kind of like the cell phone.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we hope so.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think there is a really good opportunity.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I think you know, one of the things that I think you talked about maybe previous to Ancho, you know, how many package thefts are there uh, you know, daily?
• 17:25
  Dan O'Toole: 2.7 million every day.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's ridiculous, right?
• 17:28
  Dan O'Toole: And billions and billions of dollars.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: And people don't think about it because you know, if if you have a delivery service, your package is your package is stolen, you get a refund, that's fine.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: But really, it's driving up costs for everyone.
• 17:37
  Dan O'Toole: We're we're paying that every day, every partition.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Your next delivery is gonna be more expensive or your membership is gonna become more expensive.
• 17:43
  Dan O'Toole: How about misshipped items?
• 17:44
  Dan O'Toole: Same deal.
• 17:45
  Dan O'Toole: Same issue, same issue.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone thinks that it's so easy to return stuff, right?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And it's free to me.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: All you gotta do, you don't have to print out a label anymore, but there is a hit there is a cost to that.
• 17:54
  Dan O'Toole: Absolutely.
• 17:54
  Dan O'Toole: And we're all paying it.
• 17:56
  Dan O'Toole: Let's lower everyone's costs.
• 17:57
  Dan O'Toole: Use Arrive AI, right?
• 17:59
  Dan O'Toole: Agree.
• 17:59
  Dan O'Toole: It's just a subscription model.
• 18:00
  Dan O'Toole: You don't have to buy an arrive point.
• 18:02
  Dan O'Toole: I mean, it you can't afford not to use arrive AI.
• 18:05
  Dan O'Toole: Okay, so we're looking at getting the share price up.
• 18:08
  Dan O'Toole: That's gonna be a big uh initiative here, looking at putting some sales on the books, uh announcing some major partnerships, getting our share price up, looking at some MA, uh maybe some acquisitions once we get our share price to a point where we can uh uh you know be really uh active in that space.
• 18:26
  Dan O'Toole: And and you're gonna be there helping navigate all that, right?
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's why I came on board.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of different opportunity for us.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, some of the stuff is is really blocking and tackling.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get, you know, how do we hit the NASDAQ notices so that we can, you know, we can continue to maintain being listed.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, that's important for us, for our shareholders, for the company.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how do we erase capital from the capital markets?
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: What are the different options, whether it's equity or debt or partnership or JB or something like that?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: We're exploring everything.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's my job.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, we're excited that there is an opportunity.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned MA.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when your stock price is where ours is, it's tough to use that as a currency, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: But as you grow bigger, people are more interested and being like, oh, this company has X market cap.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: I do want to have shares in that.
• 19:06
  Dan O'Toole: And if we put a creative opportunities on the we're just gonna keep growing and growing and be able to snowball this thing, right?
• 19:11
  Dan O'Toole: I think so.
• 19:12
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah.
• 19:12
  Dan O'Toole: So what I would say is, I mean, if you come in right now, if somebody were to invest right now, they're getting in lower than our very first investors.
• 19:20
  Dan O'Toole: And we're so much further down the evolution cycle than we were back then.
• 19:24
  Dan O'Toole: That I I don't see a better time to ever get in to a Rive AI than I do right now.
• 19:28
  Dan O'Toole: And I think having a great guy like you on the team helping navigate, you know, where we're going, how we're getting there, and the vision, I think I, you know, I'm betting on a Rive AI.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I am you are too, right?
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: I am too.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, I I got I came on board a month ago, you know, our stock price is kind of where it where it is.
• 19:42
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, obviously I have upside in terms of shares and restricted stock, as is the as is the management team, as do the employees.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sure.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:49
  Dan O'Toole: Everyone here is a co-owner.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so that alignment is the same as every shareholder.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Someone comes in, becomes a shareholder, they want the stock to go up.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Every employee is the same thing, right?
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And but they're actually working towards it.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so for me, it's it's it's an opportunity.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a really big opportunity.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you think that, oh, well, the market cap's only you know 12 million or 13 million.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a lot of upside there.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and we're just getting started, like you said, we're no one really knows about us, right?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: No one like we don't like we're not really well known on the street.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: We're covered by one research analyst.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: We want to get out there, get our name known as as we start getting some revenue.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, people are gonna become more interested.
• 20:21
  Dan O'Toole: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:22
  Dan O'Toole: We've got a great IP IP story, patent story.
• 20:25
  Dan O'Toole: Um, 10 fully issued utility patents in the US, four pending right now, about 85 internationally.
• 20:32
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, about 20 or so of those have been issued.
• 20:34
  Dan O'Toole: The other are pending.
• 20:35
  Dan O'Toole: 200 patent claims or so or so issued or pending right now.
• 20:39
  Dan O'Toole: So, I mean, it's a very robust patent portfolio, first position, and no one else is doing what we're doing because we own that IP.
• 20:46
  Dan O'Toole: That's really exciting.
• 20:47
  Dan O'Toole: I think everybody is starting to realize that no scalability in this area is going to happen without uh asynchronous, unattended delivery, and that's a Rive AI.
• 20:56
  Dan O'Toole: And that's why we went public.
• 20:57
  Dan O'Toole: We needed access to the capital markets ourselves, doing all the things you just mentioned.
• 21:01
  Dan O'Toole: So it doesn't matter how big you are, everyone needs access to the capital market.
• 21:05
  Dan O'Toole: It's the liquidity, the oil of growth.
• 21:08
  Dan O'Toole: And frankly, that's why we wanted to go public.
• 21:10
  Dan O'Toole: Two reasons.
• 21:11
  Dan O'Toole: The promise of liquidity to our shareholders.
• 21:13
  Dan O'Toole: You know, if you you can invest in anything, but if it never becomes liquid, it's not worth anything.
• 21:19
  Dan O'Toole: So that was very important to me to get every shareholder to liquidity.
• 21:22
  Dan O'Toole: And I was so proud that the day we went public, every shareholder in this company had had made money, not one had been lose, had been a loser at that point.
• 21:32
  Dan O'Toole: That was, you know, our stock went up to 40, we came at 13.
• 21:36
  Dan O'Toole: That was that was a really great moment.
• 21:38
  Dan O'Toole: Uh and uh and we want to get back to that.
• 21:40
  Dan O'Toole: So that's huge.
• 21:42
  Dan O'Toole: But you know, we do rely on the the second reason was access to the public capital market.
• 21:47
  Dan O'Toole: You know, we had done three rounds of crowdfunding before going public, and it's such a grind, you can never really get ahead of your burn rate.
• 21:54
  Dan O'Toole: You know, you can never put anything meaningful on the balance sheet to really keep the acceleration going.
• 21:59
  Dan O'Toole: So going public for us, even though it represented dilution and and some of the things that, you know, are not the best, it's really gotten us to be able to hire all these people, to be working out of a great facility, to be out there executing on partnerships and opportunities.
• 22:16
  Dan O'Toole: And uh, we would not be where we are today had we not gone public.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think that's right.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think like like you said, provides access to capital markets.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's not only good for investors, it's good for the company.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, as we grow, we'll have more access to the capital markets so we can do bigger deals.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned probably the biggest ATM ever, right?
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas 15 million, Google's is 85 billion, um, which I think they're using to fund their AI investments.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 22:38
  Dan O'Toole: It shows that AI.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's and and they're the, you know, they're one of the what probably five or 10 biggest companies in the world, right?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that's one of the reasons why the US capital markets are are so interesting.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's because anyone can invest in it, right?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: So you can invest in it if you have a hundred bucks, you want to put in your retirement fund, or you just want to invest for fun.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're a big institution, like, you know, say Fidelity or BlackRock that literally have a trillion dollars to invest.
• 23:00
  Dan O'Toole: Right.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so that it bringing that capital providers together with companies that need capital, I think that's why, you know, the NASDAQ is excellent for us.
• 23:07
  Dan O'Toole: Hey man, I'm so happy you're on the team.
• 23:09
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, I love how you have a can do attitude.
• 23:12
  Dan O'Toole: You know, I always say one of the things I say all the time is by the time you thought about it, I did it.
• 23:16
  Dan O'Toole: I think acting decisively, aggressively, moving fast is the key to success.
• 23:21
  Dan O'Toole: And when I called you up, you were here in 10 hours, you stayed three days on the cum.
• 23:25
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, we made you an offer, you accepted it, and look where we're going.
• 23:29
  Dan O'Toole: It's it's we're making uh big deals every day, we're having meetings.
• 23:33
  Dan O'Toole: Uh the day in the life of here is is really crazy.
• 23:35
  Dan O'Toole: You never know what the two days a day is gonna look like.
• 23:38
  Dan O'Toole: We're having investment banker meetings, we're doing SEC file-ins, we're having IR investor relations meetings, we're talking about marketing, PR sales.
• 23:47
  Dan O'Toole: Uh it never ends, right?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's uh it's something different every day.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that that pace, that that startup pace is very exciting.
• 23:54
  Dan O'Toole: It is.
• 23:55
  Dan O'Toole: Well, hey man, welcome to the team.
• 23:56
  Dan O'Toole: Thank you.
• 23:57
  Dan O'Toole: So glad you're with us.
• 23:58
  Dan O'Toole: Uh Piush Fadkey.
• 24:00
  Dan O'Toole: Uh, welcome him to the team, everybody.
• 24:02
  Dan O'Toole: Thanks, guys.