AI Breakthrough Gives Humans Superpowers To See Through Walls and Save Lives in the Workplace

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I'm Jake Aaron Villarreal, born and raised in Silicon Valley, and here to take you behind the scenes to share what it's like to be a startup founder, the journey they're on, the problems they face, and the products they build in an effort to transform industries. I'm excited to have with us today Dave Copps, co-founder and CEO of Worlds. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Copps: Thanks for having me, Jake. Great to be here.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, I'm excited to have you here as well. I know it's been a few times we've been trying to get on the schedule and, and now we've finally got you. So really excited about that, and I'm sure the...

[About Dave]

...listeners will be too. It's uh, you got a great story and a great pedigree. A little bit more about Dave. He's an internationally recognized technologist and visionary. He's founded and sold two AI companies, received EY Entrepreneur of the Year, and is now CEO of Worlds where he's revolutionizing industries with real-world AI. When he's not transforming tech, Dave is an avid collector of guitars, cars, and loves family time at his home on a Caribbean island. Wow, that sounds really fun. Are you... Where are you, where are you dialing in from today? Are you calling in from the Caribbean island or you...

Dave Copps: No, I'm actually in Dallas. I have my home in Dallas.

[About Match Relevant]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Hundreds of AI startups are launching every month, battling to build their founding teams. As a leader, your job is to get results. When it comes to hiring, that's where it gets tough. So, you go out and you try a recruitment firm, but they don't understand your story. They're off target and when they send you candidates, it's a waste of time. We believe you should never have your time wasted. That's why we launch Match Relevant because your story is more than just an open role. It's your founder's journey, the problem you're solving, the product you're building, and why it matters. When we work with companies, we make sure we understand your whole story. So, we go out and do a search, we're on target, it's worth their time, they're interested, and more importantly, it's worth yours. And when it comes to hiring engineers, we work to make sure we get it right by deploying a team of seasoned CTOs that have built some of Silicon Valley's best companies. They can collaborate with you in the technical interviewing process. They can be a sounding board or they can run it for you. When it comes to building teams, there's no time to waste. Let's make it count. If you have a role that needs to be filled, book a time with a hiring guide at matchrelevant.com and learn how we do it.

Okay. Very cool.

[Origin Story]

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. It's making me jealous just thinking about that vision. But very cool. Um, well, give us a little background of your origin story. How did you, how did you get into technology and how did you, what really inspired you to become an entrepreneur kind of in your younger years?

Dave Copps: Yeah, it's a great question. You know, on a very personal level, I think I, you know, I'm one of those persons that grew up with some pretty big challenges. You know, I, I was diagnosed as epileptic when I was four years old. And but I was one of those really lucky people that had... I grew up with a mom that was just, she, she really surrounded me with positivity, you know. And I grew up hearing, "You can be anything you want to be, Dave. You can see it, you can be it." And, and I think that really kind of set a foundation for me, this kind of positive mental outlook, you know, that I, that I take to life. And I don't think I appreciated it until years later, you know, what she was really doing, you know, because she... um, I think what I kind of looked back on it and I, I realized what she was doing was kind of telling me that you are not things, and things are not you, you know. Like epilepsy was something I had, but it wasn't who I was. Like I, I got to tell that story, you know.

And so I think that kind of positivity really set a foundation for me, you know, um for not just life as, as a person, but also as an entrepreneur, you know. Um, I'm always focused on what's possible, you know, and, and, and that's also in people, you know, so I... when I look at people in my company, I, I try not to look at them for who they are today, but who they could be, like if I stood for their greatness, you know. And um, and so I think that really changed who I am.

I think another big thing was kind of in college, I had an experience where I was kind of bored. I was a business major and I thought I was kind of bored with it and, and so I uh I dropped in on a class. And so I dropped in on an anthropology class that was called Corporate Culture, Industrial Anthropology, Corporate Culture. I thought that was kind of a fascinating topic and boy it ended up really impacting my life. I, I, I dropped in on the class. I was there. I took the test and finally the, the professor said, "Who are you?" You know. And I was like, "I'm Dave Copps." She said, "I don't see you on my roll." And I was like, "Yeah, I know. I'm not in your class." And she's... we came, we became good friends and I changed my major to industrial anthropology.

And, and so I think you know, from that I've really kind of focused on culture. I do talks on startup culture and so when we start a company, anytime we have five new employees, we, we have kind of what we call Culture Club you know, where they, we take them to breakfast and my partners... and Ross and I, we, we take them to a restaurant and just talk about culture and what it's like to work at Worlds. And, and um, it's a big part of what, what we do now and it's a big part of the companies that I build. So that was pretty interesting.

And then I think you know the other thing is just I think meeting my, my business partner Chris Rhode has been kind of, was a life-changing thing. We've now built two, built and sold two companies together and we're building our third with Worlds. And I think we're, we're just a great yin and yang. You know, I think I'm the, I'm the "what's possible" guy. I'm always pushing things uh to be bigger than they are. And Chris is the "rubber meets the road" guy. He's the guy that you know he just, "how do you make, how do you make this happen today," you know? And so we're, we're a real nice mix. But I think those are kind of the big three things for me, and kind of decide who I, who, who I've become today, unfolded to.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. No, that's, that's great. You know, we talked a little bit about this before. Um that people that have worked for you in the past have followed you in your companies. That doesn't happen unless there's a really good leader that can inspire, encourage, support, and also have a compelling vision for them to be part of and join to help, you know, in the success of whatever you're creating. What, where did you learn that from? Because that's, that's not something you, you learn in a book.

Dave Copps: No. And I think it's one of the things with school, right? A lot of things that you learn in school, there are things that aren't taught in school. And that's one of them, you know. And um I don't know where it came from. I think we just started kind of doing it, you know. After the first company, everybody was so excited that they wanted to come to the next one. And after that one, we just started building this kind of culture thing. We have tenets of our culture, you know, like we have things like um "responsibility is not something that someone can give you," like a manager can't give you responsibility, you have to kind of, it's something that, it's a gift that you give everyone around you. Like, and we have a another thing that "failure is impossible," you know. And I know that sounds crazy, but, and I get challenged by that by engineers.

But um you know, the, the theory is basically that you know, we don't talk about failure because we're building things that have never been built before, you know? And so if we focused on failure, it would be pretty depressing place. You know, because we, we fall down a lot, right? And so we have this, what we do is we, we have this in our culture. Part of it is we recast failure as iteration, you know? So instead of failure, like something worked or didn't work, we kind of structure our company like I think the world works today, which is just like more about, you know, you push something out there, you see what happens, you learn from it, you pull back, you make your changes, you pivot, you push it back out. This build, measure, learn, build, measure, learn kind of iteration. And so we cast failure as iteration, you know, and so that's another part of our culture. We actually called it Ubuntu. But you know, anyway, there's a lot, a lot to that, but it's a, it's a big part of who we are. And I think that's what's attractive to people.

We also have some more mechanical stuff like we, we cover 100% of healthcare, you know.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, wow.

Dave Copps: And, because we don't want people thinking about anything except, except doing, you know, greatness, you know, and so we're a little different from most places and I think that's why people want to keep coming back.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Ah, it's amazing. You know, when we look at businesses, it's about solving a problem and bringing a product to market that can really help not just solve a...

[Solving a Problem]

...problem for maybe a person or an industry, but really solve a problem that's worth paying for.

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: AI is out there in so many different sectors right now with a really good value to what it's doing and how it's helping. What are you bringing to market in the AI space that, that, that's, that's maybe different or that others should know about?

Dave Copps: Yeah, that's a great question because I think um like you said, change is everywhere. AI is everywhere and there's all these huge promises being made about AI. And I'm not sure a lot of them are being met, you know. And um we have a history of really um taking on solving problems, but not just tech, not just building technology for technology's sake, but like really using technology to solve a real problem. And so I think there's two things that kind of led to the creation of this company.

So after we sold our last company, both those companies were kind of back office AI, like you know. And um where we saw the gap was in the real world. Like no one's really using AI in real world operational environments, you know. And so, and so as we started talking to people, we, we heard two things over and over and over again. So one of them was, "Yeah, the p-, the pace of change is incredible, acceleration is unbelievable and we have to be able to move faster," right? And the second thing we heard was about uh labor shortage. Like every company said, "We don't have enough people," you know. And so when you crash those things together, you know, the only thing that really matters, seems like what's really next is, is automation. Like can you do more with the people you have? Like can you give the people you have superpowers, you know? Can they, can you augment their capabilities with AI such that they can be better than they could be without it, you know?

And that's what we're focusing on is how can we kind of build an AI for people because it's a, it's a, it's a really important problem right now. I think um in supply chain by itself, there's 5.5 million more jobs than there are people. And they're saying, and outside of supply chain, just on a broader scope, uh projections are we're going to be short 85 million people by 2030. So wow, the answer is automation. We have to figure out how do we give people the ability, how do we augment their capabilities with AI so that they can do more than they could with you know, before. And that's what we're focused on.

[Use Case]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Give us a use case. Where are you doing this today that is having an impact and customers are excited about what you're delivering?

Dave Copps: Yeah. Um so our focus is really kind of in, in large industrial companies right now. So think about like you know um there's uh... when people are building, when you're manufacturing, distributing, moving products around the world, they have multiple environments. Um, and when you have tens of thousands of people in hundreds of locations, you lose the ability to observe what's happening. You can't do it, right. And so we focus on really large companies, you know. So one of our clients is Chevron, you know, largest energy, one of the largest energy companies in the world, you know. We're helping them with lots of things like flare detection, leak detection, a lot of things that are ESG, you know, and environmental stuff, which is real credit to them. They're focusing on that really hard right now.

Um, but we're using AI giving them the ability to perceive things that maybe before weren't possible to be perceived at scale. Um, you know, like it's, it's one thing to have cameras everywhere because everywhere we walk in there's cameras, right? Um, yeah. Um, but you don't have, it's not possible to have a person sit and watch all those things and see what happens when it's happening, you know. It's, what usually happens is something breaks and you go back and look at the tape and see what happened. And that's before Worlds. That's what the, that's what we walk into. With us, we now give companies the ability to perceive the real world in motion. So as things are happening, you can perceive and detect of important events or critical events that are happening and then take action on those. So you have, with energy, it's those things.

We have the steel industry. So working in the steel industry, you know, that's an incredible environment. I, I, I really gained a new respect for that. I, I wasn't, I'd never been to a steel plant before. But um you know the complexity and the, and the um, it's, it's an environment that's very intense, you know. And so giving the ability to, you know, to use AI to start to map, like digitally map the environments, to create a live digital twin of, of an environment like that, and to create zones, you know. So a steel uh plant can be a dangerous place, you know. So we can create a live digital twin of the environment and then find these zones where, you know, things could be dangerous and, and create a zone, zone. So, it's like inside the, on top of the digital twin, we create these smart, we call smart zones. The smart zone is basically an, like an API for the physical world. You can now program that area of the world with AI and have an AI watch for things, you know, and, and like, is it safe to be there now or not?

And, and in a sense, our, our um, our UI is the real world. It's not like a pane of glass. Like in, in the real world, if someone's in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can buzz their phone. We can have a blinking red light. We can do things like that. But the AI can assist and make sure that people are in the right place at the right time. We're also doing work with DoD, you know, and so things like that. So nothing, nothing offensive. It's all in protecting force protection. But I think the, the use cases are unlimited. Once you see that you can turn the real world into a live data stream, everything's possible, you know. So it's one of, one of our challenges actually.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you say "live data stream," is it connected and integrated with cameras? Is it, does it have to be with cameras? Is that kind of part of the AI integration of what value you bring to a company? Or when you're talking about a digital twin, um like is it literally seeing that sort of factory in like a digital format and then being able to make decisions based on the data that's maybe being streamed into the platform? Like, just trying to get, for the listeners, to get a pulse of really the value that the users are getting from it.

Dave Copps: Yeah, it's kind of yes and yes is the answer to your question, you know. So, we will, we, we do, we create, we can connect into a company's existing cameras and sensors. It's one of the beautiful things about our platform. We don't, we're not hardware people. We don't do cameras. We don't do sensors or anything like that. Lucky for us, in the past 20 years, people have spent tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on IoT, you know, and so um, with those existing cameras and sensors, we can plug in our AI and now get, as we start to capture what's happening in the world, we can now use AI as a transformation engine to understand what's happening in the world and to recognize critical events and things like that.

Where the digital twin comes in is that um, so we can create a live digital twin of an environment that we're, we're observing. So say it's a, you know, a warehouse, right? And so whenever a forklift moves in the real world, you see that forklift kind of moving in the digital twin. The reason that's important is because with a digital twin, now we know exactly where that forklift is. Because think about computer vision. If I just see a, you know, a camera viewing a forklift, I don't know where it is. I just know it's in the warehouse somewhere. But if we have a live digital twin where it's pix-, you know, pixel by pixel accurate geospatially to the world, you know, like so literally wherever that, that um that forklift is in the digital twin, it's accurate to where it is in the world. And so we can measure where something is. So what's being sensed, when it's being sensed with time series data, now where it's being sensed with the digital twin. So we can create a live digital twin of a real world environment and give people the ability to almost now programmatically look for important things and also to um to build automation into those environments to protect people or to make them more productive or more efficient and things like that. So...

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow, that's amazing. Why is this space important to you?

[AI for Good]

Dave Copps: I'm, I'm motivated by AI for good. I mean, you, you kind of hit a chord with me on that because that's uh, there's a lot of talk about AI, you know, AI agents, LLMs, "replace people," "eliminate jobs," all, all those things. And we, we're focused on building AI um software that helps people. You know, I talked earlier about, you know, companies growing larger, workforces getting, you know, are shrinking. Um well, our AI can augment and amplify human capability, right? So um, in a sense, we're giving people the ability to exceed the limits of their biology, you know, by creating augmentation and automation that's needed to give them kind of superpowers.

When I mean superpowers, I mean like you might have a wall here and a camera on this side and a camera on this side. Well, with that, we can give a person the ability to see through the wall, you know? So things like that, like literally kind of superpowers. But when you start to augment people's capabilities with AI, um you can do things like compress attention. Like think about when you have a hundred cameras in an environment, and today there's someone sitting in a room with a bunch of monitors trying to, un-, you know, letting people know when something happens. Of course they, they sleep, they text, they go to the bathroom, you know, and it doesn't work, right? It just doesn't work. And um, so the, with an AI, once you train that AI to look for certain things, like certain events that might happen, man down or things like that, um, the AI can now compress your attention. Like so you don't have to watch 24/7 and all cameras, you can compress that down to only looking at the things that AI tells you you should look at, you know.

And so, and um, we've developed some really important capabilities. Like one of the limitations of computer vision and things like that was you had to teach an AI what to see, and if something happened that it wasn't trained on, it didn't see it. Well, we've now trained, we've got AIs that can see aberrations. So after it watches an environment for a while, it knows what's normal. It can kind of create normal and then if something abnormal happens, it can kind of do a knock knock. "Somebody needs to take a look at this," you know. So, so it's a really fascinating...

[Who are you selling to]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's, that's really cool. You know, as a company, you've built a product. To me, you've gotten some of the biggest companies now as your clients, which is, you know, first you got to bring a product to market. You got to try and get the right connections within the company and then you have to hopefully have them buy it.

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you're selling or bring, bring your product to market, who, who, who cares about the product? Who are you selling to with an organization?

Dave Copps: Yeah, it's interesting, you know, because I think it's changing, you know. Um, we're doing something that's very, very new, right? So, um, I've done this in my last company, too. You know, I've been through this before, so I kind of know the process. But what happens when you're new and you're doing... like, there aren't... there's a lot of people that understand the idea of, you know, an AI platform for real, enterprise platform for real world AI, but they don't really deeply understand what that means. And if they could do it, they don't understand what's possible. And so there's this time period like right now where we do more educating like, "Hey, did you know this was possible?" And so the groups that are, we go into with that conversation sometimes are innovation groups, sometimes they're digital transformation groups, things like that.

But eventually you get to production, you know, and that's where things happen and that's where contracts happen. So I think we're still in that, we're still in that area where um, the people that are calling us and the people that are crazy interested are the, the early adopters, the mavericks. Um and the, the internal champions. And we've had people leave one company that we're working with and go to another one. We've had this happen multiple times. And they get to the other company and the first thing they do is bring over Worlds.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh wow. That's a... internal champion.

Dave Copps: Yeah. Yeah. But um, but I think we're still in that, the early adopter phase right now. But I do feel it's changing. We've had some crazy things happen in the last even just several weeks that are kind of giving me the impression that we're, we're getting past that and we're about to move into broad adoption of real world AI.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. I think...

Dave Copps: By mid next year.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. That's, that's, that's fascinating.

[AI is top of mind]

You know, 83% of Fortune 500 CEOs today are, you know, AI is top of mind. "What are we doing with it?"

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: "How is it going to benefit our company? How is it going to help our customers? How is it going to generate revenue?" Um, $200 billion dollars in the last 24 to, you know, 18 to 24 months has been pushed into AI innovation whether it's companies, startups, or you know, big tech organizations. So the transformation's here. It sounds like you're in the middle of it, but you're, you're really solving real world problems in the real world, which, that's a business benefit. So you're really B2B, you're selling to companies...

Dave Copps: 100%. Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: ...and they're being able to see some really good results out of that. The fact you have people leaving a company, going to another company, and evangelizing what your message is or what you do, you know, we call that a raving fan. And a raving fan is someone who talks about your company even when you're not there. Brings you into opportunities even without giving them a, you know, a piece of the action, whatever it is. So, that's really cool. That's, that's hard to do. And you only do that if you have a good company, a good product, and a good service. So, congratulations.

Dave Copps: Steal that for sure. "Raving fan." I like that. Raving fan. Yeah. It's hard to get to. You touched on something though. It's not just product, you know, like um the experience of working with Worlds is when you work with our company, you experience our team. And I'm telling you, we, when we go into a company, we are part of that company. Like we, we won't stop until it just blows them away, you know? And, and they appreciate that because they know, especially these people, they know what we're doing is hard. It's never been done before, you know, so they know it's hard, but they see our dedication to it. And so that's the other thing that they're bringing to this is that it's not just about the technology. This is a company that can really make things happen.

[Challenges of abundance]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You know, as you continue to grow your company, how long you've been in business now with Worlds?

Dave Copps: A little over four, about four, four and a half years. Yeah. Four years somewhere in there.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Okay.

Dave Copps: COVID makes it weird.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. For some time there, you know. Yeah. Well, you came out of COVID, you guys are doing well. What's the biggest challenge for the company right now?

Dave Copps: Um, wow. You know, I think luckily for us, the challenge, the biggest challenge for us um is kind of problems of abundance. You know, um I think you know, we, when people see our technology and they bring it in, one of the things that they're, they kind of say is, "Oh, well, can it do this and can it do that and can it do this and can it do that?" And so there's this variability of the, of how you can use Worlds. And um you know, we're a company of 59 people right now. So it's, it's hard for us to do all of those things, you know. So one of the things that we've done um we, in the early part of this year in January, we made a pivot to channels. So I'll tell you the, the pivot moment was we were working at, I was Chevron. I was going to say "one of the largest energy companies," but you know who that is. Chevron. And we had two guys there, you know, working on stuff. And then Accenture, who's one of our partners now, walks in and they had 1500 people there. And we just looked at ourselves saying, "Why are we trying to be them?"

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, wow.

Dave Copps: Yeah. And so we backed, we kind of took a step back, you know, and decided to, to not be that and to really be a software company. Um, so we're, you know, we, we basically are, we're working with channels now. So Accenture is a channel partner, Solomon's a channel partner, EY is a channel partner. And so we're, and we did this in our last company, too. We want them to build applications and agents on top of our platform, you know, that's the win, and kind of companies themselves as well.

[Building a channel partner]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: What's um the process of getting to build out a channel um partnership for the company? Because it's easy when you're going direct to the customer. You know what you do. You know your value proposition. You try and get in the door. You sell your product. They use it. But a channel partner is a little different. You have to get their mind share. You have to strike a deal that it's worth their time and effort, and have to have a product that actually works too so they're going to implement it. They're going to, you know, deliver something well.

Dave Copps: 100%. Um, channels are a slow boil. Um because, you know, you, you've got to gain market share. It's almost like a whole another market, right? Inside of a particular channel partner, you've got to gain market share inside the channel partner, you know, and so that takes work. It takes a lot of persistent work. And Garrett Long's our... leads our channel group and he's just brilliant at that. People love Garrett because he's, he's so persistent, you know, and, and um and knowledgeable and helpful, you know. And so we know it's a slow boil. We've done this before, you know, and so you have to kind of... then as the company starts, as we start to cross that barrier that you and I talked about earlier here, um we start to get more broader adoption, you know, they'll, everyone starts to see the abundance happening now. Now they want to kind of all jump in and train more people, and, and so it's just that, you just stay in touch and you kind of, you grow together into that, that kind of, that abundance, you know. And we're getting there right now. So, this is a really critical time for channels because we're starting to see a lot of inbound business now and we, we need channel partners to, to build some of these special uh applications and agents on top of our platform.

So, um I think one of the advantages we have right now is that you know, no kidding, the world is changing, right? And so we are moving. There's an important transition that's happening right now. And I think Yann LeCun talked about it when he was at Davos this year. He said um, "You know, you can only teach AI about the world so much with text and images, right? At some point you have to give it the ability to observe and experience the world like we do." Like he, he made the statement he made was really interesting. He said um, "A four-year-old child knows more than the largest LLM," you know. And his point was because the child can experience and observe the world, and that is not happening right now with an LLM. And so um, that's what we're doing, you know, by connecting into a company's existing cameras and sensors. We're giving AI the ability to observe and experience those environments in ways like people do. And so um, we're creating an entirely new data stream. Now, the real world is a data stream. It's a live data stream. And so um yeah, it's interesting but that's, that's, that's what's happening right now. So I think that helps us with channel partners because they know what's coming. They know what's next. What's next? And we are, we have a platform for what's next, you know? So, we're an attractive play for them.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's really cool. God, I feel like I want to add cameras to my home office and use your product. Just...

[Worlds in Q]

...where should I stand and where should I not stand to get hurt for my kids when I'm in my room?

Dave Copps: No, that's really, that's, that's, that's really great.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, you know, as you um look at the company, you've been around for four years.

Dave Copps: Yeah.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: The, the channel partner to me sounds like a pretty big shift, but is there other shifts or pivots that you've gone through that were kind of breakthrough moments for the company?

Dave Copps: Yeah, for sure. The big one is what we're calling Worlds in Q. So, you know, a year and a half ago as we were going into market um, we spent about 60% of the time training AIs, you know. So before we could get to any of the fancy stuff and digital twins and all that kind of stuff, we spent 60% of our time training AIs. And so like before this innovation I'm about to tell you about, the way the world worked was the way you train AI about the world is you draw boxes. So you have a video and you see a person, you draw a box around the person and say "person," you label it "person." You see a box, you see a dog, you put a box around the dog and say "dog," right? And you do that frame by frame. Like it takes hundreds of hours to train an AI on one environment.

And so we kind of were doing that and we realized this is insanity. Like the state-of-the-art is insanely broken. And so we came up with this idea, you know, so we know the real world's messy, especially where people are involved. The variability goes through the roof, right? So what if we could create a system that could um automatically index the world? So create an index of everything it sees, and then make it really simple for you to train the AI on the things that are important. And that's what we did. We call it Worlds in Q and it's literally the fastest AI training system in the world right now. Like you can literally um create an index of everything just by turning your cameras on to Worlds. It just starts to index everything it sees.

Um but then it does something really special. Like when I want to train it on a forklift, you know, or something like that, I can draw, I can touch that forklift and say, "Show me more like this." And Worlds will do a visual search and visual clustering and show all the forklifts. And then you just say "forklift." So what I just described, you know, find more like this and label it like that, took two seconds. That was the equivalent of somebody going through hundreds of hours of video and drawing a box around every forklift they see. So you can start to see we have compressed that time down to literally nothing almost. And so we give the people the ability to not only index everything they see automatically, but now they can, they can start to annotate their world faster than ever before, you know. And so we've literally flipped the entire AI training industry from a top-down, manual human-in-loop process to a bottoms-up, fully automated AI system.

So it's a, it's fascinating. And so we announced that in March or late, late February, but I think you know we announced pretty early. I think it, it took form all year here. But it's uh, it's now in, in play [at] all of our clients and it's just, it's incredible. We use it for sales. It's like literally we can, someone will give us a 10-minute video and the next day we'll show them that their entire environment trained on AI the next day, you know. And they're like, "Wow, that's amazing." Because one of the biggest challenges...

[Labeling Data]

...like you talked about, is taking the data and then labeling the data and then training the data and making sure that you can do that in a timely fashion. So, um, God, it sounds like you've got the cheat code for, uh, labeling data.

Dave Copps: Yeah, thanks. It's, it's pretty awesome. And we're, we're excited. It's, it puts us in a different, different place from everyone else because if you think about what no one's thinking about right now, they all want to jump to the use case, right? Help me solve this problem. But what they're doing is they're skipping over the important part. Like the most important thing right now is giving companies the ability to train AI on their world and set a foundational knowledge of, for AI, about your world. It knows about everything. It knows about the people, places, things, objects that are important. So now you can start to build on top of that. Everyone kind of skips over that part, but that's what Worlds in Q is. It sets this, you know, foundation for dynamic learning about any physical environment.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Well, you kind of stole my next question, which was going to be what's your biggest breakthrough? You just answer the answer that it's, that's amazing. Um yeah, it, and it's, it's big, you, because you look at some of the companies that are out there and what they, revenue they're making on that.

Dave Copps: We're now taking this to, out to the world. So, you know, anybody watching this, if you want to train AI faster than before, give me a call because we need, we want some really large, we want a large one, you know, to, to show them what's possible, you know. And uh, but it's, it's a, it's a big change in the market. A huge change in the market.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Got it. What's the business...

[Business Model]

...model? So, you're building technology, you have partners. Is it a, a SaaS-based model? Is it based on consumption? How does it work?

Dave Copps: It's a subscription, you know. So um we base it on, we now, we base it on the number of cameras in an environment because we were doing a flat fee per environment and you know, with, someone had one camera it was great, but if somebody had 100 cameras it was like, "Oh you know, this isn't working." So yeah, now it's just kind of number of cameras in an environment or a number of sensors in an environment because we don't just do cameras, we do other sensors as well. But um yeah, so the business model is that we'll, we'll come into, we'll come into an account and we'll ask, you know, we usually solve one problem. Like, so what's, what's the environment and what's the problem you want to solve? And we'll take that problem, we'll solve it, and we kind of give them evidence that "Listen, in your environment with our technology, we can, we solve that problem. Now what else do you want to solve?"

So it sets the foundation you know, for future growth. And, and then you think about the companies with multiple environments, right? So they may have 50 locations around the US, you know. You solve all these problems in one environment, let's say you, you increase effectiveness 10%, you know, we see, we see a lot more than that. But let's say it's 10%. You multiply that 10% times 50, you know, and the, the ROI is just through the roof. It's astronomical, you know. And so um, but and then now we're working with partners, you know. So um, we now have, gosh, a dozen deals in our pipeline with partners who brought deals to us, which is, that's a new thing for us. We've always kind of created our own abundance, but now we have partners bringing things in. But now we'll walk into an account with a, with a partner and uh we'll supply the core technology and the partner will supply the, the services on top of that to make it real inside their environments and solve real problems. And so I think that's the future for us. You know, we want to have uh more and more activity with partners.

[Building AI for Good]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's great. I love the fact you're building AI for good and it's really helping companies save money. It's saving lives within companies. It's being uh I guess more aware of what's happening within your organization operationally. I mean these are just like kind of business 101 things, but it's really I think where AI should be playing and certainly there's some real value you can, you can get out of it. You know what's, what's something that you know now that you wish you would have known four years ago about what you've been building? Building like this specific company or like as an entrepreneur just as an entrepreneur even this...

Dave Copps: Yeah. Um, couple things I think. So one, you know, um as I've done this a few times now, I think one of the things I've learned, you know, is that you're always gonna, if you push the limits hard enough, you're always gonna hit, hit a wall or, you know, or fall down or something's gonna blow up. Or you know, if, if you're really pushing what's possible, that's going to happen. That's just going to happen. So, I think if you know, I learned, I've learned over the years that your situation is not your fate. And what I mean by that is like, you, how you choose to deal with a situation is what determines your fate. Um it's... and because fate is, is malleable. It's not fixed. And I say that again, like fate is malleable. It's not fixed. Everyone thinks about fate as this fixed thing. It's not. It's malleable. You know, like, so we have control over our fate, not the other way around.

So, we get to write the story, we get to write the ending, all of that stuff, you know. So, I think that's one thing I, I, I, I've learned is not to, not to freak out when things blow up, you know? You're still on the right track. You're still on the right track. You still control your, your fa-, your fate, right? And so um, the second thing I think is just persistence is omnipotence, you know. Like when times get tough or focus persistent attention, you know, on what matters and constantly iterating. Like I said before about not just succeeding or failing, but iterate, iterate, iterate until you reach awesome, right? So I think that'll lead you to greatness every time. You know, if you really want to get somewhere in business or life, um don't stop until you get there, you know. And um stay focused on bringing that possibility to market, you know. As I always tell people when I mentor startups that um, giving up is a final solution to a temporary problem. All problems are temporary. All problems are temporary, you know. And so the persistence and the focus just to drive through it, you know.

[Superpowers]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. Well, your energy as a leader, I can feel it. So, your, your employees must love you. I mean, you've got, you know, a lot of charisma and just, you know, you have that X factor that, you know, I call it a superpower, but you don't always know what it is. I mean, you clearly have that as part of your communication skills. And to your point, yeah, we look at stuff, too, as you know, try and look at the problem for what it is, not what you think it is. It's not as good or as bad as you have it. Just keep focused and things seem to turn at some point. So maybe that's more of just an entrepreneurial mindset where you know you'll find a way. You just have to keep going um and not be deterred. But I love, I love everything that you guys are doing. What's on the roadmap here? We're you know almost into 2025. Sounds like you've got a roadmap that's built out pretty well, but what are you, what are you excited about as you head into next year?

Dave Copps: A lot. Um, and before I touch, I was, you said something that was kind of, it made me think about something is like, you know, I, I get a lot of credit, but I, for our company, but I have two guys in particular, well, really a lot more than that, but um my partner Chris Rhode, he's just really, you know, we, we do this, we, we make stuff happen. We make magic happen together. It's because of this, this partnership. And this company we brought Ross in. Ross Bates. And Ross is our CTO and our co-founder, too. And he's just brilliant, you know, and he's one of these guys that you'd love to talk to for an hour because he just, what comes out of his mouth just kind of blows you away, you know. So I've got two really great partners. I got more than that. Acadmy, my, my CFO and my COO. Just everybody's just fantastic, you know.

But, but yeah, the next year or two I think, um, are... when I look forward, it's fascinating, you know, because when I mentor entrepreneurs, I tell them, um, you know, if you predict the future of your company in three... like if you predict what's going to happen in three years and you hit that prediction, you weren't paying attention. And because I think you know, the world changes so much right now. And you have to pay attention. And we, we kind of do, we do that. Like we're always watching things and, and understanding like what we're driving into the future. And so I think the, the product itself, you know, I'll give you the, the ultimate vision of our technology. And that is that we think what we have is, will be... and I don't know it may be next year, I was going to freak out Ross, but sometime soon after that. Yeah. So, all my devs, don't freak out.

But we have one of my, my lead AI guy, Paul. You know, he's, he's adamant on this, too, is, is that um, you connect Worlds into your cameras and sensors and it automatically starts to learn. No human intervention, just it starts to learn about your environment and starts to understand what things are, who, who people are, and gives people the ability now to have that as a foundation. So, it's this tide that lifts all ships. Right now, you're not starting down here trying to figure out what's happening. You know what's happening. You know, you have a dynamic learning environment that you just turn it on, turn on your sensors to this environment, it automatically figures everything out and now it's up to you to build the applications and agents on top of that to solve real world problems to, you know, make, help people be more effective, more efficient, uh, safer and all those things. So, that's the grand vision. Um, but I think, you know, we've got some smaller things I probably can't talk about now because they're going to be coming out pretty soon here. I don't want to tip anybody else off, but um but we're getting closer and closer to that, and some of that will happen this year. You know, we're going to release some things into the market that are going to, that are not anywhere else in the market.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.

Dave Copps: But our, our goal is to be the platform, you know, for real world automation for the enterprise. Just we want to be that platform.

[Finding Partners]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, I know some companies I'll connect you with after this call that I think um, you know, will be nice conversations to have and some potential sales opportunities.

Dave Copps: Yeah. Heard about.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Um, really, really cool. God, I have so many more questions to ask, but I, I just want to kind of go back to something you talked about: people and partnerships. You know, when you're building a company, it's essential. It's like a marriage. If you find the right partnership and the right companion, you know, you can really build scale and go through the ups and downs together. How did you find your partners? Are you talking about inside the company or partners like outside?

Dave Copps: Inside. Yeah, your co-founders, your team. I think, I always like the quote from Steve Jobs where he said you can't connect the dots looking forward, you know. Um, you can only connect the dots looking backwards. And um I always think about that when there's a question like that because um I think, and I, and I coach young entrepreneurs on this too, I tell them like um, plant as many seeds as you can right now. Help as many people as you can today and tomorrow and the next day. And don't stop helping people. Don't stop solving problems. Don't stop. Because every one of those will drive your future. Like you don't know how it's going to step into your future, your part of your future. And so I think that's kind of what's, I, when I look back, you know, now I can answer your question, but you know, it's because I can look back, you know.

And um it was that you know, I, I went to companies and I, I actively, you know, before I started being an entrepreneur which was pretty early because I'm unemployable... but, but I, I, you know, I met people because of my curiosity and my passion for things. When you, I do, I'm a little fofy in this because I'm one of those persons that believes that you can kind of like, the, the law of attraction is real. You know, like if you're, if you're really curious about something and you're out there talking about it and that, you're going to attract people that, that you want to meet. And I think that's true for our company, too. Like we, we have people call us that want to work for us, you know?

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, wow.

Dave Copps: Read about us, you know, and we had one guy call and he said, he said, "I need to work for you." That was the first words out of his mouth. I was like, "Well, who are you?" You know, you didn't know who he was. And I said, "Hey, I'll fly you in if you want to have a conversation." You know, we flew him in. He worked for us today, you know. So, but I think there is something real to that, you know. Like who you are in the world, who you project yourself to be and, and, and what you project as your curiosity attracts people and attracts things in your life. And, and so if I were to give advice to anybody, it's like, you know, don't sit in your room. Get out there, you know, meet people, be passionate, be curious, and, and, and watch what happens, you know. Because it, it does come back. People, if I, I could, I could draw a map on this someday. I might do that someday actually, you know, like, yeah, this led to that and this led to that, you know. But um you can connect the dots looking backwards and, and that's what I've noticed.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

[Communication During COVID]

You know, we've gone through COVID and came out of COVID and things changed and people communicate differently. It almost seems like people are more interested to talk now. They're willing to pick up a phone. They're willing to meet you. Whereas before it was hard to break down a door, now the doors kind of open up. One of the things that I always coach our team on is don't be afraid to pick up the phone and actually make a phone call.

Dave Copps: Exactly.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Because you know, it's all about messaging today and social media and email and... but I can't tell you how many times we've literally picked up the phone and it's the CEO of a company and they're willing to talk, and the next thing you know you're doing business. And you know, it's just getting over those little hurdles that you have in your mind of you know, maybe it's fearful or rejection or whatnot. But people want to communicate, so step up, make it happen.

Dave Copps: 100%. We, and if I'm honest about it, because I'm a big culture guy, right? But one of the things that's been hard since COVID because we, we are a work from anywhere company. If you want to work at home, you can work at home. We'll actually buy you a stand-up desk and we'll, a big 36-inch monitor. We'll buy you anything you want to. But um we do have all-hands twice a year where people, the entire company flies into Dallas and we meet for a week, you know. And, and that's, to your point, that's immeasurably beneficial, you know, because you get to see and meet the people that you talk to every day. Like Zoom's fine, but man, when you meet somebody and start to really get to know them, you can, you can relate to them on a different level. And so 100% we're trying to put more focus on that if I'm just honest about it. Like, you know, having more and more events like that that bring people together and more, more opportunities to clash together and have the serendipity, you know, of, of human relationships settle in.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, they say proximity is power, too.

[Proximity is Power]

So, proximity, whether it's in front of people or, you know, flying to Austin or Silicon Valley, wherever things are being innovated and built, um, it does matter. And you know, I was in Silicon Valley Valley last week and you know, met with a number of companies that were just really coffees and just, you know, nice to meet and greet and walked out of almost every single one of those with, you know, paperwork in hand. Let's do business. And you know, it wasn't, it, part of it was about you know, just getting to know people. But I just, I was shocked at um how much need there is to communicate in person. And, and if you can solve a problem, then you know you can also build you know, good relationships that there's a win-win out of it. So really, I got to get down to Dallas, man.

Dave Copps: Come on, man. Barbecue.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: There you go. There you go. Um, very cool. So, I guess as we, as we end here, um, you know, I just want to thank you for your time. And...

Dave Copps: Oh, man.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: It's really cool to, to finally chat with you. If anybody wants to find Worlds, where do they go?

Dave Copps: Our website's worlds.io. We're all over the web. As you know, our, our handle's pretty much just Worlds or Worlds.io. Um, but yeah, and um, we're, we're open for, you know, any possible conversations. I'm, I'm, my hope in having conversations like this with you, Jake, is that we spark a curiosity with somebody that wants to try something cool, you know, because we're that kind of company, you know, we, we definitely are inspired by the, you know, what the potential of what we have and love to find people that want to make that real in the world, you know.

[We Spark a Curiosity]

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Absolutely. And if there's any roles that you have open or any plugs you want to put, put out there, you know, feel free to talk about. I mean AI engineers or whatnot. If there's, there's people you're looking for roles, you know, hopefully we'll navigate people your way. So feel free to...

Dave Copps: Changes all the time. Yeah. And I definitely want to talk to you about that. So we should talk about that for sure. And it's you know, we have them on our website because they change all the time. But we're always looking for top tier talent, the, the very best people in the world. And we, we create an really great environment. And when you walk into Worlds, you, you find a, there's a whole culture of people that want you to be great, you know, like we tell people, the new people when they come in, one of the first things I want you to do is to get to know your team and understand how you can lift them up, you know, because that's the way they're going to look at you. And um so we have what we call an invu culture. And that's not Linux, you know, is it's actually a Swahili word that doesn't have a direct English translation. It means "I am who I am because of who we are together." And that's the kind of culture we like to build, you know. And uh, I love that. We're looking for people that want to just, you know, do great things together and, and we're inspired by people like that.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. Really cool. Well, Dave, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your story. And, and um it's been a lot of fun here. This has actually been one of my funnest um podcasts just because it's, it's, it's I, I really feel your, your energy, which is great. Um, so thanks for, thanks for doing this and thanks for the listeners for listening. It means a lot to me you spent your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to catch up with you on the next episode. Until then, take care. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and follow us on YouTube where we go behind the scenes to learn what it takes to be a startup founder.

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