Innovation Unboxed: The Boxabl Story w/ CEO Paolo Tiramani and the companies impact on the housing market.

Welcome to Vegas Circle Podcast with your host, pacquiao Chris. We are people who are passionate about business, success and culture, and this is our platform to showcase the people in our city who make it happen. On today's podcast, we're going to be discussing the process of constructing top tier housing for $50,000 with the CEO and majority shareholder of Box, where we're welcoming back to the podcast. We've got Mr Paulo Tiramani. So great to see you, man. Yeah, good to see you. Good to see you, yeah, chris and Pacquiao Great to be back.

We were just saying offline. It's been a little over two years since we had you on before, so I know we got a lot to catch up on. But absolute pleasure to have you back on the podcast. But just to kind of jump right in man. So you guys, you've had two factories since the last time we've got a chance to sit down. Now you're on your third factory, from my understanding. Can you kind of share what you guys have been just kind of short from moving from factory one, factory two and then what we could expect for factory three?

Yeah, absolutely I mean yeah, it's cost two and a half years.

It's unrealized. It's absolutely amazing.

So I think the last time we spoke I don't think we've made anything, I think we were just starting and I don't know if we were in factory one Before that we were in the R&D lab, which was 10,000 square feet, and then factory one I think we're just moving in just football stadium size and seemed huge at the time and that was 170,000 square feet. So then we picked up factory two, which was another warehouse building that became vacant for us and we took that. That was 130,000 square feet, and then the building in between. Some folks had some issues so we put our hand up and said, oh, can we have it? And so we're at 400,000 square feet between three factories. I mean factory may be a bit of a misnomer in terms of one might be mostly storage, but there is manufacturing in each and we're just getting up to speed now in that interim period since we last saw each other getting that production line up and running.

So 400,000 square feet, a couple of hundred people, and it just feels like the beginning, even though it's sort of scarily large.

Yeah, that's extremely scary.

It's really kind of like growing into that space, you know, going from a factory one to two to three, and do you feel like, as you're navigating and getting more space, does it create more challenges or is it allowed you to be able to take a little bit of breathing room and that way you can kind of space things out a little bit more?

Yeah, I wouldn't say breathing room. I think one of the challenges is that we have to be forward looking in terms of volume. So, as entrepreneurs, there's a risk level that if we don't do something versus if we do something, if we stayed in the 170, I think as we wind up production, we would have tapped out the volume pretty quickly and that wouldn't have been good. So if we're continuing just on the topic of building sizes, so we're planning what we call boxilla, yeah.

I saw that, yeah, boxilla.

So we're looking some of the local landholders to put up really a village. It'd be several million square feet. We'll have an R&D village and things of that nature In.

Vegas right yeah.

It requires master planning. So that's going to take possibly four years, something like that, to get it done. So we have to get to revenue and learn our craft, learn how to make the different sizes between now and then. So the 400,000 square feet, that little 400,000 square feet, should get us to about five or six thousand homes a year, which isn't too bad, and then we would put a zero on that. I believe much, much more than that actually in boxilla. So we could stop at the 400,000 square feet, be a nice regional company. The investors would be very happy. We could get it into the black sort of print money sort of thing, but that would be doing. I would consider that a failure at this point.

Really.

Yeah, I think that's the service to the goal, the concept of doing something on a very large scale and having engineered something that can scale very large by scaling large. The three things it has to do is it has to make homes as quickly as possible at the highest quality and the lowest cost. Those are the three legs of our bar stool if we're drinking.

Yeah, we drink vodka right now. Yeah, this is great. The skies is so loud, it disguised it. I mean, step back just a little bit just for our listeners, just kind of remind them of what Boxboy is. So when you guys first started off the casita that you guys had, which you guys are still building, right, that one was 361 square foot, right. Still price points still the same just under $50,000 for you to be able to purchase that home.

Yeah, so two and a half years later, post pandemic where it's, I think, 60,000, so not bad.

Everything in the world's gone up, our costs continue to glide down and that spread allows us to reach profitability. The best way for your listeners and viewers to think about Boxboy is they're basically building shells or building boxes in three sizes. So easiest way to think of them is just like the Legos, right, the little square one, the rectangular one, and you can stack and connect and can't leave those and that's Boxboy. That's the main principle of Boxboy. So we make rooms rather than homes, and then those rooms can be configured into any architectural layout and any architectural styles. Big country, big planet.

And then the other key factor is that factory-bought homes today can't ship because they make them.

You can go down the road eight foot wide and trailer homes, modular homes, they go down the road 14 foot wide, so they make something that's illegal to ship and then they can ship them 100 miles and then they have to put up another factory.

So the magic of Boxboy is they're eight and a half foot wide and they unpack to 19 foot wide, which means that the empty space is packed up, what we call dollar dense product in terms of materials and people, labor, rather, is not packed up, and it's a sort of magic ticket that we can ship something that is packed to the brim eight and a half foot wide, legally anywhere around the world, and when it unpacks it triples in size.

So it's the gift that keeps on giving. So when you have those first principles between the Lego brick analogy and the building shelves that connects that cantilever and then compress down to one third of their size, you can see now that's really really a scalable solution, and with scale comes massive manufacturing efficiency, especially if you're building in an automotive style production line, as we are. So that's a sort of a top level view of Boxboy and we have the modest goal of fixing the global housing crisis. And I'm chuckling, but we actually, we mean it. We mean it. Yeah, so if we shoot for Alpha Centauri and just land up on Mars, it's still a win. Yeah, we were amazing.

Yeah, the one thing I always.

I see him and I look at. I've found social media and I've seen a lot of the homes. They look fantastic. They're great looking homes. You know, the one curiosity I always have is how do they furnish the homes on the interiors, like the appliance packages or, you know, the painting, the decor Like. Is there any of those included, or do you have an opportunity to kind of help navigate some of those challenges, the purchase of those items?

Yeah. So basically there's the inside and the outside. So the inside, first of all, we only make the casita today, which is the studio home, which is 360 square feet, something in that neighborhood. We have like 170,000 pre-orders, which sounds like a lot. When it is a lot it's an insane amount. But I think there's a little wish fulfillment. You know, somebody just says, yeah, I want one Of course.

But then another guy says I want one.

Yeah there you go.

I wonder what your name is on the list.

Yeah, my name is, but some people. So some people are unserious, some people are very serious and maybe they want 10 or 20. So the expression of interest is large enough that we know it's really big right. So we can just sort of perfect our craft just by making the casita and getting that really really efficient and learning all the construction mechanisms, everything we need to do and, to answer your question specifically, the interior ship, complete with everything except the furniture. By that I mean the kitchen, the bathroom, the appliances, the lights, the ceilings. It's done. And I mean done, done. When you unbolt it, you know you plug it in all the utilities gray water, regular water, electric waste, all ports to one corner and you just plug it in. So folks really with the casita just have to move in. Maybe put some blinds on the windows, bring a toothbrush, a bed and a couch, you know, and they're living. And then the exterior. Have you guys been up to the factory? I am so disappointed?

I have not. I have In honest, we've connected off just a podcast.

I'm as horrible I need to go up there, so come on up and you listeners come on up, take a tour and we have outside like a little mini village. We have like a half a dozen, four or five of these things and we call them dress ups. And we've dressed up the exteriors to be like we've got an Adobe and a contemporary and a log cabin and a couple of others. And we call them dress ups because the product is built a modular code, it's secure against the elements as it unpacks. So then the decorative style is just that it's not performing any structural function, which means you can do it, your handyman can do it, your friends can come over and do it and you can just dress up the outside. You know any any way you want.

So that's it. You know that's the inside and the outside. So we're really still taking baby steps. We built, we just built 500 homes last week, which sounds like a lot, and in less than two years, from a standing start, it's an insane amount, especially when you think day one, when we moved in, there was, I think, 20 or 30 of us man, and now you're up to a couple of hundred.

Yeah, couple of hundred people.

But you know, we had to become OSHA compliant. We had to figure out how to make these things, how to turn on the equipment. It was absolute pandemonium. So I think the first one took a couple of months. You know, it took a couple of months.

And then today we're making one every, we're making one every four hours. We make a home every four hours, which is pretty mind boggling and we're slow walking because we're not at profitability yet and we call that one point version, which we which is still the original kind of business, like yeah, so we've now got a two point from all the, from all the things we've learned, all the bugs we've ironed out, and so we should be making that. We should be making that by Q one of next year, and then the production speech should go down to under an hour. So we're making a home every hour. I think it'll be around 45 minutes. And then, boxilla, we should be making a home every five minutes and the reach goal is to make a home every 60 seconds. Wait a minute, did you say? Every five minutes A boxilla. That's the plan, wow.

Yeah, that's going to help solve some of those challenges.

Yeah, and the math is really interesting because right now we have almost a prototype line. You know, by line, you know, we see the cars going down on an automotive production line.

So think of this 10 stations. So right now we'd call it 10 stations. We have 10 stations and we make one every four hours, right? So the new line, the semi automated line that we're putting in currently to make the 2.0, is 20 stations. So it's it's only double the number of stations but it reduces the time by three quarters. So it's an exponential ramp up for the number of stations you have. And then if we go to that, let's call it an hour for 20 stations at 80 stations, which is four times that much. Again we go to five minutes. We go to five minutes, which is one 12th. So you know, if you do the math, you see that it gets more and more efficient the number of stations you have. You know, if you have twice the number of stations, you don't make it in half the time. If you have twice the number of stations, making one quarter of a time. And so that's that's how we, that's how we plan to get there.

And we're working currently, yeah, we're working with Porsche consulting, we'll work with Sandy. Sandy Monroe helps Tesla with and mask with, with their stuff, and, and they've been great. And one of the interesting things for us is we say, well, we have these three building shells, these three Lego bricks to make everything, and the Lego bricks have probably 95 percent commonality between the three sizes and some of them will be empty and some of them will be stairs and some of them. So we're having a sort of religious arguments about how many production lines do we need, and I'm saying we can't just have one production line, it's not going to be efficient. But then the pros say, yes, it should be one big production line, and you just put different configurations down down the line and I'm like, well, that would be fantastic, because now we can focus all of our efforts on one production line versus various you know, it's all about simplicity and first principles for us.

So so that's really interesting and it's going to help our franchising model franchise overseas for growth. That's another part of the growth story. We'll see how that plays out. So, as a franchising model to scale beyond boxilla, it means it's just going to be one production line, doesn't matter what you make and it doesn't matter how many you make, it's going to be one production line. So that really simplifies, you know, the franchise model.

So that's the road. It's kind of fascinating because you're like you don't have a background in like factory manufacturing, right, so you're pretty they're pretty good, great expert at kind of navigating this. Like, how did you develop like your own personal skills and learning how to navigate things just trial by error? Do you spend a lot of time researching or is it really just hiring experts? Yeah, yes, everything is so so.

So I'm an industrial design degree of mechanical engineering degree, and I spent my life designing and enduring products to be made in high volume in factories.

Oh, so you do have experience.

Yeah, I do, but I don't because I visited hundreds and hundreds of factories over my career. I've never run a factory.

Yeah, a different.

Yeah, that's a slightly different skill set. So but that's. It's been like that since. Since we all get together a couple of years ago, just my own personal learning and growth experience has not just been factory either. You know, basically a guy in a box with a box of crowns in the corner.

I'm trying to figure out designing stuff and so we've had to.

We have to learn everything from politics, finance, hr, I mean all the fun stuff, yes and no. I mean you just do what you have to do. You know customer customer service and even the social media waters which are developing for all of us is something we had to navigate. So I'm sort of personally fast on boarding. You know lots and lots of new things I have to learn, but I don't have to be a master at any of them. I don't have to be a specialist in any of them. We just have to hire really brilliant people. So the common thread is we need to hire really brilliant people. So all the skills that I need to have that's the most important one I just got the hire brilliant people, you know, and they have to be loyal, committed, thank you, hard working and brilliant. They have to be loyal. They have to be loyal and they have to be committed to the cause and work very hard and not whine if they get a call at nine o'clock, yeah, on a on a Sunday night.

I mean, we're not not abusive, it's not like, it's not like 3 am Like must be anything for sure, yeah.

Yeah, you said like must we're gonna get into that too, but I did want to ask you to. You guys just brought in Are you able to talk a little bit about the strategic partnership you guys do with dr Horton? Is that that just recently happened, right, or I?

mean I, I, I can talk about what's public. Okay, because we've got. We're always getting ourselves into trouble in the A's with the SCC and things like that, whenever we say things that's not been disclosed in quarterly statements or whatever, and so the our Horton is an investor. Okay, they have, I think, agreed to purchase some nominal amount, like a hundred homes or something like that.

And yeah, we've been absolutely unbelievable. I'll give you a couple of examples. So they're, horton is the number one home builder in America. They just crossed a hundred thousand Homes a year. So if boxable a factory makes a hundred thousand homes a year, which is would be a staggering volume.

I think boxcillor is planning with two million square feet yeah, or one a minute, I'm sorry, one every five minutes.

Yeah, and that's boxilla. Two minutes square feet and we plan to make 50,000 homes. The our Horton makes double that all over the country putting putting Field factories by field I mean out in a field together to put these homes out and then just they'll disappear to the forewinds and then do it, rinse and repeat, do it somewhere else. So pretty amazing. And Guys have been great with guidance. They are and they've been. They've been good with sourcing as well.

One of the one of the nice things for us is buying in volume in sort of my my history. That's not what we're doing right now. It's not buying when you make plastic stuff Previously. These are not high volumes. Right, hundreds is not hundreds, thousands is our volume. So we'll get there, but apparently in this industry is still high volume. So so our, our new board panels are are basically steel insulation and Concrete hardy board. Okay so our grid, those building shells, you know like, you know the it's, it's basically laid out on a grid, just like the bumps on Legos. Okay so everything snaps to predetermined dimensions and Hardy board. You can get it in 48 inches wide, four foot wide, you know, for four foot wait for throwing a pickup truck. It's been done, been done that way forever and we're like uh no, we want to. When I want 48 inches wide, we want 57 inches wide and basically Hardy and allura say fuck off.

Yeah, the hell are you?

excuse me, excuse my language, you can believe that and alright, then and and then you know a couple of calls, and then we couldn't get the price we wanted. It was, it was not good. And then a couple of calls from DR and it's yes, sir.

Yes, it makes it half three bags bullfin now we make.

Now they make the panels for us 57 inches wide. So those relationships are great.

That's great to have a partner.

Yeah, 100% yeah so we have a nice, nice plans with them going forward. I mean, I think it's obvious that they've invested in us to help them build Communities and build communities in volume, and we have to prove ourselves and I think the world, I think it's going to be good. Yeah, take a little while. Yeah, it's gonna take a little while.

It's exciting, man Just being able to do but a hundred thousand homes.

Man, yeah, we are like that it does really make it seem like and crazy tasks. You see them popping up everywhere. Yeah you forget cuz they're? They're privately owned, right. It's not like a big corporation.

I mean not like yeah, they're public but, it's mind-blowing when you think, if you take a refrigerator and in a factory, you deliver a hundred thousand refrigerators to the factory, they're delivering a hundred thousand refrigerators to a hundred thousand different locations, for instance repeat, as I said earlier for everything in that home.

Yeah, it's a piece mode. Yeah, that's definitely be smoke. It's insane, it's insane.

Yeah, kudos to them yeah amazing, amazing company.

I heard all the good things about them there. I heard the people over there like the good corporate culture and yeah, you can see it now, even as a partner that they do a pretty good job of that yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So we got to talk about Elon Musk, but we could talk about it before. So can you kind of share how that process worked with you guys being able to go to SpaceX and kind of getting that publicity of being able to build you know, this casete out in Texas?

Yeah, yeah. So that's in the way back time machine now, yeah, and so we were rock sort of rock-and-roll in our D lab. We're getting some press. Yeah, my, my business partner galley it's also my son Just came to me and said I said I got this. This lady from Elon Musk's office Keeps calling me and we had a little chuckle and that was the end of it. And then, you know, a couple of weeks later came back and said because I think it's really bad, oh, he thought it was a joke.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay so. So we figured out it was real and he said to me yeah, he said they want a bunch and I said, well, we've got three, they got you. And he goes yeah, I know he told me got three and she goes kind of have them. I said what did you say? He said he said I said no, he told he told him no, he told him oh wow. And then she caught back and we're like all right, you can have one. So it works out really well.

So it's very exciting period. I mean just, guys are godless, face it for all of us. And yeah, so so small crew, and we took one of the prototypes which was I mean, it was rough as balls, this thing, and he's very nicely not said anything bad about it, you know, I believe, but it was rough, you know. And and so we just we just put it on a truck and ship down there. And you know, we were there to put, put it up, but we've, we were fans as well, of course you know, just like all the other fans that go down there.

So, yeah, put it up, put it up, and I think they moved there and I think they use it as his guest house and whatnot, I don't know. And so that's the beginning in the end of it. And and then the press blew up and you know, we had an NDA so we couldn't talk about it. And then we started talking about it a little bit, little touch, a little bit.

Yeah, and then we got a call just said excuse me, don't talk about this.

I don't like fine, and but the less we talked about it, the crazier it got. That's how. Yeah it was. It was the inverse. It was the inverse. And there's some of the stuff that we talked about. It was the inverse it was the inverse, and there's still a lot schools that pop up today and, like I said, he's been very generous. They didn't, it didn't shit. Talk us. Yeah for the Lucy goose equality, and it was great, it was great, that's good publicity regardless.

Yeah sometimes it's good, good or bad, it still works.

Yeah, we have met him. I'd love to meet, like everybody else in the planet.

Probably. Yeah can we get into a little bit of some of the investment opportunities you guys have kind of put out there right? Yeah, can you kind of share what you know, what those three investment opportunities are for you know, for the public, because I know you guys are still raising capital on things.

Yeah, I can't, I can't say too much again. Okay just totally get ourselves into trouble. So we've raised about 150 million from from About 40,000 Investors, retail investors. So they get a little frustrated. I think sometimes they don't understand how difficult, how, how extraordinarily difficult it is To make production in volume. So making a prototype is pretty straightforward and you can patch, patch the little bits and pieces. But high volume production in Quality, the right cost, is Extraordinarily difficult, very expensive to be able to do. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we spent tens and tens and tens of millions of dollars. Yeah, some don't understand that as well. Yeah, so that's where we are, I think. I think we're probably the biggest crowdfund in history, maybe short of some crypto token or something like that. 150 million, it's pretty wild. And we have, you know, reg D, reg a plus, so we'll continue to raise the company. So we have a, we have plans for boxylla. Boxylla is a billion dollar factory and we have plans on how to raise that cash. I think we're most of the way there now, but it's not something I can talk about loud and it's to do something this fast. At this scale.

You have to do lots and lots of things at once and you have to expect to be wrong some of the time. So you can do things. You can do things serially or you can do things in parallel. It's like electricity. So if you do things serially, you can do you could task number one, nail it, get it right and go to task number two and keep doing that. It takes a really long time and you may miss the opportunity. You may miss the opportunity. You may rent out a cash as well.

If you do things in parallel. You do tasks one, two, three, four, five, and they may interrelate to each other. And then you have to estimate, guesstimate how they will interrelate with each other, make your best estimate and then do all the things and then do all the things at once. So we've chosen the latter path because we feel that there is no choice. If we're gonna scale this fast, we have to do that. So we make some mistakes not too many, but it's been a very interesting process. How to get there. And then, in terms of the money's raised, boxer will be a billion dollar factory. We continue to raise under the auspices of the SEC, which I don't mind at all, because it means that we're doing everything on a solid accounting foundation and treating everybody right. Yeah, so that's it.

So boxablecom. We also have an app called.

Boxercom and we also have an app which is pretty cool. Yeah, it's really good. It's on the app store and the other stores.

I don't realize you guys had apps. I gotta check it out. Yeah, it's really good.

It's a really good one on the app stores. We did it internally with our software team. Congratulations.

Thank you.

It's like the little things.

No, that's powerful. We get that app that makes it so much easier, like the simplicity you're talking about.

Yeah, and folks can. They'll get notifications. We use it sparingly for news. We don't bombard folks, but they can check their investment. They don't know how their investment is doing. And we are basically. We are not. Basically we are a public company with no trading platform. So you think of a public company, you think of the Dow or the Nasdaq or something you can hop on to Ameritrade or whomever and trade it. So we have to comply with all basically basic public company accounting rules salveins, oxly, everything For a startup. It's enormously difficult. It's enormously difficult to onboard all those skill sets at the outset.

So we've made the mistakes, so that's been an interesting challenge. Continue to pivot and continue to win man, which is great, I think yeah, in the end, in the end, I think it's going to turn out quite well. We're definitely in the thick of it. We're definitely in the thick of it right now, so I can't give you specifics on the investing but boxbotsballcom, boxbotsballcom, awesome.

And then you guys were just recently in the news man Can you share a little bit about? Were you guys trying to assist with Maui? From my understanding and were reaching out. Were you guys successful at that at all?

Well, I mean, it's a process, so we've not been successful. We were made inroads, and you know. So we're looking at it. We're on the West Coast, we've got inventory of a couple of hundred and we said, okay, we'll divert this inventory directly to you and I'm going to price gouge, nothing, you know, just let's do it. And so our guys are working with everybody. You know, our governor, joe Lombardo's, reached out, it's my understanding. He's a great governor, by the way and at various levels of government, but it's like no good deed goes unpunished, because, you know, one group says you guys are horrible, you should be giving these away. And we're like, excuse me, excuse me, lady. And then somebody else says, says like, wait a second, you can't give these away, I'm going to invest.

So it's like you can't you can't, you cannot win it, so like how about we don't gouge?

we'll get into as quickly as we can with diverse inventory. We'll be very reasonable on the price, and so that's what we're trying to do. That's what we're trying to do, so is it?

really the ability to like take them away? Like, as you install a Casita, can you break it back down and move it somewhere else? Like, is it really easy to deploy and then redeploy somewhere else?

Yeah, 100%, and that goes for the whole system. So it's the ultimate. So sustainability is pretty big government buzzword. You know, today Sustainability really is just a function of cost and folks don't really realize that and this probably sounds really horrifically unpopular, right. But you know, cost is really, you know, a factor of energy used, so a box of all.

We try and be very efficient about energy and we get into ever smaller minutiae, we keep taking the task and cutting it in half, and you keep cutting things in half forever, right. So we're right down to like how far a human being walks from here to there to pick something up and move it over. I mean, this is how we really crush the cost. So we're mostly concerned in that narrow factor with cost. Why? Because we have a customer and we want to give it to them for the absolute lowest cost we can For very, very high volume, and we're very sincere about that.

What it happens to do as a sort of a byproduct is it makes it massively sustainable because we're using less energy, because waste is not is wasteful, it's inefficient. So we have a lot less waste, we re-grind and repurpose and things like that. We're very careful about the energy we consume. We're actually sort of leading the charge on appliance energy to lower the energy used by appliances, especially in Vegas. Yeah, why Are we trying to save the earth? No, we're trying to give lower energy bills for our customers as a byproduct. Folks who want to save the earth are happy with us. They're sort of different. And then to your point, as sort of super securtis route that's your question.

Hey, we'll take a long road.

The ultimate in sustainability is a house that has no projected end of life. So we're you know homes should last hundreds of years. We're engineering our homes. We have a forever mentality about the homes. Like I said, the steel concrete insulation. It's basically a brick. You know what house I mean these things are really incredibly solid.

So we don't have an end of life situation, but you could have sort of an end of purpose situation where you look at that lot and you say I don't, you know, I need to take down that single family and put multifamilies. So normally that house would just get leveled, not with boxable. Why would you take something that has value and not just folded up and repurposed into something else? So that's the ultimate in sustainability. Is that the attitude, is that it never dies, it just gets repurposed unless it ultimately fails.

Yeah, that's what we're gonna ask you about the life story, but you answered it for me, so that's a hell of a question. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, that's a very interesting point. You don't want it no more.

You can just resell it and relocate it versus you can keep your land and just move the boxable somewhere else 100% and in terms of secondary markets, it might be our secondary market, might be Amazon, might be eBay.

But yeah that's gonna spring up as we mature. 20, 30, 40 foot boxes. They all have a bin number, boxable identification number like automated bin number so somebody can look back and see when it was made, what its original purpose was, and things like that.

So that's fascinating.

Yeah, and the other nice part about it is it fits the way we live.

Not everywhere in a built-up city you're gonna have an apartment and that's it. You're gonna go in and live in it. But if you have a lot and you put a home down, you can't afford a home with as many bedrooms as you want. So you get smaller bedrooms and the kid comes along. Or you need a patio and you can add an additional box and it even changes the way, so in sort of the arc of life growing family theoretically can even go and buy, go and find a boxable home. I say, oh, this is cute, but we're having a kid in three months. Let's add a bedroom. You can do that.

And then, yeah.

And then the arc of life. I mean the human life. On the other end of it. You could have empty nesters that you know. Kids come home, they fight. You don't like your tax bill because you taxed on the number of bedrooms, whatever nonsense the government's doing, and you could pack up a boxable pocket of $5,000, get rid of a bedroom, lower your tax bill. So it changes the way you think of building construction, because it's truly repurposable in lots and lots and lots of different ways. But we're nowhere there yet.

You know, this thing is sketched out, all sketched out, and we have to just make it all real and it had. The business has to mature over decades.

I'm gonna ask you just before Paul and I can't remember like from the vision of putting Boxwell together. How long did it take, like to least get you know what I mean. Like you come up with this vision you and Galeana, I'm assuming you guys were talking and wherever you guys were at right and you're saying, oh, we've come up with this idea From that vision to literally moving in it. Right, how long did that take?

So it depends when you look at it. I would say, you know, 20 years ago I put up a spec spec means for resale, spec mansion. When I see mansions in Greenwich, connecticut, it was, I think, 11,500 square foot mansion and that I made it modular because I didn't know anything about building construction. I knew that I'd get my lunch eating by with change orders and people looking at the rookie and saying you know, we can take him. So I went modular because it was a fixed cost. I remember back in the day it was like $660,000 for the whole thing. It was a lifetime ago, right, and that mansion, we sold that for five and a quarter million dollars. But this is probably 20 years ago, right, yeah, and Greenwich Connecticut is a big number.

Connecticut is, yeah, it's very high end, yeah, and that had nine foot ceilings and the rooms were 14 foot wide on the inside. Nine foot ceilings and 14 foot wide. It's a big space, man yeah but Boxball is nine and a half foot ceilings and it's 18 foot wide. It has much, much better construction. So everybody sees a little Casita today, but the reality is I could have built a much better mansion with a 40 foot Boxball. Once we have the three sizes of Lego the 20, 30,- the 40 foot.

I could have built a much better. So that was 20 years ago and I just remember getting my pickup truck and going and visiting a lot of the modular manufacturers and just thinking, like as a factory guy, as an industrial designer, mcanthaginia, that this is a disaster, this is a mess. And so I filed a couple of patents and went about my life and then decided a few years ago to sell my previous business, move out here and give it a shot. Galliano sold his farm, large farm in Northern California, came down and joined me and that was maybe five or six years ago. And then I think you sort of we didled around. There was basically three founders there's Galliano, kyle, who also came and moved out West with me from the East Coast, new York area, and we just fiddled around in the R&D lab to see if we could convince ourselves that we had anything.

And then this was maybe how long ago Three, four years ago and we got a little bit of press it was around it's just before Musk, I think and IBS was coming up and we got a call out of the blue from a magazine company that said do you want 60,000 to make a couple of boxables each 40 footers? So we did, you know, we said, let's try it, let's do it. And then the year after that, after we realized we didn't know what we were doing and didn't know what to sell, so, we configured the tech for the Casita and then the year after that attended the IBS show again, and then everything went crazy.

And then we started talking to investors and angels. I put a few million in. At this point I was like I think I'm not gonna spend $200 million on it, it's a bit much. And yeah, Galliano said why don't we try crowdfunding? I think we talked about this before.

Yeah, we did a little bit yeah.

And so from there, that was I don't know four years ago. I mean, everything's happened very quickly.

That's a short period. What a story. Yeah, it's a short period, man.

Yeah, it's a really short period of time and just scaling up the staff, the different departments, has been a huge challenge. We have now. We have folks from Daimler Chrysler, from Bilstein, I think. We have three or four guys from Tesla. Oh wow, Everybody in the office pretty much is from the tech world. We have one poor guy, Lance, from the modular constructions.

Yeah, let's go. Let's go, beat you up now because you over here doing all this yeah.

That's funny, though hilarious. You know well, that's being a business. I know you answered this before, but I'm just curious. You know things have changed and pivoted and things. What would you say to somebody? I mean, obviously you and Galliano thrown yourself into this, right to this business. What would you say to somebody that wants to be a small business, or they might have a dream, they might have a vision. Whatever it is, what would you share with them for what they should do next?

Yeah, well, I mean, so you guys are in the same boat, right?

Yes, you're living every day, so I mean I can only speak for myself and possibly for Galliano. The first thing I would say is not everybody's wired to be an entrepreneur, not everybody's wired to be an entrepreneur, right? So unless you are willing to live and breathe every day, unless you're willing to put everything a second place I mean everything, I mean your family, I mean your children, possibly your health, everything, your friends, everything has to better be second place or you're probably not going to make it until you sort of get it figured out and then you can act to make possibly a bit more like a human being. But do you really? Do you really? Or at that point, are you just wired? Are you just wired?

You know, if words like work-life balance come out of your mouth, it's not for you, right? If you're not thinking about it at the weekends, like I am and I know you guys are all the time it's not for you. It doesn't make you a bad person. You just go, get a job and have a lovely career and a lovely husband, wife, significant other babies. Go ahead and do it. You can do it all, but the business had better be number one. The business had better be number one.

So that would be the first thing, I think you really have to gauge yourself and I would say it's not something you can convince yourself to do. I think it's almost a compulsion. So I don't think you can decide. I think your wiring decides whether you have compulsive enough to say no, I don't want to work for the man. You know I have issues. You know, and you probably do have issues, you're probably not a terribly well-balanced individual. You know. I think success is unreasonable because it's not the norm. You know, if you want to be more successful than most people, it's not the norm. The norm is average. So success by definition is not average. So maybe you have to be a little bit unreasonable.

Maybe you have to be honest.

And if I say, one other thing that I think most people don't get is you don't give up people that can make a goal something, just give up. They do too easy, so easily they give up.

Too soft yeah.

Yeah. So you just never, never, ever give up, never, ever, ever give up. And I would say the third one is, if you hear yourself internalizing excuses or, even worse, it coming out of your mouth that you're making an excuse, you're never going to make it. If you're making excuses and by that I mean I don't care who's fault it is, I don't care who's fault it is, I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix it Because if I say, oh, I couldn't do this because that guy did that and it's not my fault, I just took all my power away.

I took all my power away to fix that problem because I just put it over there and now I'm not going to do anything, I'm going to be a loser. I'm going to be a loser. So I don't care who's fault it is, I'm going to take that on board. I'm going to take that on board and I'm going to say I'm going to fix that. It's my problem and I'm going to fix that. And now I've empowered myself. I hate using words. I can power by the way.

No, but I get it, but it's true.

It's true, and those are some of the maybe, certainly, I think, the three biggest principles You've got to show up.

No, I think you've got to get done and, like what you're saying, I love your honesty and transparency on it.

That's what I want to hear your perspective. The white is in the ass. Sometimes I get it. People actually say it's like oh my god, did you guys really just say that?

But it's true, though a lot of the times, man, we don't care.

I don't have to remember the last piece of bullshit that came out of my mouth. I don't have to remember the last white lie that came out of my mouth. Yeah you're just going to just be yourself. Who cares, be pompous and all this. So I mean, obviously we all lie socially. I mean, if you haven't seen somebody and they put on 100 pounds you're not going to say you're fat load or something.

You know what I mean. You're going to be polite.

But outside of that, let it out.

Yeah, that's real. Yeah, that's real.

That's real stupid.

I do get to ask you any update, just as we're finishing up favorite restaurant in Vegas. Man, I know I probably asked you before, but what's the new one that you can give us here?

Oh, I hope I'm gonna give this one to you before it's a panavino.

Yeah, I'm about to airport Sunset. I want to see a time place. Yeah, yes, I'm gonna be more.

And the nice thing about Panavino is the it's food's Italian. Yeah, maybe a little bit biased. I mean it means bread and wine and Italian panavino and the major D. There is gentleman by the name of Vincenzo. Okay, and Just just say Paolo sent you, okay, we'll hug you. Take care he might let you cheek. My girlfriend loves getting hugged by him. Get a room Disgusting.

Okay, I'm gonna pay to be the mom not bring up my wife.

He's just a lecherous Italian.

Good stuff. We always give us a gym. In just finishing up, what would you be focused on? Just finishing out strong for 2023?.

Oh gosh, professionally professional person. Think about it for a moment, maybe in the next Iron man movie the way you.

So I would say I would say professionally.

So the biggest challenge we have with the company today is Certifications, as the government gets in the way and you talk to government people and they will readily agree with you. The government is getting in the way. So I'll be a very quick example. And we didn't realize it would be this bad when we started, so we're grinding through it. By that I mean certification, state-by-state for our building product. So it'd be like since a pre-industrial business, there's no rationalization Across states. So it'd be like you get in your car, you drive to Arizona and you get to the border and they put the hand up and they say, well, you can't come in. I said, well, I can't come in. A little to your wheels they're half an inch too big. Yeah, certification. So we're grinding our way through.

We have zero certifications right now in the modular space. There's about nine Modular certifications across 50 states is about nine States that require it. We can also just get into the weeds, do something called a part model RV so we're able to sell. We're on the cusp of breaking through with California, arizona, nevada. Like most things, california is the toughest nut to crack. Once we get that, the others will flow and it's just part of us being, you know, in a leadership position in this space to turn a pre-industrial business into a post-industrial business, so we can all get get the goodies that a model finish line. So on the professional side, you know, I think, I think that would be it Awesome yeah but we're rooting for you.

We've got to keep keep having you come on Just to kind of share. Every every time we you come on, we learn something new, man. It's great. So definitely check us out the Vegas circuit, our common pile. We appreciate you, man, thank you yeah.