This is gonna make a ton of money

The one that I was like, man, this is gonna make a ton of money was, was Glide. I think that the potential logistics is such a huge space. Second for me was the satellites with fire.

I think the team was great, especially the creative stuff.

We were really vibing with each other. Hello everybody, my name is Kevin DeMoe. I'm here with the Vibe Check. How you doing today, Jayla? Tell me about it.

Everybody remembers the year 2025 when a bunch of apes discovered this prodigious mushroom really changed life on Earth. Thank you for bringing this to us today.

Scientist himself, the man that created it.

We was built by nature. Nature! So we have to help them back. If you want to build something, like, it's not how good actor you are, like, how good you execute.

How's your pocketbook at this point in life?

I had a great time acting. We touched the grass. We connect to the, to the earth.

We have a very close race. One team got 15.5, the other team got 14.

Team 2 wins.

Woo!

I think that every time I'm able to speak a little bit about my story on any stage, it's a blessing. And then to be able to compete against the best and then to, you know, meet founders on that same journey is always cool. So I'm Kevin DeMoor. I'm the founder and CEO of Glide, and we're on a mission to make road and rail more accessible. Over the past 70 years, the corridors between road and rail have been extremely broken. Road, extremely congested. Rail, severely underutilized. And the bridge between the two Transloading is a process that is off whack, for lack of better words. It involves multiple pieces of equipment, trains, forklifts, drayage trucks, an army of people, and a lot of capital costs. It takes a unit train 2 to 6 weeks in order to depart, and guess what? They charge you for it. What we've come up with is a very elegant solution. Road and rail combined with hardware and software to unite, to synchronize, in order to solve the greatest problem that we have. Logistics. The top vehicle that we have is an autonomous robotic unit called Raiden. Raiden has the ability to get underneath any road-based trailer, any rail-based cart with little to no modification. And then the bottom vehicle is our manned vehicle called the Glider-M, and I'll show you exactly what that looks like. Raiden is a purpose-built vehicle able to get underneath any road-based trailer and then transport it directly on the rails. We are industry agnostic, so we're able to transport either as a solo or the pack. We have a patent for this technology as well, the only patent in the world. Say you're a port and you're worried about unions and you want to put a man in a vehicle, that's where the Gliderim comes in. So the Gliderim goes down the track, it does track inspection for the track inspectors, and guess what? It's real. So we've built 2 Gliderims. They're actually going to be piloting with our first customer down in Kansas within the next couple weeks.

Seems like the real innovation is on hardware. So how do you— how do we— how should we be thinking about that?

Yeah, the way I think about it, the innovation is in the entire package. So software is is our leading horse. I've been doing hardware my whole entire career, so that's the easy stuff. The software piece is the key enabler. So we've combined fleet management with transportation management, as well as all the environments that pour into that cost, and then made it into a great business model. So we charge a subscription cost for our services. We're asset-based. So traditionally, like Maersk or JB Hunt, where they— you'll sign a truck, we'll go pick up a load, and we'll come back. We do the exact same thing, but we build cool vehicles to serve you. Each vehicle actually comes with financial terms from our contract manufacturer, Custom Truck OneSource.

So you said there's one that includes a driver and one that doesn't?

Yes.

So why would they choose one versus the other if the non-driver is more efficient?

Yeah, so unions and speed to market, right? So the autonomous one, I would have to spend gobs of money and it takes a long time in order to get a customer. With my human-operated one, I was able to build it get certification for both road and rail and deploy it all in the same year and generate revenue. But the question that came up was about the unions. Even now I'm thinking about, you know, how do I win the other side over? When the market sees that that transition works, now I can say I can throw in a robot and it can do what that human vehicle can do. And some markets will say yes and some markets will say no. But now I have both sides of the fence. So it's global domination.

All right. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.

Tim, it's been an honor.

Congratulations getting to the semifinals.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you.

Good.

Great, Kevin.

Thanks so much, buddy.

Thank you all. Cheers. It was so fun to be up there. Great questions. Tim and his crew are always amazing. To be able to talk about our mission and to, you know, explain it to the world in a way that the world hasn't seen it before is always a blessing for us. So happy to be here.

You know, there's great impact, social impact, but there's a lot of money in logistics. And if you can fix this, I think, you know, I can't help but say, like, you're wearing a part of your hat that's like, is this good for the world and are you going to make a lot of money? This feels like both, but it also feels even stronger on the gonna make a lot of money because there's a lot of money in defense and logistics and movement of goods.

I think there's more profitability in this type of industry rather than even the ones that we've seen before, because logistics is everything. If you can solve that, you can solve all the major problems.

I love it. When the railroads were connected, the whole world changed, at least the United States of America, and the economies changed. This is a new economic revolution, in my opinion. from a brilliant entrepreneur that also is good for society. I mean, everybody wins here.

Really extraordinary what you're doing. The rail-to-truck thing, I've got that settled in my head. The union-to-automated thing, I'm still a little fuzzy on. How are you gonna do that? You said you're gonna do both. How are you gonna resolve that if you're sending something from Illinois to Tennessee?

There's a lot of nodes Ports, railroads, industrial parks that are non-unionized. That's where we start. We show the possibilities in regards to inefficiencies as well as the capital increases, how much revenue that person can make in order to pull those other folks in and say, man, I want to do that as well.

To me, that's a huge opportunity if you can actually solve that. And for many reasons, the timing is right.

Megan?

Okay, well, this is amazing. I have to say, I've done other episodes and you can really watch the progression. as you get to the semifinals and the impact. I had to make a decision between heart and financial kind of viability, right? And that was the hardest thing for me because Galena Innovations, I think that's really important. I delivered a great presentation. We have a baby Draper to prove it. Right there, right there.

Being raised by Dan, apparently.

But I do think that as far as viability and the financial part, like we said, the math makes sense. Glide would have to be my number one as far as, you know, financial viability and all of the things, improving every single part of the system. And then the fires was, yeah, my number 2 because obviously, you know, we've seen that firsthand here in California.

Terrific. Dan, thoughts?

Yeah, so I have a couple of different lenses. Not all of you are the right kind of companies for tech space investors, but I was thinking to myself, are all of you investible? And I think the answer is yes. It's just who you get the money from will make a big difference. But I agree with both of them, exactly the same order, which is glide and satellite. The other companies are all investable though, and I think some of them need more time or need more clarity. What the crystal ball said.

Terrific. We're getting there. Let's just see what happens here because, I mean, there are some weird things that happen when we start Working with the medium and the spirits. Okay, I need everybody's attention here. Satellite's on fire, and Clyde, you move forward. The rest of you guys—

I'm feeling amazing, feeling absolutely amazing. It feels like a blessing to be able to compete against the best. It's always humbling, you know. Every victory feels different. Yeah, it's wild.

I knew Kevin was going to win. Like, Kevin was definitely going to win. So I was like, I just want to go with you.