Technology d couples Labor from location. We remove the geographic restriction to hiring, because with remotely operated forklifts you can have someone doing that exact same work in the exact same warehouse but be sitting thousands of miles away. So our customers are using our remote operation platform to connect people all around the country who want need to work with the hundreds of thousands of essential jobs that must be filled to keep our supply chain intact. Welcome to
the restless ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland. As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between. Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business, that fascinate me the most. Elliott cats and shy Magsimov are working at Phantom auto
on some really tricky challenges related to autonomous vehicles. Phantom Auto's mission is to provide solutions that address gaps in autonomous vehicle capabilities, and one way you can look at that is how machines are very good at dealing with a limited number of variables, but as you add more and more variables and you make a system increasingly dynamic,
machines can struggle to keep up. Situations that a human could handle by drawing on similar experiences or using free association or trial and error are beyond machine capabilities, at least for now anyway. And when it comes to driving a vehicle, dynamic situations are the norm. Under controlled can editions and autonomous system can excel, but the world is rarely organized into such standard scenarios, and that's one area
where Phantom auto can help. The company creates solutions in which a human operator can control a vehicle, such as a forklift in a warehouse from a remote location in real time. Using a combination of cameras, sensors, actuators and wireless connectivity, the operator can control the vehicle as if
they were sitting in the driver's seat. I was beyond excited to talk about that technology, but first I wanted to learn more about Elliott cats, whose vision is all about leveraging tech to make a difference in the world, and shy Maximov, who builds solutions that make those ideas possible. I am so excited today to have this conversation. We're going to be talking about a lot of things that I find absolutely fascinating and I want to welcome both
shy and Elliott to the restless ones. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Ji. Thank you, thanks for having us so. First, Elliott, I was wondering if you could start us off by telling me a bit about how you first got interested in technology. Yeah, absolutely so. I grew up in Silicon Valley, really before it was silicon valley, but I kind of
came of edge during the first dot com boom. So I saw from a relatively young age how quickly and broadly technology can be adopted by society, and that's when I really got interested, and and not so much in technology for technology's sake, but really technology that could help make broad, sweeping positive societal change. So I'm mainly attracted to technology that I believe can create material net positive change, enhancing people's safe the or their health or just the
general quality of their day to day lives. Yes, and that DOT COM boom, that's also a time of learning, lots of lessons. You know what is working in that realm of technology that can make positive change in the world versus technology that, without the proper planning, can end up falling apart. Shy, I'm also curious about you. When did you first start getting interested in tech? Yeah, I got a slightly different story than Eliot I. I grew up in Jerusalem, in Israel, so pretty far away from
Silicon Valley. I remember when I was six seven years old, I used to wake up at night and see my dad playing video games. So my dad was a video game addict. So I saw that growing up and I got into computers, playing within real time multiplayer on the computer, connecting land and and things like that. So that's how I got, you know, my my initial passion to computers. I started to learn about networking communication and had a
deep passion for wireless connectivity and built on communications. Later on I got to white combinator and went to Silicon Valley for the first time. I barely spoke the language at the time and that came in and presented the company. We were doing at the time, some e commerce social website that turned into a search engine that later got acquired by Apple. So it was an interesting journey there.
But I would say, you know, for me, technology is always, you know, something that is fascinating just seeing it and what it could change in this world. What the things that you can create and build makes you so excited to do something that really matters. Shall you touched on something I definitely wanted to ask you about, because having someone who is a serial founder of companies is really exciting for me. What is it that motivates you when
you're founding these companies? Is it just that you you have a spark of an idea and you have to see it to fruition? For me, it's a deep passion
for technology. You know, I was inspired by the Steve Jobs and the Mark Zuckerberg of the world when I was, you know, a teenager already, and you know then there's solving big problems, changing the world as the results and doing something that matters and leading teams building something that can really, technologically speaking, make a leap in in our day to day and how we used to do stuff.
Just a be passion for technology. Elliott, we're going to be talking about things that have kind of a then diagram overlap of autonomous vehicles. Did you become interested in autonomous vehicles, partly because this is a technology that is poised to have a tremendous positive impact if we get the technology right. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, as I said before, I'm attracted to technology that I believe
can create material net positive change. And when it comes to our current status quo with passenger vehicles, for example, more than one point three million people die from traffic accidents every year worldwide and, to put that into a pretty sobering perspective, that death toll is equivalent to nearly eight fully loaded, seven forty seven airplanes crashing every single day in a given year in killing everyone on board.
So you know, if that amount of planes fell out of the sky for even a week, we would likely shut down aviation as we know it. But for whatever reason we've kind of just accepted the fact that a certain amount of people are going to die each year driving on our roads. And I really am a true believer that autonomous vehicles can and eventually will change that.
It's going to take a lot of time and a lot of hard work, obviously, to make that change, but I think that, you know, given that factual backdrop, our current status quo, it's a very worthwhile pursuit. And Elliott, you've tapped into something that I think really helps define restless ones, this idea of just because things are this way now doesn't mean that's how they have to be and that, through the application of technology, we can and
envision and make that change. So Elliott, the Society of automotive engineers a while back define levels of autonomy from zero to five. Zero being there are no real driver assist features to speak of in the vehicle. Five being the vehicle does everything and there's no need for human oversight at all. When I talk to people I say we're probably to maybe on the cusp of three, but as that being too cynical, too pessimistic. Listen, we definitely have level two vehicles out on the road today and
that's that's basically advanced driver assistance right. An easy example is Tesla auto pilot. But when we're talking about, you know, what I would call truly autonomous vehicles, we do have an extremely small volume of level four vehicles that exists today.
A level four meaning the vehicles are truly autonomous. You can be sitting in the back seat of the car with no one sitting in the passenger seat or up front at all, but you can only do so in certain very specific operational design domains, which means the vehicles can only travel at certain times a day in very limited weather conditions and in very limited geographic areas. So to expand to more vehicles operating in larger geographic areas, in in areas where there may be rain or even
snow that is going to be very, very difficult. And the issue is just how hard this problem is to solve, because if you think about it, if every day today, when you drive to work, you have to make an unprotected left hand turn, you know that you, the driver in the car, are very, very likely going to successfully make that unprotected left turn a hundred percent of the time.
And for an autonomous vehicle it has to be the same right and if an autonomous vehicle makes that turn successfully nine times in a row but crashes on the thousandth attempt, that's arguably the worst automotive grade product in history. So it's an extremely high safety bar that the autonomous vehicle players need to hit and again, it's going to take a very long time to get there, but I
do believe that it's a very worthwhile pursuit. Yeah, shy, can you talk a little bit about the guiding principle early on with Phantom motto. Yeah, it comes from my experience with wireless connectivity and Communication. You know, as we're talking right now, we can be in different places at the different times and still hear each other, see each
other and help each other. Right. And when it comes to the future of technologies, when you look at the four g even and then five g and sixty in the future we're going to have more and more wireless connectivity and infrastructure and also technologies that would allow us to almost be in a different place in real time. You're not actually going to be there physically, but you will be able to help out. And we're looking at AI.
You know, I remember when it started Phantom, before I came up with the idea, I started working on autonomous system and I built my first AI application. And getting a data set online gets you of accuracy, and then everything else is getting more and more difficult as you continue to develop your software and machine learning and practice more data. But it doesn't just get more difficult linear, it gets more exponential as you go towards the top.
Once you're a ninet, you need trillions of data sets. So when we're looking at the technologies they're there. The problem is they can't cover the entire all the use cases, all the edge cases. And then I thought what if,
with low latency communication, somebody can help out? It doesn't mean that they can jump in in the middle of driving, but if the vehicle recognized it as a problem and then it can slow down and stop in place, wait until someone remotely connects to it to figure out whether they need to to the sideway of the world or continue to do something around an object that is an obstacle that's in front of it. Broad construction areas, right, whether conditions. So that's when I thought, you know what
if we have that human capability? So I started working on an engine for a video communication and data that allows you basically to see what's going on from the sensors like human, not like a machine. Right then be able to send commands back to the vehicle, assist the vehicle or remotely driving in certain cases that are very limited, at the speed, limited the constraints, and that basically resulted in the idea of a human in the loop. Right. So think about someone that can be sitting far away
from where the vehicle is and getting a request. Hey know there's a vehicle in trouble here, can you help out? They assess the situation and, depends on the conditions, they can help out in different paths. Right some would be a bit more involved than others. That was the general idea. But more than that, something that we keep forgetting is computers have been out there now for forty or fifty
years and there's still not perfect. There's no single computer syst them that you can say hey, no, that can never fail. It's a hundred percent secure from anything in any bugs, any edge cases, and I think that combination of machines and human at the same time is the strongest. If we can work together to accomplish autonomy, it's going to be much better and it's not this kind of a vivid idea of like a rosy picture of people
and computers. I think we practice it every day when we're working on our computers and we see that there's certain things that we still gotta do, and I believe it that and I think that's not going to change. I think that's going to be the next couple of
decades to come. We're still going to need to have human in the loop in every computer system, especially mission critical systems that we all depended on and we need that for our psychology and we need that to make them work and we need that to really deploy autonomous
vehicles at scale. That's it must have. Yeah, you've touched on so much that I love to talk about on this show, like I love the idea of Ai being more about augmented intelligence, where the AI and the humans are working together so that the AI is an a willing people to do their jobs better than they could before, as opposed to the AI has stepped in and humans
have become unnecessary. I find it phenomenal that the convergence and technologies have enabled this approach, largely in the sense of of that low latency, because that was, I think, a huge hurdle for us to overcome, and we're entering into a world where we're getting that same sort of low latency, high throughput capability, but now we're not constrained by tethers, which obviously, in the in the case of being able to potentially control a car remotely, is absolutely critical. Right.
You can't have any latency there. When you're talking about moving a vehicle that has some form of cargo in it, whether it's people or products or whatever, and there are other vehicles on that road as well. There are real time events that are happening, so you have to be able to see and react in that real time as if you were physically behind the wheel of the car. I'm very curious about what your approach was to ensure
that low latency, to enable this technology. Right. So we can talk about the approach of specifically how we solve for low latency and communication, but before we get there, I think just taking a look at the history, right.
So we started a couple of decades ago. I think even when I was a child, like ten years ago, video communication like the one we're having now, you know, that didn't exist at the time, and let alone like twenty years ago, when it was only just giant phones, when I don't even have to make a phone call and you barely can hear the other person, you know. So you can see that there's progress and evolution around communication that is definitely trending in the right direction to
enable things like that. If you read online about five g low latency capabilities and and in the future of things like six G, everything points that we're working on getting low latency communication. So first of all places or areas where it may not be the case yet, it will happen eventually and we're a big believer in that. So that's number one. Number two is the design of the vehicle. We believe that the vehicle safety sensor system must be intact in order for a remote operator to
get in. So meaning if the safety system is disabled or not working or as a problem that dissevered with the vehicle, the human operator will not intervene with the vehicle. They can guide, they can give some information, some logs and pointing a direction to the vehicle, but they can't really drive it. They can only drive it when the safety system is working, and the safety system is the baseline protection of the vehicle. That's how we should think
about it, almost like a guardian. Think about like a circle around the vehicle, like your Aida System Today, and the idea is that the remote operator can communicate with that system and say, Hey, you know, you're now detecting an object, but listen, if you reduce that distance from an object but another a couple of inches backwards, closer to the vehicle, then you will be allowed to proceed. Right. So that that's a huge idea. Now it's all within
predefined area of operation. So again we have a guardian for the vehicle, and this is one of the reasons why we are not working with forklifts in warehouses, where you don't have that same problem like auton was vehicles, where their safety systems are just not not there yet. You know, they're overly conservative. You can't really adjust them because there's too much risk on the table. And we're
looking at the forklift in the warehouse. The speed is much lower, so you're allowed to work together with the safety system to achieve the task, which is to drive to somewhere, pick up a palette, places on the racks or load the truck and so on. Some places really have a bad network right as five g continues to
roll out in different places all around the country. We have a niche today that we're very successful at and we're proud that we're making impact in the labor and logistics where the market really needs Phantom today, and that's
in closed environment. Right. So in the closed environment, when you have a warehouse or the yard operation areas where you can actually install better network conditions, you know if you have an issue with the networking, you know, you map the network, you see that there's not enough bandwidth for upload or download and and basically your request to get a better network conditions in this specific area. And there we go. So that's the infrastructure side. Now the
text site. We have the ability to bond multiple networks. You can think of it as it can be a couple of networks together. Each packet of our software is being sent to the best network available, right. So you have basically packets routing and each package that its own criticality. Right. So if you have a data channel versus a video channel and the data is to break system, so you have to have that over all the channels, to have
multiple redundancy layers where you know something that is less important. Right. So we have some prioritization and bonding systems that would build some deep technology and I P that. You know, we spent a lot of time with money working on the first couple of years of the company. That same technology works for cars, for trucks, for forklifts, for you know, delivery robots, and we believe again, as the future and infrastructure continuous to evolve, that's going to apply there as well.
And I definitely want to talk more about the forklifts in particular. Can you talk a bit about some of the challenges that this remote operation helps solve? I know that like labor shortage being a huge one, obviously. So, first of all, we are squarely in the logistics sector. Our hottest application right now is remotely operated forklifts. We also do work with yard trucks and distribution center yards and,
first and last, mild delivery with robots. But when you're talking about the logistics space, you hit the nail on the head right. There's been a labor shortage in the sector for decades. That's become much more acute in the past couple of years, in which many believe, for a myriad of factors, is our new status quo. And our customers have traditionally had to hire, for example, forklift operators
that are in commuting distance of their facilities. But our Technology d couples Labor from location right we remove the geographic restriction to hiring because with remotely operated forklifts you can have someone doing that exact same work in the exact same warehouse but be sitting, you know, up to thousands of miles away. So instead of having to hire people only within commuting distance of the facility. We're turning that Labor pool into literally anyone located pretty much anywhere.
So our customers are using our remote operation platform to connect people all around the country who want need to work right especially coming out of the pandemic, with the hundreds of thousands of essential jobs that must be filled to keep our supply chain intact. Labor is the key
top line problem right now for our customer base. Yeah, I didn't have a deep appreciation for how delicate the supply chain was until the pandemic and we saw the disruption of the supply chain acted out on a global scale, affecting every industry, particular lead computer and Electronics Industries, as the semiconductor shortage exacerbated that problem, and I realized that you could think of the supply chain operating almost like an electric utility and that it's frequently operating near Max
capacity and that anything that would push it beyond that. Suddenly you realize how delicate the system was and when you pair that also with this growing trend of a desire to work remotely, which is happening both in white color and blue color jobs, you realize that this is also a solution for that as well, where it enables people to have that kind of life where they are able to work remotely. If covid taught us anything, it's that,
you know, remote work is probably here to stay. Right the face of work, I believe, has changed forever, but times like Covid have taught us that there are times when remote work isn't just a nice to have, it is a half to have. And what we're doing is
we're providing warehouse workers that same privilege to work remotely. Right, I think that we have an ability to positively impact the lives of, you know, the backbone of our supply chain, these warehouse workers, while at the same time providing a technology to their employers that is solving one of their major challenges, which is not only finding labor but retaining that Labor right, because a lot of times working in a warehouse is really hard work in a pretty tough environment,
and their safety issues. To write. One in ten forklifts are involved in a in an accident each year which can cause, you know, serious injury, sometimes even death, unfortunately. So if you can remove those operators out of that potentially hazardous and definitely uncomfortable environment in put them into an office environment where they're sitting with other colleagues and they're doing the exact same job, but you know, it's seventy degrees and they can have a cup of coffee
while doing that. We strongly believe that that is going to be preferred by both sides, meaning the employers, the companies and also their workforce. Conventional Thinking says you have to pay more to get more. I want the world, but t mobile for business uses unconventional thinking to deliver premium benefits for better R O I, from customized five g solutions to three sixty support. We help you reach your business goals right now. I want it now, innovating
to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking from t mobile for business. Capable device required covers are available in some areas. Some US require certain planter features. C T MOBILE DOT COM. Moving on to dad, because that has become the currency of the modern world. How does data gathering and analysis play a part in your strategy?
This is a great question. I think we're only scratching the surface when it comes to the data in general in this world and we're looking at specifically what Phantom is doing, and you know autnoms vehicles collect data today with drivers that are sitting as safety drivers in the vehicle, right, and you have to practice and drive with people in order to collect data, to teach the machine how to
drive without people. Are Approaches saying, you know, if you can get to commerce and really operate in the way that creates value, true value, not just a safety drivers sitting there without any value for for people or consumer or logistics, you know in our case, and then collect that same data while the vehicles being operated remotely and contributing value to the warehouse or to the road. It's
such an amazing model. You're basically getting paid two collect data on the system and you can practice with this data. But even more than that, what's interesting is you can use models in the cloud that read that data and respond back with what they would do during this time of operation. Let's say a model that needs to compute the best path for the vehicle, and you can also magic with what actually happened with the remote operator guidance
for the vehicles. They'll say if it's in the forklift in the warehouse, right. So you basically have this kind of training. said that, not only is being collecting the data, but can also train in the back end and compare the results of the bottom line. So it's such a great way to get into the market. I think of it like an entry point that is very business effective.
I mean there are many ways to collect data. The problem is they're not really effective when it comes to cost right you just have to spend a lot that you have safety drivers and vehicles driving around for no value. That, I would say. Again, we're the early phases there of that technology. I think in the future we're going to see more. There's a lot of discussions about edge technology.
If it's the autonomy is going to sit in the vehicle or some of it is going to be in the cloud, it's probably going to be a combination of the two. It's just like our Syria on our phone. And again that back to the communication infrastructure and connectivity. Nothing can be deployed without connectivity and build time communication. So it's a backward necessity for the vehicle to begin with. So why not use it to gather board data and move,
you know, create value at the meantime? Elliott, you mentioned earlier, right at the top of the show, that you were really interested in technologies and solutions that can have real material change, positive change, in the world, and I'm curious is there any sort of specific challenge, like maybe even a global challenge, that you would really like to approach an attempt to solve, either through Phantom auto or through
some other venture down the line? Yeah, absolutely. When you talk about operating a forklift right, this is a dangerous job. Want in ten operators get into an accident each year, severe injuries, even death, and so if you can move those people out of harm's way, out of that potentially dangerous environment and into an office environment, that is a huge win. In addition to expanding the Labor Pool for
our customers, we're also diversifying that Labor Pool. So we have, you know, people working for us today that are able to remotely operate forklifts. One is a wheelchair user. He was injured during his service in the military, so you know he he would not be able to operate a forklift in the way that one you know drives a forklift in a warehouse today, but he can remotely operate.
We also have neurodiverse individuals, operators that have autism, and we are quite literally bringing jobs into their homes where they're fantastic remote operate leaders. They can do this from their homes, they can operate vehicles across the country, and so there's real impact here. Obviously we have primary goals. The first goal is to kind of change the face of work and hopefully build a game changing business around doing that. But the second goal, which is equally as important,
is that aspect of positive societal impact. If we can really make positive change for different individuals along the way and open up new avenues for people to do work where they formerly could not operate machinery of this nature, that's the real win win for us. Yeah, that's phenomenal, Elliott. I mean this idea of the technology not just enabling business solutions but also addressing things like accessibility and providing an outlet for employment for people who are completely capable
of doing the job. It's inspirational because we're looking even beyond the critical role that this plays for business operations to remain intact. Before I could let my guests go, I needed to ask Elliott cats shy maximum one more thing. We call the show the restless ones and I have my own definition of what a restless one is when it comes to things like leadership and in technology. But, shy, I will start with you. I'm curious when you hear
that term the restless ones, what comes to your mind? Wow, that's a that's an important question. First, it's really about working, not just for the sake of making money, but really having ambission, having an ambition and inspiration, something to work for that is beyond what's out there. We just talked about this wheelchair and artistic people that work at Phantom.
I would work day, night and weekends if needed to make sure that those people get jobs, because the is something that can make a change that is positive in the world. So restless for me it's making sure that your mission and in the vision, you're doing everything you can to achieve it. Thank you. Shy Elliott, same question. What does being a restless one mean to you? Yeah, it's a very interesting question in the way I would
interpret it personally. To kind of tie together all the threads here, I consider myself a big thinker and I'd like to think that the things that I put my mind to and really put my time and effort into, I want them to have real purpose. And Shy and I are co founders of Phantom, but we have very different skill sets right, as I mentioned before, he's been
an engineer basically since his bar Mitzvah. I had a certain vision, I had a certain idea, a way that I saw the world away that I could make impact, and I happened to be lucky enough to meet someone who not only shared the same vision but, from a
technical perspective, could put that vision into motion. So I was restless in the sense that, hey, this is something that just makes sense to me, and I think Shay was restless in the sense that, you know, not only is this something that makes sense, it's something that's technically feasible, it's technically possible, and so when you get two people like that with a similar vision in the room, we're gonna be just restless enough to make it happen, because
for us, we can't sit here and think about what if we have to create our own offense. We have to make that reality happen and it's what we think about all day, every day. Yeah, I just go back to that thought of just because things have been done this way doesn't mean that's the only way they can be done, and that when you adopt that as your philosophy and you realize that this is an opportunity to experiment and to attempt new things and to innovate. The
results end up being phenomenal. Even in the failures, you learn right like even then. You you learn things like, well, now I know to go a different way, but if you've never if you just accept how things are done, then there's no growth, there's no learning and there's no change. I couldn't agree more and I think that phantom motto in most ways is no different than any other startup.
And the way I I typically think about it is at a big company you can hit singles all day, but if you want to take a really big swing in the bat, if you want to attempt to hit a grand slam and really change the status quo, like if we succeed in the way that we want to succeed, we will change the face of work. Mean people that formerly had to go into warehouses and distribution centers every day and work in these environments and work in these
conditions will have a better quality of life. And we believe that because, also for our customers, the business case pencils so beautifully that this can really create rapid change and we just can't take those swings of a bat. When you're in a large system, you have to have this startup environment where it's encouraged to not only think differently but act on that. Thank you. And so we've done it thus far for almost five years, and we really hope to continue to do it for many more
years and remain restless and thus create that change. Gosh, I can't think of a better way to conclude this episode. Elliott shy, thank you so much for joining the podcast. Thank you for this conversation. It was even more or inspirational and invigorating than I had anticipated, and I have to tell you my expectations were set pretty darn high. Well, thank you, Jonathan. We really appreciate you having us on.
It's always a pleasure to speak with leaders in tech who have incredible drive, no pun intended, and it was obvious to me that shy and Elliott have that drive. Their collaboration is inspiring. Identifying a real world challenge and then building a solution to meet it, and to know they were working on these technologies before the issues with supply chain stability had become undeniable shows how forward thinking
they are. It's also incredible to think that wireless connectivity has reached a level in which someone can operate a vehicle in real time from hundreds or thousands of miles away. I would refer to this use case as a reason why low latency connectivity is transformative. It opens up possibilities that would have been science fiction a decade ago, and that's before you even touch on what options open up when you have access not just to low latency but
high throughput. I really do believe we are on the cusp of an era of unprecedented innovation. Making use of five g technology and beyond will usher in a world in which data analysis, automation and remote Operation Change Everything. These are the elements that are necessary in a world where working from home becomes the new norm, and we'll discover that through careful use of these technologies, we can actually improve operations, make our work more efficient and cut
costs and ease pain points along the way. Thanks again to Elliott cats and shy Maximov for joining the restless ones, and be sure to join us on future episodes. We're I'll talk with more leaders in the tech industry. I'll see you then, m t mobile, for business knows, companies want more than a one size fits all approach to support. I want the world. So we provide three sixty support
customized to your business. From discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already, right now. I want it now. Three sixty support that's customized for your success. That's unconventional thinking from t mobile for business.