Earning $$$ While Driving (The Future Of Car Data) - Rob from DIMO

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Welcome to the Andy and Friends podcast. I'm your friend Andy, and in this episode, I have Rob, who is the CEO of Dimo. What Dimo is doing with car data is pretty amazing.
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They have a device you can install in your car in a couple of minutes, or you can just connect your car to their app and then start earning their token. But it's really so much more than just that.
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Rob filled me in on all the different things that Dimo is doing right now and how you can get a lot of value out of what they're doing.
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Plus, he even drops a bit of alpha here and there about some big new updates in the world of Dimo that are coming soon. So let's jump into it. And here we are on this episode with Rob, the CEO of Dimo. How you doing?
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Good. How you doing? I am doing great. I'm excited for this conversation.
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So for those who are tuning in, who li- have been living under the DePin rock for years now and don't know what Dimo is, what you do there, why don't you tell us? Yeah. So Dimo makes cars smart.
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We connect cars to the internet, so you can do really cool things with them. Um, a lot of people, when we say we help developers build apps for cars, think like, "I've already got CarPlay. I can play Spotify."
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Like, that's not what we mean at all. What we mean is, like, you should be able to connect your car to your insurance company if you want to. Maybe you don't want to.
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Maybe you don't want to see them, them see you speeding.
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You should be able to connect it to, like, a parking garage, and your car should just, like, pay for itself and, and, uh, coordinate with the garage as to where it needs to go park itself and auto valet and all this kind of stuff.
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Um, it should be easier to buy and sell used cars. You should be able to sell them with all this data that, that makes the buyer know that the car is in good shape and all that.
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You should, you should be able to own the data from your vehicle. So we enable that, and it's kind of uniquely enabled by blockchain.
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A lot of projects, um, are a more traditional SaaS business that happen to have a token as a reward, but we genuinely build our technology stack on blockchain, and there's really good reasons to do it.
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We wouldn't be able to, uh, satisfy the automakers and insurance companies and everyone else if it were some proprietary centralized SaaS. So that's Dimo. Very cool.
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So I wanna dig into the data element 'cause that's, you know, data makes the world go round these days. Data is the new oil. Uh, I wanna dig deeper into that.
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But first, um, I'm curious, um, you know, you're, you're a Web3 company. Um, you're a DePin. Uh, why-- So, well, first, how did you get your start in crypto, and then why did you decide...
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Why-- You could've built a, a Web2 company, you could've built a traditional company doing this stuff. Why, why Web3? Yeah. So I was at Vroom, a car company, selling, selling used cars online.
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I was there in twenty, twenty fifteen to twenty seventeen. And a friend of mine sent me the Ethereum,
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I don't know what to say, it was a white paper or the website, whatever it was, something that kinda showed a few of the use cases, and I since went on to, you know, read the whole white paper and all that.
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But, um, and seeing the, this concept of a distributed ledger being used for voting, supply chains, finance, organization structures, whatever, it made so much sense, and it was so exciting.
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And my take was, all right, I'm at the age where we all get a couple transformative technologies, like, per generation, and it-- maybe this generation's gonna get a few extra 'cause it's nuts what's going on now.
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Um, but, you know, if you were Gen X, it was maybe, you know, early internet dot-com was your opportunity to do something crazy and, and get into something early on.
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Um, and for, for me, it was, it's either gonna be AI or blockchain.
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And I'm not a Python engineer, so I had to said I'll do-- I'm gonna dedicate the rest of my career to blockchain and, and enabling these types of things.
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And when I got into it in twenty seventeen, twenty sixteen, actually, um, it was kind of pre-ICO, pre the hyper-financialization of all tokens.
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And so it was, like, more about the use cases, and that's always been kind of what got me excited about this space in the first place.
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Um, I joined ConsenSys with a Y, the Ethereum development company founded by Joe Lubin, and I was there for four years and saw a bunch of different eras of crypto. And I told myself,
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"I'm only gonna leave and start something," which I did wanna do, "but I'm only gonna do it if the thing genuinely benefits from blockchain."
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It can't just be, like, a thing that happens to throw weight around some blockchain, then go launch as a token, cash out quickly, and go on with your way, right? So, um, in the case of Dimo,
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I mean, what we're building genuinely couldn't be built without blockchain, right? Um, we give cars an identity. We give cars and drivers the ability to set permissions as to who can access it.
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We, we help to, help the user to store their data. And if you were to imagine, like, the centralized alternative to that, like, you know, Apple would be a great builder of this.
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You could imagine Apple gives every car its own Apple Car ID, and there's an Apple developer kit for building apps for cars that let you take remote control of the vehicle and change, you know, open and close the windows and lock the car and rent it to a friend, whatever.
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They could do that. And then they would say, "You know what? We can also do payments. In fact,
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we have to do payments, and if you don't do our payments, we're gonna kick you off our platform and, uh, and we're gonna take thirty percent.
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And, oh, now we're launching Apple Car, so, like, ours is gonna-- we're gonna get some preferred, you know, inroads that yours won't, and we're gonna..."
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Automakers are just so uninterested, and, and, and DMVs and DOTs and insurance companies, they don't wanna be whole-- like, give away all of their power and this entire new, uh, ecosystem to a centralized company like that.
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I'm not picking on Apple's fine, like any other company, but it do- doesn't matter who it is. They don't wanna be in that position.
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So you have to be able to offer them a trustless open protocol where we could disappear, and you could just keep minting these cars forever.
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As long as the blockchain's working, our system for setting permissions and giving cars identity will just work forever. And that database will be kind of open and trustless forever, so long as the blockchain is running.
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So, um-That's why we built it this way, and that's why I was so excited to do it in the first place, was because here's a, a genuinely, um, useful thing that can be built, if only for blockchain.
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And, and so now's the time to do it. That's a very interesting point you just brought up.
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And now, uh, this is my third, um, uh, full c-crypto cycle, so I've seen a lot over the years, um, battle-tested, uh, crypto veteran at this point. What does that, what does that mean you got in if th-this is the third?
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Uh, twenty seventeen. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah. Well, I, I got my f-first start in crypto in twenty fourteen.
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I built my first mining rig in twenty fourteen, but I basically forgot about it for two years until the tail end of twenty sixteen, then I'm like, "Oh, what's this crypto thing?" That's a good strategy.
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Set up a miner and then forget about it for a couple years. That's great. Well, I didn't run it the whole time, unfortunately. Oh, yeah. That's, uh- It was, uh... That would've been really, really good.
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Anyway, uh, I've seen a lot, and one thing that, you know, I've seen, you know, tens of thousands, if not millions of tokens at this point be created and stuff, and every project, you know, they wanna put this thing on the blockchain to do this thing on the blockchain.
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And, and I've always had this idea in my head that's like, everything does not need to be on the blockchain. This is cool. It's obviously revolutionary.
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It's obviously, you know, has a place in the future, but there's things that, you know, maybe are better suited to do it elsewhere. So I find it fascinating that you recognize that.
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Um, and, you know, I, I'm curious, you know, with the insight, um, of, you know, should we build Dimo as a, as a Web3 company? Here's why it needs to be Web3.
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H- what type of businesses are best suited going this route and, and, and which ones are not?
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Because I feel like this is a helpful way to maybe discern as you're looking at projects and go, you know, this is snake oil or this, you know, shouldn't be, um, this shouldn't be on the blockchain or, or maybe, you know, this is a cash grab, um, 'cause there's so much greed in this space.
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Like, how do you... I, I'm curious how you thought about that and how other people can navigate thinking about that. Yeah. Well, first of all, there...
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a lot's been said recently about how there's just like tens of millions of tokens and how bad that is, and I actually I kinda disagree with that point. I think that
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early on, if you launched a website and it was on, like, people would just kinda find it because there were so few. And then, uh, now at this point it's like, good luck getting attention.
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You start a new Twitter handle, a new YouTube channel, uh, a new website, like, people aren't gonna find it unless you make them find it. So I think the same thing goes for tokens now.
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Like, there's, yeah, there's tens of millions of tokens, but ninety-nine percent nobody will ever hear of and nobody will find unless they somehow come across the contract address somewhere.
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So I'm not, like, too worried about it. Everybody's... There, there, there is more... I think it's, like, really in the top thousand is where it, it, it matters.
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And, and the more competitive that band gets, the, the, yeah, the harder it is to, to break through. Um, but the... Yeah, somebody creating the fifteenth, like, Kendrick Lamar
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meme coin on pump.fun today, you know, this hour, like, doesn't really impact other projects. Um, who should build on blockchain? Uh, really any time, you know... So the thing that was so
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great about the internet, so freeing about it, was you had these protocols like TCP/IP, which is like the internet protocol, just like how you navigate to websites, um, and connect to servers.
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The, uh, SMTP mail transfer protocol, that's how emails work, right? Like any... So you, so you don't need to be locked into only Google. You can have Google, Yahoo, Microsoft.
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All these email platforms are interoperable with each other because it's, they're using the same transfer protocol. RSS is another one.
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All these protocols were great messaging protocols more or less, but they don't maintain state because there was no shared ledger.
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So you had these very freeing, awesome, innovative, open systems where there's no counterparty risk.
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Like, no web- no company's afraid that they're gonna get kicked off of the internet, like their web, their URL's gonna be revoked from them.
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I mean, there's like some ways, but that's not really a, a concern versus, like, your Twitter handle. Yeah, you better worry that you, that could get revoked from you.
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Um, so these, these protocols are excellent, but they're limited because they can't maintain, you know, a unique identifier for a car and prevent the double spend problem with money and, you know, whatever it is.
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So when you need to maintain this kind of like append-only ledger, uh, it's really the only tool that you have that's, that's, you know, effective for it.
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So we wanna send, not just send a message that you wanna send money, but update the balances. Now you need a blockchain.
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Um, and so, so I actually think a lot of projects, you know, similar to, like, every, every business is an internet business now. It's just a matter of how much on the internet they are.
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Like, Amazon's very much an internet business. Best Buy is still an internet business.
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Even a business that just lists their address and their hours is, you know, a store that's doesn't even put their inventory online, it still, like, has some internet.
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So, like, I think every company should have some blockchain piece, even if it's just accepting payments.
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Um, but it's really just a matter of how far they go, and I would actually love to see more projects, especially in DePIN.
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Like, it's cool that there's a token reward, but could you make it so that the ability to add new types of sensors is decentralized such that if your company disappeared, like, people could still add sensors to the network?
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And there are maybe some governance around that or licensing around that, some ability to kind of establish canonically that this is a trusted sensor part of this network, um, to point to where the data is stored off-chain for these, uh, sensors and, and the tokenomics for how they operate.
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Can it, can it be more automated and, and on-chain versus re-requiring a central company to, to do it? And, and it's not just, like, for some moral purity test that you would do it.
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It's so that this thing can exist forever, and people can build on it without fear of the rug being pulled out from underneath them with new API fees or, you know, the central, you know, company changing the rules of the road without, without, uh, working with them.
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So, um, yeah.Hope that answered the question. That was kind of the long, long-winded version. No, that was great. No, I agree, uh, I agree.
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That's some of the reasons why I love, uh, this space, um, and why I feel like especially DePIN, this, you know, subset of, of the, the crypto world, um, I see DePIN as if not the future of business building, at least a huge component of it.
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Uh, you know, we had a great analogy here that also fits in with the, the Dimo, um, story is, you know, we had taxi companies, they had to buy all their taxi cabs and get people to drive and whatever.
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Then Uber comes along and says, "We're gonna disrupt this whole thing. We don't need to spend money on infrastructure. We're gonna have people provide that," which is kind of like a web two DePIN almost. And then
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I feel like DePIN is the next evolution of that, where we have this, a- all these on-chain tools, um, all these blockchain-based tools, this permissionless element, and then also, you know, the direct native, uh, rewarding and, and interesting other, uh, other, other elements of that that's layered on top of it.
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Um, so I view, uh, like I feel like once all this takes root, people cannot, you know, not pay attention to it. DePIN will be the way that businesses are built in the future.
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Um, I'm curious if you agree with that, if, uh, you've thought about this. Like, what you think about that future vision of just building businesses through the lens of, of DePIN where we're at today.
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Yeah, I think you can, I think you make it even simpler than, than just, you know, De- the, the... I agree with you. Um, you brought up Uber, so let's use that as an example.
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All these companies, they have a couple things that they do that are valuable, that are core, that make up the experience.
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So, um, in the case of Uber, really what the entire company exists to do is to verify the drivers are suitable to drive and their cars are suitable to drive passengers.
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They, uh, connect passengers with drivers based on intent, and they set the fee, the fee market. They, um, facilitate the actual payment. They prove the trip happened. Um, and that's really
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the-- and they, and they handle the reputation scoring, you know, afterwards, right? So to help to and get better rides in the future.
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That's really all that they exist to do, and like the internet has already done, where it's taken a lot of things that companies did on their own and just kind of like made it so you can-- I mean, I can build my own e-commerce store in ten minutes with Shopify and Stripe and, you know, other stuff, and some drop shipping companies, whatever, that could get T-shirts made and sell them in ten minutes.
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Um, how it's kind of unbundled a lot of that stuff.
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Similarly, blockchain will do the same, where the, the verification that proves you're fit to drive might be, um, ZKTLs proof from your insurance company and, uh, the DMV and, and, and someone else.
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You might have a, a, a proof of personhood attestation from somewhere else that you can combine into this package and therefore be, um, you know, fit to drive on the network. The, the payment rails are obvious.
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Obviously, blockchain can, can facilitate that. And the reputation system c- you know, could also be built on chain.
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So the, to the point where, like you could, you know, five guys in a garage, g- guys or gals, uh, in a garage could take some of these blockchain building blocks and just
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slap together some interesting rider, passen-- uh, driver, uh, you know, matching algorithm and launch their own version of Uber that just runs permissionlessly forever, right? So,
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um, yeah, absolutely it makes sense to build businesses this way. I- in terms of, you know, where DePIN, why it makes sense to do DePIN, it's like it just, it's doing that to typically much more, uh,
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say bureaucratic, harder to start, more, uh, less flexible infrastructure companies where, um, you're taking the main thing that they do, which is deploying infrastructure, deploying physical infrastructure, and you're creating an incentive and a means for a whole community movement to do it themselves.
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And, uh, just much, much more nimble, much easier to maintain. It's kinda like what Airbnb did to hotels. And, uh, you know, I think we'll see pretty much anything that can be done that way,
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be done that way going forward. Love it. So let's get back to the, the conversation regarding data. Um, Dimo, uh, is... data's at the center of what you're doing.
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So, uh, if you, before you get into adding Dimo into your life and your automotive life, uh, what is your car-- like what is the situation with data and the relationship between you and your car and the car manufacturer today?
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It's not great. It depends on the, the car. I, I use the phone analogy a lot, which is to say, like, if you have a... My, my first car was a two thousand and three Ford Taurus. That was like a landline phone.
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There was, there was almost nothing smart about it. I think there was a digital clock in there. But it had tape, a cassette player. The whole thing was incredibly analog.
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That's like a landline phone tethered to the wall, um, in terms of how smart it is.
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You have more modern cars now, or like, you know, if you have a car with OnStar, or Uconnect or something like that, that's like a flip phone or maybe like an LG Dare. That's what I had when I, before I got the iPhone.
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It's like it doesn't-- you can't get apps for it. It's not that s- it's not really smart. It doesn't really have a data plan, but it's got a touch screen, and you can go on the go with it.
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It's like you can play Snake on there or whatever. So some like fun things that you can do offered by the OEM. Um, Tesla definitely gets the BlackBerry crown for me.
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It's like the first like smart platform, and others are getting closer. They're still definitely the best in terms of like their app and their ecosystem.
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They, they've really opened up the car quite a bit, and you can summon your car from your phone. That's pretty, pretty cool. But still, it's not... You don't, you don't get a Tesla and then go,
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you know, like wh- wh- when you get an iPhone, you go, "Okay," and you go to the App Store, get Netflix, Uber, Tinder, Angry Birds, whatever.
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Download whatever I want, uh, built by third parties for me that can take advantage of this cool hardware that I just bought. That doesn't really exist yetFor Tesla.
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They're actually the most open to this of any automaker. They have an official, uh, developer platform, and, and so they're open to it. But for the same reason developers don't like building
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an app for Android and iPhone, they're not gonna wanna build an app for Tesla and Toyota and Mazda and Honda.
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Um, so that's kind of where we come in to be the, like, the Android of this ecosystem, where it's like, for any automaker, doesn't matter, um, you can build an app for people in their cars almost instantly.
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The, the automakers, they know they wanna get there. Their, their DNA is hardware, so the software side is, is tough, but they see what Tesla's doing. They wanna keep up with it.
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So our conversations with automakers go incredibly well. You might think that they might not like us, but they actually are...
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You know, we have, um, those are some of the fastest moving conversations for big companies is what we could do with, with some of them. So, and they're always very interested to, to take the, take the initial call.
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So we, um, they, they get the value pretty quickly. And yeah, right now they're, they're trying to navigate the security issues.
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I mean, there's some public cases, I don't wanna go after any one particular automakers, but there are some automakers who aren't allowed to sell data, uh, for several years because of pretty egregious violations of, um, you know, consumer rights.
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It's like inc-- it's notoriously very hard to opt out.
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There was a, you know, an automaker where it's like you'd buy the car at a dealership, and you'd scroll to the bottom one of these pages, and you didn't realize you were giving the sales rep
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like, you know, almost power of attorney on your behalf to then just go opt you into all these data programs without you knowing about it, without you even seeing that.
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Um, and then people were having this data shared with their insurance company, and their rates were going up. That's, like, the, the worst possible, uh, future.
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And, and one thing that we gotta make it better, uh, more front and center for Dimo is that we are the opposite of that. We, like, we only share your data when you go to a site.
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Like, if you go to, um, your insurance company, and then they put a button there that says continue with Dimo, and it says, "You will be sharing this information with us," and you click yes, that's when they get to see your data, but short of that, they don't.
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Um, so that is, that is the world that we're building. Similar, like with a, with an app when you can decide if you wanna share your GPS or photos or whatever, same idea with your car. Yeah.
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One of the, um, uh, uh, one of the videos where I talked about, um, what you're doing in Dimo,
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uh, the sto-one of the stories that kind of opened my eyes to this world, uh, was, uh, someone whose, um, it was a Toyota Corolla or something caught fire, um, they had to pull over, their car burned up.
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Uh, it was still under warranty, um, so they, you know, contacted Toyota to take care of this, um, but Toyota looked at the data, and they saw that at some point, um, maybe not even that trip, the person had driven over eighty miles per hour, and because they had done what was, you know, considered excessive and unsafe speed, they denied all warranty claims, even though it had nothing to do with the incident.
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Um, and you know, I know this stuff happens. Like I... there's a litany of stories across not just automakers, but every product and service, you know, under the sun, um, 'cause of all this data,
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um, that, you know, this-- that's happening in the background.
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Um, but just seeing e-examples like that, where it's just so readily, like, apparent that there needs to be some kind of change here, um, you know, made me really, like, kind of zone in on what, what y'all are doing.
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So talk to me a bit, a bit more about that. Like, what is your relationship to this data? What, what are you doing with it? Are you collecting it and using it? You know, uh, do people have to opt into that?
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Like, what is, um, happening behind the scenes when people plug in one of your devices or, um, install one of your apps? Yeah, I used the email analogy earlier. Think of it like that. You know, if you, if you use, um,
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email, let's say you use Apple Mail, right? Apple will store your emails, and they technically have them. Um, now in our case, and I think in Apple's case, like, they don't do anything with that.
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They're not, like, selling your email to the highest bidder and using them against you. I... maybe, maybe there are some out there who, um, use the emails for advertising, whatever. We don't, though. We don't.
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Like, we, we collect your data, and again, like, we only really share it when you op- when you expo- explicitly want it to be shared, when, when it's, when it's you saying, "You know what?
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I'm gonna play this game that my real world driving stats impacts my, my little car in the game, and I wanna share my data here," and you opt in, and then, you know, we share it until you revoke.
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Um, so that is what we're doing with the data. We do store it on behalf of users, but similar to email where you have the choice, you could use Google, you could use Microsoft, you could use Apple, and they store it.
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You could even use your own home server with, with, with email.
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That's what we aspired for with Dimo, where right now, yes, we're the only company that can store your data, but in the future, uh, maybe your automaker, maybe you, maybe another company is, is your option.
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And the, the, the vehicle NFT that you mint for your, your car, it just basically points to where to go get that data. So as a developer, you call the same APIs. Everything kind of feels the same.
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It's just, you know, part of the URL changes in terms of where that data's hosted, so you know where to go get it, uh, once the user's opted into sharing it with you.
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So that's, that's the vision for, we call it nodes, um, these like, these data storage nodes that enable the connection to the car.
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And so right, uh, as of today, if you have, if you're running a Dimo app or you're running, um, one of the devices, um, it's collecting all this, you know, you know, a litany of, uh, vehicle data.
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Maybe you can go into detail about what, what some of that stuff is. Um, and, uh, you get rewarded for running this hardware with the, the token.
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Um, and right now that, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, I know there's, there's maybe some updates. There's some things happening, but, uh, that's kind of where it's at today.
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Um, but, uh, either there's already some of the early stages of this or in the future, there's, uh, you want to become more of a marketplace where you can decide who gets what data and how and stuff like that.
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Can you walk me through what, what that vision looks like?
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What it, where it is today, what it looks like, and then how that impact, you know, will you earn more tokens if you go to more, you know, more places, uh, with your data?
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Or like how does that, how's that all gonna work?Yeah, right now we-we've simplified it quite a bit.
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So on the one hand, yeah, you earn tokens when you connect, and that's just we set aside a promotional pool when we-- there was a billion tokens minted, and four hundred and fifty million of them were just set aside to reward drivers for the next forty years, and the amount goes down fifteen percent a year.
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So that's not funded by selling data. People-- A lot of people think that the, the baseline rewards come from us selling their data. We're not selling their data, um, at least not until they opt in to doing that.
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Um, and, and, uh, uh, the, the rewards just kinda come from there. So the baseline, we call it baseline rewards, that's a pool that's set aside that's just, you know, set to come out. Um, on the other side,
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you know, what-- where do the fees come from? Where does the... How does the system, you know, uh, create a, a, a closed circuit?
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When you do decide that you wanna share your information with your insurance company to get a discount, when you do decide you wanna share it with a dealership so that you can book maintenance and get a better trade-in value, when you share it with a game or an online social network or an AI that can answer any question you have about your car, every time you opt in to use one of those apps, that app developer is paying.
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Right now it's a dollar twenty-five worth of Dimo tokens to connect your car each month.
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So the, the real way that this ecosystem is sustainable is, let's say you add your car, you connect to ten different apps, that's twelve dollars fifty cents, uh, in Dimo tokens being kind of taken out of circulation or, or, you know, paid in fees for your car each month.
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Um, forty percent of that is-- so five bucks goes back to whoever's hosting the data for you as, like, the, the compensation for being your node, and the other seven fifty, the other sixty percent, that goes...
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that just-just taken out of circulation permanently. Right now it's, it's going into the Dimo treasury, and it could be re-spent or it could be burned.
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Maybe, you know, we-- one thing we can go back and forth on is the people, they'd rather it just be burned. Um, either way, it's taken out of circulation. So that is, that is the main kind of fee dynamic.
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Um, certain apps may make you money. So, so, uh, maybe you share your data with an insurance company, and you just get a discount on insurance, not only making you money, but it's saving you money.
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Um, there's, there's a couple really cool ones already that are-- I don't even know how much we've, we've promoted them, but I think they're both... Well, I know Royal is public.
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Royal, uh, allows EV owners to connect their car. They-- You share your charging data, and then they use that charging data to purchase or to, uh, generate carbon offsets and sell them and give you cash back. So we had--
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I think we've had forty-five hundred people opt in at this point.
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The, the people who did it in twenty twenty-four and qualified, they were, you know, driving a EV in the right states where, you know, this is, this is, um, uh, where Royal can operate.
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I think they on average got like two hundred dollars in cash back that they just never could have gotten otherwise. So that's gonna come back in the form of cash. It doesn't have to always be in Dimo. So they get that.
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And then, um, another group, uh, DLP, they are working with Dimo and Vana to create a data union where you can opt in and share your data, and they'll, they'll maybe let you pick, like, "Hey, do you wanna share, you know, sell only aggregate and anonymized data?"
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So we'll never share your particular car. We'll just report that Teslas in the northeast have an average battery range of X, and, and, and you can be a part of that aggregate data.
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Or maybe you wanna share your, your de-identified data, uh, and earn even more. They'll give you the choice and, and I think, I believe their plan is to pay you back in Dimo tokens.
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So there will be kind of a market for these options for people to earn money. But, you know, some of it will be some apps you'll use to earn money or save money.
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Some of them you'll just use because they're fun, and it's like you, you know, cars are fun, and it's fun to look at your performance of your vehicle and, you know, play like a Pokemon Go style game with your car, whatever it is.
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So be lots of reasons to use these apps. Yeah. That, that's super cool. It would be fun to see some games and stuff like that where you're driving around collecting, scooping up- I wanna build one personally. Yeah.
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I'm gonna start hacking the other few, few apps and that, that's one I'd love to build, uh, uh, like a GPT wrapper that, you know, basically a ChatGPT that knows everything about your car, so you can ask any question you want.
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What service is due next? Is there an open recall on my vehicle? Um, what's the best speed for my car to drive to maintain the best MPG? Whatever. Do I really need- Very cool.... ninety-three octane premium gas?
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Can I do the other one? You know, it can answer that question for you. Instead of generic answers from the manual or what some guy said on Reddit, it would be specific to your car, which would be pretty, pretty rad.
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So the data collection portion of that, um, comes from either, you know, in the case of your Tesla or other s- kind of smart car person, uh, an app installed or at least connected to your, uh, Tesla.
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Um, but the case of lots of other people, it's a device. Um, and the latest one you have is the LTE R1. So maybe talk me through, like, what that is, what that's doing, how it works, all that good stuff. Yeah.
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That's a really good piece of hardware. I mean, you, you, you said it right. Uh, you know, newer cars come connected from the manufacturer, and people have active connections.
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Like, they have an app for their phone already that lets them connect to their car, and many of those people can connect directly to Dimo with that.
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Teslas, uh, can connect that way and get a lot of data and earn quite a bit.
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Um, but actually, for most cars that connect that way that are, you know, non-Teslas, they, they earn significantly less, and we only get about four snapshots of data a day. So, um,
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it's better, it's still better to buy the hardware for any car that's not a Tesla. You, you're, you'll, you'll earn more, you'll see more data, you'll have a better experience.
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Um, so you can kinda think of it like Roku or something like that, where it's, it's built into some TVs and others just need a stick. This is the stick that you plug in to make your car compatible.
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It works with almost any car that's two thousand and eight and newer. Our website will tell you if your car is compatible.
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We'll actually probably tell you, even in some cases it is compatible, we'll tell you it's not just 'cause we're not sure, but, uh, it works with most, with most two thousand and eight and up cars.
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Um-And yeah, as people do buy them and stick them in the cars that we didn't know were compatible, we'll update our, our checker to say that, yeah, those cars actually are compatible.
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But, uh, it's a great piece of hardware. The, the partner, uh, with this based out of Europe, they've been doing this for decades. They've sold so many of these. They've done a great job decoding the signal.
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So every car is like, it kind of sends out this, this mushy strings of data, and you have to decode them to know that that actually means your speed is fifty miles an hour or your, your ga- your fuel level is, is, you know, whatever percent liters and,
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uh, gallons, whatever it is.
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So they've done a tremendous job doing this decoding over years, which is why people who maybe might have see-- you know, a lot of people with the other devices see pretty good data, but some people might have gotten some incorrect values.
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Maybe the odometer was a little bit off or something like that. This corrects for most of that, um, almost all of it.
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So it's working really well for people and it's, it's much more affordable than, uh, the other, um, you know, high bandwidth device that we had with max earnings. Uh, it's just kind of the best of all worlds.
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Easy to install. Takes about two minutes to install this thing. Like one of-- some of the best crypto onboarding, I think, um, with our, with our new wallet system and this device, and it's a fun little product.
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It's, it's, it's a, it's, it's more than just a crypto miner. You can actually get real utility out of it.
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You can see where you parked your car, you can see trips you've taken, you can see f- uh, you know, fuel level and things like that, and track these things over time. Um, so it's a fun, it's a fun product to use.
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Uh, I mean, obviously as a crypto person and someone who has a YouTube channel where I'm talking about passive income and all these things, um, Dimo has popped up and I've talked about, uh, the devices and stuff and, and the popular conversation ac-across, you know, YouTube is how much does it earn and this and that.
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And I think that that is interesting. I think that that's a compelling reason to consider something like this. Um, but I also feel like it's just missing so much.
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Uh, there, you know, there's other devices that have been out there in the past where you plug into your diagnostic port, and they give you some info and stuff like that.
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They don't earn, but people are willing to pay for those just because it gives you some kind of insight back, um, where, you know.
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So I feel like something like this, if you care at all about, you know, all the health of your vehicle or what's going on, or if you wanna, if you do wanna share, um, you know, information with your insurance instead of getting their little proprietary dongle to plug in, you use your, you know, your Dimo device.
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There's a litany of reasons why, or if you have a Turo fleet and you wanna track where all of them are, well, guess what? You can s- one view, you can see where they all are.
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That, you know, all those features seem like it's worth the price tag by itself. And then, you know, you also earn crypto on top of it as, you know, like a n-nice little bonus.
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And I feel like a lot of people just get, kinda get sucked into the, "But how much does it earn? You know, how much am I getting back?"
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You know, it's like, uh, I feel like, you know, we're in the early stages of what you're doing and, you know, and maybe you can talk a little bit about what, you know, the later stages might look like.
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But if this is the kind of functionality you've built in now, what, you know, how much better is it gonna be a year from now, five years from now?
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And so maybe the, a great place to go with this is, one, what are you collecting and doing, you know, uh, uh, what's some of the biggest insights now, maybe it's the GPS and health stuff, and what, what are some of the most exciting stuff five years from now you wanna offer people?
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Yeah. I think it actually, I mean, you, you can keep going deeper. We can, we could keep decoding more and more and get, like, super specific, um, things happening kind of in the engine and, and, and so on. But
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honestly, the--
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there's, there's the raw data, you know, the, the, the fuel, like the liters in the tank and the, the lat-long of the car and the, the throttle position, all that kind of stuff, and we, we can capture that, and we can show cool things with it.
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What's, what's really more interesting is what you do one level up. So, okay, so you've got odometer, you know, the, you know, the, uh, the engine error codes if the check engine light's on, like what's causing it.
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You know a lot about how the car's been driven, where it's been driven. You could come up with a pretty good valuation based on that.
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You know, you, you know the, you know the, the kind of car it is, you know the state that it's in, you know where it's like, sometimes cars in the northeast that are driven on salty roads are worth a little bit less than cars in the southwest.
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So you get such good data that you could, you know, uh, a, a group like Carvana or CarMax or someone like that could give you a much better price. I can tell you, I-- 'cause I worked at Vroom.
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In order to get that normal margin that you wanted on the car, you had to lowball people a thousand, two thousand bucks on their trade-in because you would
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make a couple extra on their cars, and then every once in a while, you would just get your face ripped off on another car that you just didn't understand. This car sucks, and you lose ten thousand dollars on it. Um, so,
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so being able to, um, you know, get that extra data, it, it's, it's, it's, again, not just the raw data, but what you do with it that, that comes up with some interesting meta-analysis around, around valuation or, um, you know, uh, battery performance and, and, and battery health and, um, you know, engine performance, that kind of stuff that lets you, that lets you create things that are even more interesting.
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Like, again, we, we, in our app, we're gonna add a cool fuel widget that shows you how much you've consumed in fuel and...
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But then we're also gonna forecast it, and here's how much we s- and, and also then we're gonna pull in an API that says, um, "And here's what fuel costs in your area."
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So we can guess what your monthly fuel cost is gonna be, and then we can combine that with the other wear and tear in your car to give you like an estimate on your, your expense.
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You know, so th-this isn't data coming off the car, it's data that we can, um, infer from the data we're getting off your car.
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So there'll be more of that and just more use cases like, you know, your charging data's cool, but when you can monetize it with Royal, it's even cooler.
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So there's gonna be more and more of these apps that can do things with it that are valuable to you. So, uh, y- in that future where you're adding more and more functionality, what'sWhat's the long term look like here?
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You're, you wanna get as many Dimo devices in as many cars as possible, as many people connecting their smart cars to the app?
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Or is it those conversations you were talking about earlier where you're talking with the manufacturers and it's like- Yeah...
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there's not even, you're not even buying it and installing it yourself, it just comes from the factory that way.
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What is, what is that next, like, what does that longer vision look like to get all these cars connected in this ecosystem you're trying to build? I'll tell you, I'll tell you what your future will look like.
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Um, this isn't, you know, uh, I hope it's sooner than later. Maybe this is later. Um, but you just imagine an autonomous, not just a self-driving, but a self-thinking AI robo-cab,
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and it's driving into a smart city, and that smart city has an AI hive mind traffic orchestration agent that knows where all the cars are going 'cause all the cars are communicating with it.
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It knows what they're seeing in terms of obstacles on roads and potholes and whatever, and it's all being kind of reported in real time.
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All these cars are in communication with each other and this agent and, you know, the car, your car broadcasts where it wants to go across town, and the hive mind knows how it's gonna change all the lights, you know, green at this time and then over here, and it's gonna send you on this path with all the other cars.
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Your car's driving two hundred miles an hour, like inches away from the car in front of it because they're, they're talking to each other, and if one's gonna stop, it's broadcasting that in milliseconds back to all the cars behind it.
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They form a little bit of a train, draft off each other and, and if, you know, it's gonna sees an obstacle or it's gonna turn right, they all slow down together.
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And, uh, you know, the cars are paying micro-transactions for maybe faster access or inductive charging off the road, whatever it is.
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They're communicating with the cameras that are, uh, mounted alongside the road and around the corner.
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They're booking charging stations before they even get there because they know what time they're gonna get there from all this coordination and, and maybe pre-paying a deposit for it.
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So, I mean, y-y-you can kinda tell right away, like, that level of cross car sensor, uh, city, uh, orchestration and communication just like totally impossible. It doesn't matter how smart your Tesla is.
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Like, the, the, the thing that a lot of... It, it's incredibly impressive. I'm a huge fan.
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I, I was driving around California with a brand new Model Y, and just, like, the latest hardware self-driving is just so impressive.
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Um, I, there was one time I had to, uh, take over, uh, over a week and many miles of driving and, um, but still it, it operates like a human does.
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Like, where it is a sole actor in a sea of disconnected things. It doesn't know what the other car on the road is thinking.
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Um, you know, when it, when it goes to, uh, you know, if it's gonna par-- like, let's say they, they release some car parks itself feature.
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It's gonna go look around the lot for a spot and try to recognize one and pull in.
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It's not gonna just be in coordination with the lot and know exactly where it needs to go, and cars will move out of the way for it 'cause we're all, you know, working together.
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So that's the kind of thing that we enable. And by the way, we-- everything that we've built is, you know, it's, it's, uh,
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cars happen to be the thing that, that, uh, we're focused on right now, but this, these identity contracts and permissions and relationships and node work and payments and all the things that we've built work just as well for humanoid robots, work just as well for a smart home, Roombas, even just, like, non-physical AI agents, you know, could benefit from some of this stuff.
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We've been talking to some of the, um, you know, agentic AI folks about what happens when your bot needs to have permissions, uh, to access things in the real world and, you know, so on. So we've, um...
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And one of the really cool things I hope to be able to demo soon is a humanoid robot that's connected to Dimo, and it knows when your car's returned, and it goes and plugs it in, and it can open your trunk with its mind and take your groceries out and bring them into the house.
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Now so you asked about the future. That's the, that's your future. Uh, I love it. So, um, when, when do you ship me the robot to test out and do all this stuff? When does that happen? Yeah.
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The, the, the Dimo robot, we're working on it. Yeah.
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The, so, so that, I mean, that wouldn't be our robot, but we're, we are talking to some folks now who, who build brains for robots and, uh, there could be a, a POC there pretty soon, hopefully. That'd be pretty cool.
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That would be pretty rad. So okay, this is, this is some really cool stuff. This is some g- great, you know, future casting and what the world will look like. But you know, we're in year twenty twenty-five.
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We're here today. Um, what you've built so far, um, uh, i- is, is great. I'm a fan, um, but it is a business.
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So how does your business, um, you know, in order to continue functioning and moving forward, how do you make money today? Yeah. So I already kinda mentioned that app developers pay to access these cars, and so the, the,
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you know, similar to how, like, a good blockchain rewards the validators, and maybe there's some burn or velocity argument that, that makes the token valuable outside of, you know, just being a validator. Um, same idea.
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The, the, the protocol takes out of circulation sixty percent of all the fees that are paid to access the cars and the nodes. So our business, Digital Infrastructure Inc, we host a node.
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We make money when people, uh, use apps. Again, we're not connecting people to apps without their consent.
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This is when you decide that you wanna make mon- save money with Royal, uh, or make m- uh, money in carbon offsets with Royal, you decide you wanna join this, this social platform for people with cars like yours in your area, whatever it is.
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Like, we make money when you decide to do that. Um, so that is the, that is the most basic Dimo protocol, uh, economics aspect. In the future, um-You know, payments are a natural part of this.
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There could be some protocol fees generated as like a percentage of payments, but right now we're not gonna convince Geico and Toyota to ditch their traditional bank loans and do everything with DeFi and crypto payments.
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But, you know, eventually we'll, we'll figure that out, and that's part of the reason we like working with Coinbase and, and Base is they have really good on and off ramps and, and services for traditional companies.
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So, um, that's another way that we could make money at the protocol level. And then, yeah, and then businesses will make money when they build awesome apps that they couldn't have otherwise done.
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You know, Royal is gonna make money with these carbon offsets, taking a cut of the cashback from cars they could have never accessed before, just entirely new opportunities for them.
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So there's lots of, um, lots of value to go around to anybody participating in the ecosystem. So you've mentioned a couple of these people like Royal who are, you know, doing this currently.
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Uh, how many, how many partners do you have in the ecosystem at the moment?
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So we have a great-- And I don't know if you can post links or whatnot, but there's a, there's a Dune dashboard that we have now that we've really cleaned up. And on there, you can see all the cars that have been added.
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You can see all the developer licenses that have been, uh, minted.
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So to become a developer, you have to, uh, create a license on-chain, and you can track not only how many have been created, but you can see how many cars have been shared with those apps.
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You can kind of see their, you know, total life-to-date users in real time. So we have that.
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We, we, uh, just now added the fees spent per month, uh, to that dashboard as well, so you can track that, and that'll likely be something that is, like, updated every month.
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We, we wanna automate that, so the second you connect to a car, that billing is instant and automated. For now, we're having to do it manually with invoices and then monthly going back in and, and, uh, doing the fees.
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So you can track that there. You can look at how people are holding or not holding the token. Um, you can track baseline rewards. There's a lot of really cool stuff on there. Very transparent. Very cool.
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Um, so talking about the, the DIMO token, uh, right now, you know, if you run the device, you earn the token, you can, you know, do whatever you want with it. What, um, what is the, the purpose for the token?
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Um, aside from just earning it, what else can you do with it? Yeah. So I mean, it's the, it's the fuel of this ecosystem, much like ETH is for Ethereum or HNT is for Helium,
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and it's required to build apps and access car data. If you're, if you're just an average person, you're not gonna build apps, um, you can hold onto it. You can, um... We're about to launch, pretty excited about this.
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This governance proposal passed a couple months ago, but this, uh, this staking feature where if you want to level up your car, you'll be able to stake tokens.
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Uh, one thing people don't always realize is that, like, you can earn more, uh, if you connect your car with just software. If you add the device to it, you earn, you earn quite a bit more.
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If you stay connected over time, you build up a streak, you can earn more.
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And we're adding, uh, another way to do that, which is to lock up tokens for increasingly, you know, high amounts and long periods of time to earn even more. And
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so you can kinda think about it like leveling up your car, and the higher your level, the, the more you earn.
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We, we talked about streaks as, as a level thing, but you could really think about every, all these things as like building up a, a composite level for your car.
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So that will launch pretty soon and give people something really interesting to do.
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And then we, we'd, we'd still love to, you know, find ways to allow people to pay for subscriptions, charging, you know, whatever it is, using the token, so we're look-looking at some things with that.
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Again, another thing that Base makes a little bit easier just because of the integration with, um, you know, Coinbase Exchange or some of their other, other things.
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So hopefully things that we can bring to folks sooner than later. So with the staking, um, feature, what, uh, funds that? Do you have, uh, just tokens set aside in the rewards pool?
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Is it gonna be, um, you know, added more in the future? Like, how does, how does staking rewards get paid out? Well, so it still comes out of the same baseline pool. Okay.
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So the theoret-- Like, the way it works, and this is a, you know, design choice, is, uh, the more cars get added to the network, the more cars are competing for the same set of weekly rewards.
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And so yes, technically if somebody increases their, their streak even more, or their stake even more, it does decrease everyone else's rewards slightly.
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So it's really just, uh, uh, it's, it's an opportunity for people who are more committed to get a, a bigger share and people who are less committed to get a smaller share.
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So that way the tokens are distributed to people who are most aligned with the project, who are the most bought in long term, and that's good for the ecosystem overall. Got it.
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And so recently, uh, you just kinda talked about this, where you're working with, uh, Coinbase and, and the Base chain. Um, y'all transitioned over to Base chain, um, this is maybe two months ago or something like that.
293
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Um, and why, why Base? And then is there, are there plans to, um, do multi-chain support? Will you only, you know, only do Base? Like, what does that, uh, landscape look like? Yeah. Well, so we didn't actually...
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We announced the intention to move there, but we haven't even started work yet.
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It's a pretty tricky thing because it, it'd be one thing if we just had like our vehicle NFTs, but we have that and they, they connect to these which are on-chain, and then you give your permission to an app which is on-chain, and the app developer license is on-chain.
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So there's a lot. It's kind of a web of things that we have to figure out how to move, you know, seamlessly migrate over. So it's gonna take, uh, quite a bit of work to do that. The...
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When we talk about being multi-chain or migrating chains, let's like pack up or unpack the, the two different main parts of DIMO that somebody asking that question would care about.
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They, what, um, some people are just asking about the token and some people are asking about the rest, the, the cars, the, the devices, the licenses, all that kind of stuff.
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Um, the token absolutely can be multi-chain and it already is. Like we're-- The token's technically already on a bunch of different chains.
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Um-And pretty soon inside the app, actually, I have this, I have this version on my phone. You don't yet.
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But, uh, soon it will come to everybody where you'll go to hit transfer your tokens, and you'll have to add a wallet to send to, um, to save to your, like, address book.
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And when you, when you do that, you'll nickname the wallet, you'll, you'll add the address, and you'll choose the chain. So you'll able to... There'll be a dropdown you can pick, whether you want Polygon, Ethereum, Base,
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might be another high-speed chain, uh, being added to that list, um, in the not-too-distant future that people will like as a place to just be able to send your tokens out to.
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So if you're somebody who uses our app and you really prefer trading your tokens and managing them and doing things in, in a particular ecosystem, you'll be able to just kinda add that wallet for that ecosystem and just send the tokens out to that and enjoy DeFi and whatever on those chains.
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Um, so that's the token. What we talked about moving to Base was the, uh, the vehicles, the permissions, the developer licenses, that kinda stuff. And the reason for that is, um, there's a couple different reasons.
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We are talking to some of the biggest enterprises and, uh, traditional companies there are, and they oftentimes feel more comfortable with an established brand like, you know, Coinbase and Base.
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They have a lot of tools that pass their muster, that are secure enough, that are regulated enough, a qualified custody enough, you know, for them to get really comfortable with building critical business systems on blockchain using Coinbase infrastructure.
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Uh, in addition to that stuff that's more enterprise-facing, just the stuff that's, that's, uh, developer-facing for us, the tools that they continue to build, um, that they're making available to developers just make things easier for us, um, things that, things that bridge legacy and, and, and crypto world, but also just deeper into crypto.
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And, and one reason we've loved EVM is, uh, there's been incredible innovation in Solana, and I, I'm a fan of Solana, but a lot of it has been more so purely on the token side.
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And when it comes to some of these complicated contracts that we're using, there's a lot of off-the-shelf, open source, audited, well-used stuff.
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There's a lot of people building more non-traditional things, you know, or have been. EVM's just older, so there's a lot of stuff that we can just kind of... It just makes our development cycles a little bit faster.
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So, um, yeah, for all those reasons, uh, Base makes a lot of sense. Great community, great team. Huge fan of Jesse and, and the, the Base team over there.
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They're investing a lot in wallets, which matter so much for UX, um, and, and, uh, and investing a lot in AI, which I mentioned some use cases here earlier. So yeah, those are the, those are the b- main reasons.
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Very cool. So if you want the, uh, you know, prototype experimental version of the app, you just gotta be the CEO of Dima to get it. No big deal. Uh- I wish we could open it up more.
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The, it's, uh, gotta write a note to Apple. I mean, the, the, the test flight- [laughs]...
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process, it's a little bit cumbersome to release it to, uh, people that don't have a D- I'll shoot off a DM to, uh, to Tim Cook right after this one. I'll let you know. Yeah. Um, okay. So that's very exciting.
317
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Um, I love that. Uh, take one quick step back, though.
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When you were talking about, you know, these, these different, um, opportunities and, you know, different, um, brands and, uh, companies you're partnering with that, you know, could potentially be buying this data.
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Um, uh, all this is central into the, the app right now, the Dima app.
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Um, h- if you, if there's a particular, like, um, great opportunity, someone new you just purchased, like how are you surfacing that or getting that in front of people?
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Or, um, how are people interfacing with these, you know, different opportunities right now or, you know, seeing the ones that are the best fit for them within the, uh, the app and the ecosystem?
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It's still super early days. So I mean, Royal's awesome. Um, it's really the only one that's really...
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I mean, it's, it's, they still have some things to iron out, too, when you, when you sign up some things around like, "Hey, you've, you've done it and here's what you can expect."
324
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They, they have some, some onboarding things to, to work out still. But it's super early and, and these, these marketplace partners are just getting started. A huge, um...
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You know, you remember like Apple when the App Store came out and their whole campaign was like, "There's an app for that?" Mm-hmm.
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I'm very excited for that to be like the, the focus of our marketing, where, where our, um, when you sign up...
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Right now when you sign up for Dima you get three emails directly from me, and you can reply to them and I, I see them and often reply back.
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I tell people, "Reply to s- you know, to Eluwe and support if you want a reply," but I reply to most of those emails. Um, and but that's what you get when you join.
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I'd love for people to get emails that are like, "Hey, you've got this car," like, "Thanks for connecting this car. Here are the top five best things you can do with it."
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A- and, and to make those things even more clear in our app, push notifications. We have our marketplace tab. We'll, we'll 100% be doing more and more of that as more and more of these options come online. Very cool.
331
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Uh, one thing I wanted to ask you about, um, I've, you know, heard, maybe, maybe it's already been kinda covered throughout the conversation, but I wanted to call it out as an individual thing.
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Uh, are the, uh, advanced, uh, vehicle health widgets and like explaining what that is or what you're doing with those. Yeah. We, we've been
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really ramping up our internal design resources and, and mobile engineering resources, and we're really excited. The, the last year's main theme was onboarding, and it was a huge project to replace
334
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MetaMask and the, the kind of wall experience that we had in our app with a just like super slick passkey-enabled account abstraction, no paying for gas.
335
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Just like we made it so easy for us to add new on-chain features and for developers to log a user in. And so that was so much of the work last year on mobile.
336
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So there weren't a lot of new exciting, uh, features for users other than just being able to log in faster. SoThis year, we've done that. Um, I mentioned some of the, the token-related features that are coming very soon.
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So that's like the staking, seeing your, your-- being able to level up your car and transfer tokens to other chains.
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So now the focus is really on how do we make this just an app that people love to have regardless of tokens?
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How do we make this an app that people would love to pay ten dollars for and are just surprised and, and happy that they get it for free and get to, uh, earn tokens on top of it, but they, they would have paid if they, if they had to because it's just that useful for tracking your car's value and its health and, and, um, um, seeing if your kid's driving past curfew in areas they shouldn't be or whatever it is.
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Managing your, your six cars or w-whatever you've got. I, I don't know. I've got one. I don't know why I said six, but maybe you've got a bunch. So, so we are excited to add a lot of new features there.
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The, again, the, the version that I've got that you don't, that's, uh-- but the, that'll come next week, has some really cool features just around like tracking your distance by day, week, month, year, projecting your, your distance.
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Same for your speed, top speed, average speed. A really, really nice heat map of where you've driven. See if you can maybe, you know, unlock the entire, um... Mine's kind of pathetic.
343
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It's like, it's really tight around the tri-state area and then a couple trips up to my hometown. I haven't made any really long trips with my car in a while. But,
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um, yeah, there's a bunch of fun things coming with that.
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And as I mentioned, a, a fuel widget that, that tells you how much you're-- not just how much you're using the fuel, but what's your MPG and, and how much are you spending on it, and how could you, uh, make it, make it simpler.
346
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Where there's, there's, um, there's probably fifteen other of these things that'll start popping out, uh, you know, one after the other through Q1 and Q2.
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I'm gonna buy, uh, five more Demos, um, and I'm gonna manif- I'm gonna use that as my manifesting my five more cars so I can get my six total cars.
348
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I'll let you know when I, when I get the, the garage full of, uh, my supercar collection. I'm excited about that. So, uh, I got a couple last questions here towards the end of the podcast.
349
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Um, one, you've, you've talked about the faraway vision.
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You know, we have super compute AI, and it's navigating everything, and there's no traffic lights, and cars just seamlessly, you know, cut through each other, and, uh, I love that vision.
351
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Um, but let's, let's z-- bring it back a little bit and talk, you know, just, um, about Demo and maybe this year and maybe the next couple years. Uh, I'm sure you already view what you've done as a success. I would.
352
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But what, you know, what things do you have to check off for 2025 to go, you know, "This was a success. We, uh, we, we did what we set out to do."
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And then what does the next couple years after that look like, um, in terms of what you're building and success and, and the next step? Yeah. The, the, the real focus this year,
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like we, we, we love our mobile app, and we wanna make it great. But in, in a, in a way, it's a, it's a showcase for what this can be.
355
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And real-- If, if, if we had to choose between large automakers, insurance companies, uh, lots of smaller developers just building awesome apps for people that they love and it being a more of a, a decentralized grassroots thing, or our mobile app being a really solid app, we would choose
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the ecosystem. Um, we want both and, and, and they're different teams.
357
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So like our mobile team has got killer people on it, and they are focused on making that app great, and they're not, they're not too worried about, you know-- They, they don't feel like if someone else builds a great app that that means they're, they're off the hook.
358
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They know they need to make that app really special. Um, but yeah, we really wanna see just a bunch of awesome apps launch where you go to their website, and it says continue with Dimo.
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You click the button, you share your car, and all of a sudden you get something really valuable to you, whether it's an experience or savings or something.
360
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And, and to see those apps not only launch, but for them to grow. We want them to, um, add, you know, thousands of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of cars relatively quickly.
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One of the cool things about our model is we don't even have to be the source of onboarding cars.
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Some of these apps that are launching, some of them would mainly be discovered from people who are already on Dimo, but some of them would be people signing up for the first time that never heard of Dimo Mobile or Dimo.
363
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The same way that, you know, you never downloaded a Plaid app to connect your bank account to mint.com the first time for, um, you know, budget tracking.
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You just went there and saw this little button that said, "Connect your bank with Plaid." What is that? Okay, whatever. Fine, I'll do it. And, and, and the, um, uh, the usage kind of came more organically from it there.
365
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So we're gonna see a lot of that this year, and there'll be a, an awesome combination of some, some proof of concepts with huge names that are on longer sales cycles that could lead to just mass adoption with, with large enterprises.
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We'll see some really awesome viral grassroots stuff coming out of smaller, um, you know, dev shops and everything in between. Awesome.
367
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And then, uh, practically, like if you're, if you're listening to this episode right now and you're listening to it within the first few days of when it actually hits the channel, uh, well, then ETHDenver is just about to happen, and, uh, a little bird has told me that, um, Dimo will have a presence there.
368
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Uh, so tell me a little bit about what you're doing there and maybe how people can, you know, s- meet you in person or connect in person with the Dimo team. Yeah, I assume
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there's a couple different things we're doing there, but I think the little bird is probably talking about this food truck- Mm-hmm... that we're, uh, gonna, uh, mint on Dimo. So you can mint cars on Dimo, obviously.
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So we're gonna, uh, add a food truck to our app, and we'll share it with everybody who's kind of local to Denver.
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So if you're in the Denver area, you'll see this food truck on the map alongside your car, and you'll be able to tap on it and learn more about...
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You'll, I mean, you'll see [chuckles] the fuel, the fuel truck's fuel level and location and things like that.
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But more importantly, you'll see some cards that say, "Hey, by the way, if you show up to where this food truck is right now and you show that you have the app, you can get some free food and meet the team."
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And so we'll be hanging out there doing some cool stuff. Uh, it's likely that Blackbird will also be. They're another popular... I, I kinda count them as Deepin.
375
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They have these physical pucks that you can check in at with restaurants, and they wanna be payments for restaurants, like a modern Foursquare meets Resy meets, uh, Toast, I guess, i-is kind of what they're, what they're doing.
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So they'll likely be in on this food truck with us, and you'll be able to earn fly tokens from that as well. And, um, we might have some other partners with it as well. I'm not sure.
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I'll wait till those, those things, uh, materialize. But yeah, come, come say hi to us there. I'll be, I'll be by that truck for a lot of the different events.
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If you're in the Denver area, of course, come say hi, and it'll be a great conference. Love it. Very exciting stuff. Um, well, thank you for taking the time to chat with me on the podcast.
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Um, if anybody who's listening to this is interested in all the various things having to do with, uh, Dimo that Rob talked about, I will link everything down below in the description, including, uh, a video on my main channel that is a, uh, very synced deeper dive into the device itself and, um, what they're doing with that.
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But, uh, Rob, thanks for being here. I appreciate your time. Thank you. And for those who are watching, thank you very much for listening. I will see you in the next episode.