Before Autolane, Hamei spent 15 years in hospitality and ran his own restaurant. In this episode he talks about what delivery apps did to restaurant margins, how COVID changed what customers expect, and why autonomous delivery gives operators, big and small, control of the last 50 feet again.

He also covers why people skills still matter most, the time autonomy frees up for operators, and advice for owners weighing new tech. Plus celebrity visits, favorite shift meals, and why a cold burrito can ruin the experience.

David Richer, founder of Orbital Kitchens, joined Ben and Cam this week. While most pandemic-era ghost kitchens collapsed, Richer's flagship Union Square location in New York does a reported $30 million a year out of a single kitchen, and his in-house fleet delivers at more than double the industry's rate. He gets into the missed payment that forced him to build that fleet overnight, what he thinks everyone else got wrong about scaling a virtual brand too fast, and the bowl-building robot already running in one of his kitchens.

🏁 goautolane.com I orbitalkitchens.com

Garrett McCurrach, founder of Pipedream Labs, joins the show to talk about the underground pipe network he's building to move food and packages straight to the curb, no roads required. We get into how the system actually works, what it took to get real pipes running under drive-thrus in Texas and Georgia, and what property operators stand to gain once the last 50 feet moves below ground. If you've ever wondered what's happening beneath the sidewalk, this one's for you.

Van Tucker has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology, creativity, and commerce. He's helped brands like Nike and Disney and is currently head of AI at CMG. He is helping businesses adopt AI through his venture, AI Wrangler.

In this episode, Van traces his path from building his first website in middle school (to promote BMX biking) to creating a locker ecosystem with Harbor Lockers. He worked to bring locker networks to U.S. cities to help emerging business. Van also shares how AI Wrangler started as a joke on Linkedin and turned into a real business after people kept asking how he was actually using AI.

Tune in for a conversation about entrepreneurship, reinventing yourself, and where AI is headed next.

🏁 goautolane.com

https://vantucker.com

Angell Tsang is the Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer of Tso Chinese Takeout and Delivery, Autolane's first autonomous delivery partner in Austin. He is also the reason this episode has an unusual number of accidental puns.

Angell did not start in restaurants. He started in software QA, ran engineering teams across startups, and in 2016 was eating dinner at his friend Min's restaurant when Min said he had a dumb idea. That idea became Tso Chinese, a delivery first Chinese food brand built from scratch in a converted pizza restaurant in Austin's Cherrywood neighborhood. No sit down dining. Just code they wrote themselves, a scratch kitchen, and a very bright wrapped delivery car that people still remember today.

Ten years later Tso has five locations across Austin, investors including the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, the former CEO of Wendy's, and the founder of Bonobos, and a partnership with Autolane that Angell never saw coming.

He walked past Autolane's Tesla at ShopTalk in March. He thought autonomous delivery was five years away. He moved on. Then Cam followed up. Then a Slack channel happened. Then they went live and the rest is history.

This episode covers how Tso built their own restaurant operating system because Shopify does not ship Chinese food on demand. Why W2 drivers never stole their food but 1099 contractors have a statistic that is higher than zero percent. Why the Tesla will never eat your pot stickers...yet? What happens to Chinese American cuisine when the 65 plus generation of mom and pop owners retires over the next decade. And why Angell's entire philosophy as Chief AI Officer comes down to three words: customers over clicks.

Oh and he named all his AI agents with Tso puns. TSophie. TSora. TSolomon.

🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com

Fair warning. This one goes places.

Michelle Kwok is a partner at Draper VC and one of Autolane's earliest investors. She led the pre-seed round when most VCs could not even fathom what Ben was building. Her portfolio includes artificial womb technology, limb regeneration using bioelectric signals, scarless skin healing, and a company they affectionately call bag of organs at the office. She is also funding the infrastructure for the internet in space. Just in case anyone needed that.

She is also the very first female guest on The Last 50 Ft. Producer Kyle led the conversation alongside Ben for this one and the energy was immediately different. Michelle plays piano, violin, guitar, and drums by ear. And the kazoo simultaneously with guitar. She can learn any pop song in five minutes flat without sheet music. Her favorite movie is Meet the Robinsons. Her favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. Ben and Kyle had thoughts on this.

The conversation covers how Michelle knew Autolane was onto something when other VCs could not even understand the premise. What it is like being a woman in VC and how those rooms are slowly changing.

Then Ben goes on one of his most expansive philosophical runs yet about what a 90 percent reduction in delivery cost means for libraries, food banks, farms, meals on wheels, and basically the entire structure of how human beings access goods and services.

Oh and an ice cream delivery showed up mid-recording. Completely unplanned. Absolutely perfect timing. Although the flavor was vanilla - this episode was anything but.

🏁 goautolane.com | draper.vc

Cam is on a ferry somewhere in the San Juan Islands celebrating his anniversary. So this week it is just Ben and Producer Kyle, and it might be the most honest episode yet.

Kyle steps out from behind the scenes for the first time to co-host with Ben, and the conversation goes places the pod has never gone before.

Ben walks through exactly how the Tso Chinese Takeout & Delivery autonomous delivery launch works end to end. A customer orders on the Tso Chinese website. The order flows into Nash. Autolane bids as a delivery provider. If they win, the customer gets a text: reply Y for autonomous, reply N for a regular human delivery. If they say yes, the Tesla drives itself to their address, the customer gets a tracking link, walks out to the curb, presses open trunk, grabs their order, and the car drives away. Nobody touches your food. No interaction and no special app downloaded.

Then Ben shares an insight from the first week of live operations that neither of them expected. The same reason women loved Waymo from day one is showing up in autonomous delivery. And it has nothing to do with cost savings or no-tip delivery or any of the reasons the industry talks about. It is safety. Not road safety. Safety from the driver.

Kyle talks about traveling alone at 27, getting off planes in cities she did not know, and always hoping the person in the Uber was safe. She talks about being home alone now as a mom and not loving when an unmarked vehicle pulls into her driveway at night with a stranger inside.

Ben calls it the most important emerging insight from the first week of live operations.

They also get into the Georgia Senate bill about delivery driver food tampering, why DoorDash and Uber can never legally solve this problem because their drivers are 1099 contractors and not W2 employees, and why that structural gap is exactly what Autolane is built to fill.

Oh and Ben promises to have Claude count how many times he said so/Tso in this episode. The results are not being shared.

🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com

Shane Feldberg was the very first person to ask for allocation in Autolane. Shane runs Feld Ventures, a fund he built over six years from a network he developed at ClearBank, a fintech company that built the 20-minute term sheet using machine learning before machine learning was cool. They took it to a $2.5 billion valuation. Shane then left to back the founders he met along the way. Fifty plus portfolio companies. Eight figures deployed and climbing toward nine.

He believes startups are the way out. Not just for returns, for cancer, for diabetes, but for every problem humanity has not solved yet. He thinks one way to unlock the compute needed to get there is solar-powered data centers in space. He's not joking.

On this episode Ben, Cam and Shane get into why contrarian thinking is the only way to be good at early stage investing. Why Autolane could be Shane's best investment despite having some of the top 30 companies in the world in his portfolio. The Shirky Principle and why institutions will always try to preserve the problems they were designed to solve. Why personal injury lawyers lobbying against autonomous vehicles might be one of the most genuinely evil things happening in America right now. And why 40,000 people dying in cars every year while the technology to prevent it exists is something that keeps everyone of them up at night.

Ben and Cam also report back from Austin where they took 10 unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides in Model Ys identical to Autolane's fleet. Ben's verdict: the technology is absolutely here. It is just a matter of when Tesla decides to push it to consumer cars.

Oh and Shane is Canadian. He says PROcess and the very Canadian way of sorry. He was given allocation anyway.

🏁 goautolane.com | feldventures.com

Ming Maa started his career at Goldman Sachs. Then he went to SoftBank where he sat alongside Masa Son and ran every major ride share investment globally before the Vision Fund even existed. Then he became President of Grab and scaled it across eight countries and more than 500 cities before taking it public.

Then he decided investing was not enough. He wanted to build.

Ming is now Co-Founder and CEO of Moove AV, the world's largest dedicated infrastructure provider for autonomous vehicles. Moove operates the entire Waymo fleet in Phoenix and Miami with zero Waymo employees on the ground. London is next. They handle everything from 40-megawatt charging infrastructure across multiple sites to managing haboobs, the massive rolling dust storms that engulf Phoenix and require a full fleet recall in minutes.

And Ming drops the number that reframes the entire autonomous vehicle investment thesis: the car itself is only 30 to 40 percent of the total cost of commercializing autonomous vehicles. The other 60 to 70 percent is fleet operations. Charging. Cleaning. Maintenance. Infrastructure. People. The moat in autonomy is not the vehicle. It is everything that happens after it rolls out of the factory.

Ming also identifies the two things every city needs to unlock before AVs can truly scale. One of them is curbside infrastructure. The other is PUDO zone coordination at airports, malls, and stadiums.

Which is exactly what Autolane builds.

Ben announces on the pod that three of Phoenix's largest shopping centers are coming onto the Autolane platform next week. The first city where Moove AV and Autolane will converge. And Austin direct delivery went live this week.

🏁 goautolane.com | moove.io

Alex Roy has been covering autonomous vehicles longer than almost anyone. Ten years hosting the Autonocast, widely regarded as the top podcast in autonomy. Former Director of Special Operations at Argo AI, where he spent years putting autonomous vehicles on the streets of Miami and meeting with everyone from local elected officials to VIP riders. He is on his fifth Tesla. He ran the cannonball record on 100% FSD earlier this year. And he is an official Autolane advisor.

He also thinks Autolane is a great candidate to scale or for acquisition. His words.

Ben, Cam and Alex get into the AV 1.0 to 2.0 transition and why neural networks changed everything. The political orphan problem of autonomy and why neither the left nor the right has fully embraced it despite the technology being demonstrably safer than human drivers.

And the most compelling job displacement analogy we have heard on this podcast: the New York City elevator operator strike of 1946, which brought the city's economy to a standstill, forced every building to upgrade to automated elevators, and resulted in the total number of people employed by the elevator industry growing tenfold over the next 25 years.

Ben also makes two announcements on the pod. Austin direct delivery launches next week. And Autolane is coming to Scottsdale Fashion Square and the Phoenix market.

Alex's prediction on when private Tesla owners get unsupervised FSD: 24 months, pre-selected by Tesla Insurance based on your driving risk profile. If you are David Moss or Alex Roy, you are not getting it first.

And he closes with a 1970 film recommendation that he says Elon Musk has clearly seen and everyone in AI and autonomy should watch immediately.

🏁 goautolane.com | autonocast.com