How Stephen Burns Is Using Robotics and Electric Vehicles to Transform Food Delivery

In this episode of Experienced Voices, host Jeanne Gray sits down with Stephen Burns, Founder and Chairman of the Board at NoTip.

Stephen is tackling a large-scale opportunity in local commerce: reinventing last-mile delivery using autonomous vehicles and robotics. 

With online delivery projected to hit $500B+ by 2030, NoTip replaces high fees and tipping with a flat $6 model for food, grocery, and local retail.

A serial entrepreneur with 30+ years of experience, Stephen previously founded Workhorse Group (NASDAQ: WKHS) and Lordstown Motors, and built Mobile Voice Control (acquired by Nuance). 

Now, alongside a team from Tesla, Honeywell, and Cypress Semiconductor, he’s building the autonomous infrastructure for the future of logistics.

In this episode, we cover:

• The economic breaking point of traditional delivery apps
• Combining autonomous cars and robots for the "last 100 feet"
• Lessons from scaling EV and tech ventures

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Transcript

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Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

Steve Burns: I think everybody in America is probably familiar with real-time food delivery, the DoorDashes, the Uber Eats, GrubHubs of the world. So this is just designed to be a lot less expensive, and we're using robotics to achieve that end. two robotics. One is an autonomous vehicle that gets the food from the restaurant to the curb outside your house.

Jeanne Gray: There are great ideas, 

and then there are those who have the experience and skills to actually execute them. Welcome back to Experience Voices. Today, we're exploring how robotic food delivery is being completely reimagined through autonomous zero commission service. Our guest is Stephen Burns, founder and chairman of NoTip, a company tackling one of the largest untapped opportunities in local commerce, reinventing the last mile.

With the global online food delivery market projected to surpass five hundred billion dollars by twenty thirty, NoTip is stepping in as the next generation of delivery. By combining autonomous vehicles with specialized delivery robots named Noah, NoTip offers a game-changing model, a flat six dollar fee for consumers and a zero commission for restaurants.

And Stephen knows what it takes to scale bold technology. As a serial entrepreneur with over thirty years of experience, he has built disruptive companies across electric vehicles, transportation, software, and telecommunications.

Jeanne Gray: Stephen, welcome to Experience Voices. 

Steve Burns: Thanks. Great to be here. 

Jeanne Gray: I think a great start is having you explain or describe to the listener the vehicle you're introducing that's going to change local delivery 

Steve Burns: great. The company's called NoTip, and as the name implies it's designed to reduce the cost associated with food delivery.

I think everybody in America is probably familiar with, real-time food delivery, the DoorDashes, the Uber Eats, GrubHubs of the world. So this is just designed to be a lot less expensive, and we're using robotics to achieve that end. two robotics. One is an autonomous vehicle that gets the food from the restaurant to the curb outside your house.

This is mostly designed for suburban and rural areas. And then once at the curb a ramp deploys and a small wheeled robot runs the food up to your doorstep. So not waiting for you out on the sidewalk, it runs it all the way up to the doorstep. Just like the human... We're mimicking the human experience of what we're all used to.

Jeanne Gray: So how do consumers engage with your service? if I'm your first customer, and I'm wondering how I can execute this for my, food delivery, w- what do I do? 

Steve Burns: So very similar if you're using any food delivery now, it's the same thing. You download the app, or you can do it via the website, and we have several re- restaurants on our system, and you choose your food, and put in your credit card the first time.

- We remember it so you don't have to do that every time. We remember your favorites, It's very familiar to you're used to with the current system. 

Jeanne Gray: So describe a little bit then about the operational side of this, because it seems like magic in some , ways that we as the consumer put our order in and it shows up at the door.

Steve Burns: Yeah. 

Jeanne Gray: But there's infrastructure behind all of this. Describe a little bit of the infrastructure that's specific to NoTip. 

Steve Burns: Good. Well, I think as background is quickly going over the existing, you know, when you order food now, how does that happen, right? And there's a master app somewhere by one of the, big companies called DoorDash or Uber Eats or GrubHub, like I said, and it gets the food order and then dispatches it to, in their case a gig worker in their own vehicle, And that gig worker gets the food and brings it to your house. And since we are trying to dramatically lower expenses, we're trying to do two things. We're trying to eliminate the gig worker and have a vehicle more built for purpose than just a person using their own car, That may or may not be suited for delivery.

What if somebody's using a big SUV or a Suburban, which happens, constantly. So we're optimizing the vehicles, we're making them for purpose, and we're endeavoring to lose the human altogether. But like all this autonomous stuff, robo-taxis, for example that are shuttling humans around, we are introducing it slowly, human monitor inside the vehicle for now, watching everything and we'll slowly, lose the human.

Jeanne Gray: You own the vehicle 

Steve Burns: We own the vehicle and the robot. 

Jeanne Gray: Okay. So describe a little bit of, is this vehicle just like a little car? Or describe a little bit about how you did your first prototype. Yeah. 

Steve Burns: One of the things that started this was just the imbalance of using a 5,000 pound vehicle to deliver a three pound pizza.

I just thought that was out of proportion, right? If you really think about it in those terms, all the steel, everything wrapped around a car that was built to shuttle humans and protect humans is not necessary for this purpose, right? So we are building a three-wheeled vehicle, which is, the government classifies as a motorcycle.

So it's three wheels. weighs a third of a Tesla, just as an example. And it's only designed to protect that robot and that pizza, and it's so optimized that It only uses three cents of electricity for every mile that it travels. So our typical scenario in suburbia is the pizza joint is three miles away.

So it's a six-mile round trip to get that pizza there. And so that's 18 cents worth of electricity for that full trip. And we're building this, again, since it's only designed to shuttle food around very low maintenance. The fuel, the electricity is our biggest cost, and that's 18 cents in that scenario.

So that just gives you a little feel for how economical this can be once we fully implement everything. 

Jeanne Gray: So there's no human in the vehicle, and the vehicle, since it's designated as a motorcycle, it merges directly in with regular traffic? 

Steve Burns: So a lot of folks ask about drone delivery, right?

And I, tell them if every food run and every milk run and every run for, small packages was drone delivered, it would probably literally darken the skies, right? Some things just aren't suited for it. But we could have all that on US roads and you'd never even know, they're built for that, And, you know, as you're bringing automation to something that is very, very manual, an app dispatching to a gig worker that's using their own vehicle and their own GPS to get to your, house and drop the food off, that's as basic as you can get. That hasn't changed since a guy was probably doing it on a horse.

 Bringing automation to bear on a very manual problem, you try to mimic what you can, what works well. But the inefficiencies that come from having a human in there and random vehicles. If you look at any major fleet in America, if I say UPS to any American, they can probably conjure up immediately that brown square truck, right?

Or a post office truck, or a FedEx truck, or even an Amazon truck, right? And that's because those companies, those successful delivery companies have all figured out that you've gotta have a consistent fleet so you can do maintenance properly and you can anticipate when there's gonna be problems. we worked with UPS for a long time at a company I started 20 years ago making electric step vans for them.

And in the diesel step vans that they were currently using, that they'd been using for 60-something years, they knew that the ignition switch, you know, the key switch at that time wore out at 120,000 miles, so they replaced it at 100,000, right? So those are successful fleets. Those are how you drive down cost.

And then if you can take the human out, you start to realize that it's better on many fronts, right? A lot of people just don't like a stranger on their doorstep at night, If you Google Food delivery in America comes up as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. It's more dangerous than construction workers. It's more dangerous than police officers. And you're like, "How can that be?" Right? And, you know, they're trying to piece together why, but a lot of it's just that it's usually younger folks being drivers.

They're always in a hurry 'cause they're trying to, turn their orders quickly to make, a decent living. And they're usually looking down at their GPS not being in familiar territory. Then once they get there, then they've gotta get out. They can trip and fall. They can slip. They can get bit by the dog.

- And anything can happen on the doorstep. And then we get into a lot of, kinda cleanliness issues, ... A lot of people don't like the driver smoking in their car with their food or I don't think I'm going out too far when I say, you know, a lot of fries have been stolen-

in the coffee, I said. So all those things go, but robot doesn't do any of that, 

Jeanne Gray: are you sure? 

Steve Burns: I'm pretty sure. Maybe AI will get to the point where it will try to be like a human and steal fries, but I don't think so. 

Jeanne Gray: So the vehicles will be parked at some hub location that overnight, or actually 'cause a lot of deliveries are done in the evening at night.

But really you're gonna have , in a city or a suburban town as you describe, you're gonna have X number of vehicles comprising a fleet for that w- geographic radius, is what I'm hearing. 

Steve Burns: Yeah. Yeah. Kinda I think the first throw at automating this, this food delivery wa- is these small sidewalk robots.

If you've ever been in a big city, maybe a, a college campus and seen those, right? They work in very dense areas because they can only go sidewalk speeds, right? And they have to share that sidewalk with what the sidewalk was made for, people, ? And it gets a little dicey and the more robots and the more people, it slows them down even further.

So that scenario where I talked about where the, pizza joint is three miles away, you could never use a sidewalk robot for that. The pizza would be ice-cold. And.. it's like a restaurant that has to turn its tables once per hour to make a living, you know? Well, these robots, if it takes three hours to deliver, it can't pay for itself.

So we use a, road vehicle for the speed that a road achieves, and then the delicacy of a small robot to run it from the vehicle up to your doorstep. And I think the big innovation is one vehicle can't do everything, So combining this dual stage type of, vehicle that takes advantage of the terrain it's on, whether it's US roads for speed or going up your driveway and your, walkway to your doorstep.

Jeanne Gray: you're focusing on restaurants, right? 

Steve Burns: Yes. 

Jeanne Gray: So- As you look at the market, are the chains your primary targets as customers, or is the local mom and pop, Italian, Chinese s- Yeah ... restaurant right there with it? Who, Who's in, who's out? 

Steve Burns: That's really an interesting question because we kinda treated the website and the menus on that website and the restaurants just as a a means to an end , to get the robot out there, right? To get the food out there. we started digging in. Everybody knows that food delivery's expensive, but I think a lot of people don't realize why, and a big part of the why is these incumbent services, food delivery services, charge the restaurant.

So when you order and they charge you a fee, a delivery fee, and you tip on top of that, I think a lot of people think that's the cost of delivery," but it's not. The biggest cost that you incur is that , the food delivery companies are charging the restaurant a percentage of the order, and it's typically can be 30%, especially for small guys.

The big chains might cut a better deal, but the small guys are all paying 30%. So no restaurant can handle a 30% hit to their margin, right? It's just not that high a margin business. So what do they do? They mark the food up on the websites of these delivery companies. Fast-forward just I think from 50,000 feet, what's important to know is a $30 meal that you could - pick up at Chick-fil-A for $30 will cost you $60 to get it delivered with fees and tips and markups.

So we don't charge the restaurants anything. We're independent of the restaurants. We don't have all these complicated partnerships. We're just independent of them. We fly above them, and we pick the restaurants that we think would be suitable for our service in that particular town, and that's proven to be very effective.

And so the bottom line is we charge a flat rate of - $6. So that example where I just said the Chick-fil-A costs 30, and , to get it delivered it's probably gonna cost you 60. In our case it would cost you 36. 30 for the food plus $6 flat fee And when we're fully automated, that's because we have engineers and technicians out monitoring, driving the vehicles, watching everything.

But when they go away, down the road it'll be less than $6 even. Again, our cost is gonna be three cents of electricity per mile. And these sidewalk robots, because they go so slow, they have to be dropped off every night. A van has to come drop them off. They do their work during the day. The van has to come collect them at night, take them back to Santa's workshop, charge them, work on them and everything.

Our vehicles all just drive on the road to our central location and charge themselves and, all that stuff. So again, having a road vehicle that can go 45 miles per hour instead of three miles per hour completely changes the economics. Now, we build this, we're just like Amazon, right?

Amazon started with really the free delivery, at least for me, , and I think most people, is what really shocked everybody into discovering Amazon and then getting hooked on it, right? Amazon has to pay something for delivery, so what they do is try to do everything they can to minimize that cost internally, right?

So I think everybody knows their warehouses have got a lot of robots and automation in it. They're using Rivian electric vans. They invested in Rivian to get that technology. They're doing everything they can internally to keep their costs down. That's what we're doing. We can't do free delivery, but we're doing low-cost delivery, and we are keeping the cost down by building our own tools.

You know, We're not a robot company selling these robots to a DoorDash. We are our own DoorDash or Uber Eats or GrubHub because the experience is just so different, And it's a lot less costly for the customer, but it's also, we think, a lot safer for the customer. 

Jeanne Gray: So you just completed a beta in Mason, Ohio, right?

Steve Burns: We're in beta. 

Jeanne Gray: Oh, you're in beta. We, 

Steve Burns: We launched a beta, so we're in beta. 

Jeanne Gray: Okay, so you're - going through a proving out period now, or you've already started to get some of the input back in to flush out the ease and the efficiency? 

Steve Burns: .

Right. Just for your, listeners Mason, Ohio is a small suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio. It has 39,000 residents, and it happens to be the hometown where we're headquartered. So we thought, let's do that as our first city, right? Originally, I thought we should do somewhere a little warmer, 'cause Mason's gonna get cold and gonna get snow, right?

But then I thought well, we might as well prove out our snow tires and all the other things we have to do, right? But the next city will probably be somewhere warmer. But we wanted to be close to the engineers as we learn things and tweak and every delivery makes, it a little better. This is world of AI and big data and mapping and you know, nobody has ever, from what we can determine on planet Earth, nobody has delivered to the doorstep.

Nobody's mapped all the doorsteps in the country when a robotaxi goes into a city, when it announces We're going into Miami, Florida," Miami's been mapped. You can't just wander in there and hope for the best. So, We are, every delivery we make we think puts us further ahead than anybody else that tries to do this later.

But the first part, again the website and the app that the consumer uses was not as trivial as I thought, The menus have tons of rules, If you order a meal deal, you know, it can't let you go to the next screen unless you've ordered the side and the Coke. Right. And so all those rules apply, and then if you get sour cream do you want normal, heavy or medium, right? So there's a lot of that. I miscalculated how tough that was. So we proved that out first and now we're proving out the robot And people are on their porch when the robot comes.

They're on their porch with their iPhone. It's still such a novelty that... And I think it's gonna stay that way for a little while. But it's doing just what a beta should do. It's slow and steady, and we wanted to start in a small burb like that. But our goal is to conquer Mason and then go to the next city.

Jeanne Gray: So when you were whiteboarding your vision for this did you bring in some of your contacts in the industries that you've been in and sit down and how long did you brainstorm, go from whiteboard to- Yeah ... prototype? 

Steve Burns: Yeah. Well, First of all, the idea just, you know, the way ideas that are gonna take a lot of effort, they germinate for a while before you pull the trigger, and for me, it started germinating when my kids were younger, and they were DoorDashing, and somehow I was paying for it, And I started thinking, this is so expensive, right? I think Uber Eats or GrubHub all of them, 'cause they all follow almost the exact model, right?

With a big app and gig workers using their own vehicles, so they all charge about the same. But I started thinking this process, it's gonna require EVs. It's gonna require an autonomous electric vehicle, robotics, App development, a lot of software, and of course, AI.

So we've been doing that. I've been doing that for a few companies here of late and, I'm 67 and I think people expect an entrepreneur to be a little younger, but the advantage of being older and having started a bunch of companies along the way, is you find people that you want to be in a foxhole with, right?

You find people that you want to work with, and you know are gonna see it all the way through and not pull the rip cord when the, you hit the first speed bump, And that's what kind of entrepreneur stuff takes, especially you're up against these big incumbents, I mean- DoorDash's market cap is bigger than General Motors, much bigger, Just to put it in perspective, these, incumbents are giant, And so if you're going to bring in a different system... What we found is there's love lost with the restaurants to these. Restaurants don't like their food being perceived as more expensive because they had to mark it up, So they don't like that. And consumers of course, don't like the expense. And so we think we can their loyalty. But when we white boarded it to your question and we realized what skill sets is this gonna take, I was fortunate to be able to call some people that I know and that I knew had the skillset, and it was exciting enough that we were able to get a lot of them to come over and, join us.

Jeanne Gray: So with AI integrating into everything, is AI involved in your technology? 

Steve Burns: Oh, yeah. AI is, you know, it's doing the coding for us, like one would expect. But things like just imagine the diversity of driveways and walkways and doorsteps, And trying to recognize that.

we built the robot, in-house, right? So it's designed in-house mechanically, all the software is done in-house, because we wanted to keep the cost down, and this is a very unique robot, His only job, I say he because his name's Noah. Tried to find a name with the word no in front of it, Like no tip. So Noah, he's very thin and he, can't run a marathon, he can't fold your laundry for you. He's dedicated for purpose, just like the three-wheeler that's waiting out at the curb for him. And we keep him cost-effective. But we keep him thin, he's very thin, because he's gotta navigate down somebody's walkway.

And there could be something in the walkway, right? There could be a toy left by a kid, or a lawnmower, a garden hose, or a flower bed hanging over the edge type of thing. So that's where AI's really helping us the most, is taking these vision systems where you're taking a camera and LIDAR and GPS, and you gotta fuse all that together and try to complete your mission, that's a lotta stuff going on there. 

Jeanne Gray: what part of communication is involved in this? If I come out of my house and there's some sort of tech issue, is someone in your operating office able to speak to the homeowner if there is a issue? 

Steve Burns: That's how it will be when we're in full automation.

But since we have a technician out in a car for now- 

Jeanne Gray: Okay ... 

Steve Burns: that takes care of that. But, all the robotaxis, the law requires that if a policeman should knock on the window, they have 30 seconds, it's gotta connect to a human somewhere. 

Jeanne Gray: Oh, okay. 

Steve Burns: Right?

A little law that nobody knows about.

And all These sidewalk robots they all have remote human intervention when necessary, like crossing a crosswalk or something. we'll have that, remote when we're fully automated, but now since we have a technician out in a car, we don't need remote.

We have a human right there. Which I think brings comfort to the users, right? When you order your food, you have , one extra check mark that you don't have on the other ones is that you have this - little checkbox, are you okay with our robot coming on your property, right? And they have say yes to that.

I think knowing that a human's at the curb helps as you're ushering in kinda new technology. 

Jeanne Gray: As 

you scale or you anticipate scaling you're not in the business of manufacturing your vehicles, so is it all gonna be built upon a partner who will handle the actual mass construction of these vehicles?

Steve Burns: Again, since we're EV people- ... Mm-hmm ... 

you know, 

used to making our own and I tell People that building a car in America, a four-wheeled car in America is one of the toughest things for a small company to do. That bar, that regulatory, that safety, that liability, that heaviness of having two kids in car seats in the backseat, that's a lot, And I think Having done that I think we've done one of the toughest things there is. And so this although tough it's not as tough as that. So we're used to building, Building cars. And so we're for sure gonna manufacture the robot in-house, I think. We've made it very manufacturable.

And again, it's gonna change so much over the next five, 10 years, right? We don't wanna have some third-party company where we're constantly saying, "Okay, now change this and ch-" We wanna keep that in-house. When you have something changing so fast... tesla had 2,000 engineering changes the first year the Model S came out.

And if they had somebody else building their vehicle I don't think Tesla would be here today. You've gotta be able to react quickly and inexpensively be able to do all that kind of stuff. On the three-wheel vehicle, I don't know. how that will work out.

The hardest part of the three-wheel vehicle at this point, we have the vehicle done. The hardest part is the regulatory around the autonomous driving, that's all software and sensors. But every time I turn around, th-there's a better sensor or a less expensive sensor, so even that is under a lot of change, which is good, these sensors used to be hugely expensive, I keep talking about Tesla, but I think it's just a great parallel. Musk famously said, "Tesla will not use LIDAR. We will only use camera." Now, when he said that, the big LIDAR sitting up on top of the roof was about 50 grand, right?

As much as the car. But now he said it, so he's kinda stuck and cannot go back on his word. But for the rest of us, these LIDARs have gotten so good and so inexpensive, And again, you try to ride on any sister technology you can that will help bring down the cost when you're early on. In the robot, where we don't have to see as far as a car sees, right?

A car wants to see a football field away at all times, This little robot doesn't have to see that far. So we use a lot of the sensors that are in these autonomous lawnmowers, if you've seen those, right? A- and so they've just really , brought the scale and the cost down. It's been great.

Jeanne Gray: So looking forward, give me a sense of the timeline, 'cause you said you're in beta. What do you define as a beta timeline of, is it three months, six months? And then goes on after that? 

Steve Burns: . Mason didn't call us and ask us to do this, right?

We did it 'cause it's our home city, right? And but I was thinking if this is as good for s- the citizens of a city, because the other thing is a lot of middle and lower income families do not use food delivery because it's just too expensive. But at this cost, at $6, I contend you cannot get in your car and go and get it yourself for less.

Jeanne Gray: Right. 

Steve Burns: And every drive is a risk, right? So just running up to get the pizza, if the dad just says, "I'll get it myself," and runs up and gets it, there's a risk every time you're out on the road. And I, think at $6, given a little fuel and a little wear and tear on the car and a little of your time, you just can't beat it.

So think a, town is going to, democratize food delivery and bring it to a lot more people that couldn't do it. So we started thinking maybe the towns will ask us to come, right? And so we're starting to see a little pool there. And so thought we would wait to announce our next town, to your point about timing- 

Jeanne Gray: Mm-hmm 

Steve Burns: until Mason was really buttoned up, we were through beta and everything. But I think we've got enough learnings even in beta here we're, and it's, it will take us six months to set up in the new town anyway that we might announce the new town, the next town here shortly while we're still in beta in the first one.

Jeanne Gray: Is the setup for whether it's Mason or any town tied to a certain number of your vehicles and robots being dedicated? Meaning, if you go to the town next to Mason, it's just not one vehicle, you know- Yeah ... you know you have to do 10 or 30. give a sense of- Yeah ... of what that commitment is to be able to really serve that market?

Steve Burns: Yeah. When we do the little town next to Mason because to your point, 80% of the cars that are in Mason we can use, for the next town to it, . I don't consider that the next town. We'll probably do all of Greater Cincinnati and still call it one town.

Jeanne Gray: Mm-hmm.

Steve Burns: So what I'm talking about is another town in a whole 'nother state and warmer. but suited. We want a town that already might be doing robotaxis, so they're already inclined to- ... to see the vision around that. you know, at the end of the day, I think our pitch to the town when we get far enough for the autonomous part of it Again, going to the premise that food delivery is the most dangerous job in America.

So if there's a wreck, it's not just the food delivery driver, the gig worker, Yeah. He or she probably hit somebody, I think we'll be able to prove pretty shortly that we're safer than an 18-year-old hustling in his Suburban. 

Jeanne Gray: Yeah. But- 

Steve Burns: His or 

Jeanne Gray: her Suburban ... but a town similar, back to sort of full circle, is a 39,000 person town like Mason let's just say they're in Kentucky maybe a little warmer.

Jeanne Gray: is this five vehicles you think would end up having or 10? Just give me a sense of the scale of is it just per capita, the number of families? 

Steve Burns: since this is so new it's very difficult for us to gauge- ... 

Jeanne Gray: Mm-hmm ... 

Steve Burns: now, as we roll out different towns we'll be able to gauge a little better, but we're really focused on how fast can I build a robot if I have to, And even if the robot has to be in a conventional vehicle at first, the robot's the unique part right now. So we think if we get surprised in a town and maybe humans have to deliver until the robots catch up or humans have to help. But it's one of those deals where, you know, I feel like I'm Musk groupie here, because I'm talking about him so much, but when Musk was trying to land the rocket booster on the platform floating in the ocean- where every NASA booster is at the bottom of the ocean from every NASA flight. So in other words, that's the high bar. So when he missed the first six times, right? Mm-hmm. And they put the microphone in front of him like, "This is... you're toast, Mister. That's it. Obviously you missed. You did bad," right?

He knows that he's no worse than NASA. It's at the bottom of the ocean, never to be used again. So here, I know that worst case, I've just gotta get the food there in a timely manner, safely, 'cause the bar is a kid in his Suburban, a stranger walking up on your, your porch. So I feel like we can go to a town, and if we misjudge at first or if we're more popular than we, we thought, we might get a little behind, but the food will always get delivered, and we will slowly catch up, or as we can we'll catch up with the robot.

So scaling is a little different, 'cause hardware's involved. You know, since we're not using somebody else's vehicles, Where when Uber Ridesharing rolled out into a new town, They didn't have to guess how many vehicles do we need.

They just signed up a bunch of gig drivers, and as they needed them, they called them. it's a little more heavy, but again, that's why we're keeping this robot so inexpensive, right? So that we can scale quickly without a lot of capital. 

Jeanne Gray: So as we wrap up and, we've touched so many different parts of your model And you specifically were saying, suburbia is a, focus the service.

So how do you think the customer, the suburban customer looks out the door and sees home delivery? It's your vehicle, it's drones it's all... What's the competition? It's a pie that you're dividing up among yourself and others. 

Steve Burns: I think no matter what they're doing right now, it's gonna cost them $60, right?

That $30 example. That with the food markup and with the fees, and sometimes there's little hidden fees, and the tip, and by the way, you're tipping on the more expensive food that's already been marked up, and the tip's a percentage of the food, so that's where the $60 comes from. So wherever they're doing in that town, it's costing them 60 bucks, and we're gonna come in at 36.

And food's already so expensive, the average income, family income in Mason is $125,000, So you think well, maybe they're not really worried about a tip or the extra cost associated with a food markup. But everybody is.

Nobody likes paying more. So I think wherever we go for $36, I think we're gonna be welcome. 

Jeanne Gray: But sticking to the point, though, is I'm not seeing drone delivery right now in ... where I live. But I was watching YouTube the other day about China, and I was like, whoa, they already seem like drones are a part of everyday life, at least in certain towns or cities where this is being deployed.

Yeah. That's where I was kinda looking for is you'll still have the gig worker. but you'll have the drone, and you'll also have your autonomous vehicle. Are those the- Yeah. They'll all be there, but- Yeah ... different factors will settle out the market as to why I'll call you versus, why a drone might be better used.

Steve Burns: Yeah. Nobody, even a drone can't be as inexpensive. With all the regulatory... So drones have a lot of regulatory. As soon as you're in the air, you got a lot of regulatory, right? Bringing props down, spinning props down into where people live to drop it off is a problem. , Once you're down, a kid can still pull on that string, or wind can get it swaying.

If you drop it as a parachute when you're way up there and you're flying, buying a drone you gotta be able to somehow predict where it's gonna land. So a little robot running it up right now,

this isn't something new. We're just mimicking what's done with a human, and we thought this was the best way to mimic it. But it will evolve, of course, right? And so, we're trying to be nimble so that as a new sensor or a new this comes out or anything we wanna be on it.

We wanna be quick and nimble and just be the most advanced, safest... I think when people - order at NoTip, they should count on it being a sterile experience. I don't think that's the best word, sterile cause it's food. You want it to be sterile, right? But right now, for the - last 15 minutes of a delivered food's life, where that, incumbent takes it, the food delivery company's making more than the farmer that grew the food and the restaurant that made the food, right?

And just for that last 15 minutes of life. So it's really imbalanced, and it can't stay that way, 

Jeanne Gray: it sound, it sounds like a phenomenal entrepreneurial opportunity 'cause you have identified something that's sort of amiss in the food delivery service that I don't think just yourself, that other people are wondering, 

how many times can I order with this additional cost for food?

At the end of the month- Yeah ... it starts to change, it starts to change behavior. So Steven- Yeah ... it was great speaking with you. I'm pretty excited for- 

Steve Burns: Thank 

you 

Jeanne Gray: ... the next stage, and I'll be opening my door and, in a couple of years And I'll say, "I knew that- Okay. "I knew that guy when he- That guy

when he was doing that." Again, it was a pleasure speaking with you and thanks for being a guest. 

Steve Burns: Thanks for having me. 

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