Then, I was vice chairman of the board of Marvel for six years. After that 10 year run, we sold the business to The Walt Disney Company for $4 billion plus. From bankruptcy to 10 years later, almost four and a half billion dollar sale to Disney. A theme, I think in my career has been service on public companies on public boards and so on. I’ve had titles such as chairman, executive chairman, vice chairman, chairman of the audit committee, chairman and CEO, interim CEO, and so on of various public companies.

Peter Cuneo (00:04:02):
During my turnaround career, so to speak. I also have a business with my two sons where we invest in venture capital situations again in media and entertainment, consumer products. Notably, a couple of years ago, we sold one of our comic book businesses to the Chinese for a very nice profit. From a personal standpoint, I serve on the board of the National Archives in Washington, where I am chairman of the development committee and the audit committee. The Archives is the government agency that houses all the records of the United States government from the beginning. We have 17 billion documents. You see the constitution and the declaration and so on at our headquarters in Washington, if you ever visited. If you love history, actually this is a great experience for me and so on. That’s a real quick background for me.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:04:56):
I’m Avinash. Obviously, Peter is a hard act to follow. My career is different, I would say. I started as an engineer. I’ve got a background in mechatronics and computer science. I’ve grown up in a few countries. I was actually born in the UK. My family is from a tropical island off the East coast of Africa called Mauritius. I grew up in Australia and then was in the US for about a decade as well. My career, I started out at General Motors-Holden, which was the Australian division of GM in Melbourne, Australia. The focus there was really about the up and coming technology that was going to define the automotive industry. I think that’s probably the sort of key theme of my career. To be able to look ahead and recognize what was going to be coming and what was going to be important to people, the market and the world. I think that was a lot of the grounding in looking ahead and focused on innovation type activities. Over there, I got to do some pretty cool stuff.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:05:57):
Obviously it was a different world. It was the world of V8s back in Australia, especially around that time. I was lucky enough to be part of the team that designed the world show car of the year back then. I did a lot of advanced technology that is only hitting cars to some extent now. Then I sort of left that world. I wanted to do my own thing. I started a chocolate company, totally random, and moved to India. I’d never lived in India before. I couldn’t speak the language, but me and three friends, we created India’s first chocolate lounge. It was a place where you would go and have great desserts and great premium chocolate. We had recognized that in that market, there was a growing middle-class and upper middle-class that didn’t have too many great places for a date night or cool places to go. We went and created this chocolate lounge. I can say I’ve had a chocolate factory. We had a chocolate factory in Bangalore, and we created that.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:06:48):
That was quite an amazing experience because the speed that we were able to bring that to market, in about 12 to 14 months were able to get a couple of lounges up and going. We had the factory going. We were importing chocolate from around the world. We had chocolatiers designing our products. We were tied up with a Louis Vuitton and Audi and other top brands. We were doing some really interesting stuff there. Then I sold that. I went back to Australia. The other thing I was recognizing, this is more than 10 years ago now, was the fact that phones and digital tech in healthcare was just way behind. I created a company that is partnered with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia and the Royal Children’s Hospital to take medical research and translate it into products for doctors, patients, and parents. That was back before the term digital health was even a thing. That company is now still going and growing and doing very well. I started that, I think it was 10 years ago.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:07:45):
That theme of seeing things before they happen and just going out and making it happen has being part of my career and the things that have really interested me. I then moved to the US. I was leading the innovation activities out in Silicon Valley. That was for General Motors actually. Then I led the acquisition of Cruise, which is the self-driving division for General Motors. I led that acquisition. The full public number is not out there, but what’s publicly disclosed, approximately a billion dollars. That really kicked off the autonomous industry and the OEM startup ecosystem that has really just continued to grow strength from strength from then. When we were looking at that case and when I was building that whole strategy in terms of why we would acquire a small startup, it was really because I had seen that the only way to do autonomy was not to try and take incremental steps, but to start from scratch and really design it in a whole new way. That’s what the team out there was doing. Obviously that has proved to be a very good success story.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:08:42):
Then when I met Dennis, the founder and CEO of Arrival, I had just seen something that in all my time in the industry, I have not seen. Arrival is something truly disruptive and just transformative to the industry as a whole, with the deep technology that we have, the micro factories, which I’m sure we’ll be talking about today. I just jumped at the opportunity to join him on the journey. I left Silicon Valley and moved to the UK where I joined him as the president chief strategy officer for the company. I think over the last couple of years that I’ve been there, we’ve had an incredible time. Amazing team, amazing culture, amazing tech. We announced an investment from Hyundai Kia two years ago now. We have an investment of 100 million Euro that really brought us out of stealth. But the company has actually been going on since 2015, and so six years now. It’s got over 1400 employees all around the world, but it was in stealth. We came out with that announcement.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:09:37):
Then we followed it up with an investment from UPS and an order of 10,000 units with the option for 10,000 more. Then we at BlackRock invest in us. We have announced three products. We’ve got the Arrival Bus, we have the Arrival Van and we have a small vehicle platform. It’s really best in class products, a competitive price with diesel, built in low CapEx, low cost micro factories. I think it’s a step change. I think that once you produce vehicles with our method, you can’t go back. Then we had the pleasure and luxury of meeting Peter and team. This is where our stories come together, and we decided to partner on the same journey. Arrival announced the merger with CIIG late last year.

Robert Leonard (00:10:22):
I want to talk today, start the conversation by talking about what you just mentioned, the merger and what a SPAC is. Because I think that will help a lot of the listeners for the rest of our conversation that we’re going to have in case they don’t already know what a SPAC is. Please tell us what S-P-A-C, a SPAC stands for and what they are.

Peter Cuneo (00:10:41):
Maybe I’ll start with a SPAC. SPAC stands for special-purpose acquisition company. It is a company, a public company that is created with the express purpose to merge with a private company that wants to be a public company. A SPAC, in essence is simply an entity that is public, is listed on, in our case, the NASDAQ exchange. You can trade the stock. Basically, it has a large amount of money in the bank in trust looking for a deal. In the case of our SPAC, we went public on NASDAQ in December of 2019, a little over a year ago. We raised $260 million from investors and that went into trust. Then we had two years to go and find a merger partner, if you will. A SPAC typically goes out and looks at many, many different business types. Now, in our case, we are a TMT SPAC. That’s financial parlance for technology, media and entertainment and telecom. We looked in all those areas quite extensively. We actually met the people from Arrival now it’s probably last September.

Peter Cuneo (00:11:59):
We were introduced to them by an investment banking firm. Again, technology is one of the high points of our SPAC. We really view, and I think Avinash will say this too, even though you might say, well, Arrival is an electric vehicle company. We would say, actually, Arrival is a technology company that happens to be in the electric vehicle business. We’ll get into more of that as we go on. But SPACs have become very popular in the last couple of years, simply because they are a means for companies to go public in ways that have advantages to the normal, what we call regular way IPL process. Which has some inherent flaws in it. Just a couple of things that make SPACs, I think much more attractive actually to a company that wants to go public is, first and foremost, the company going public knows exactly what the price is going to be on the stock, knows exactly how much money is going to be put into the company. By the way, our SPAC raised an additional $400 million above 260 once we met Arrival and knew that we wanted to merge with them.

Peter Cuneo (00:13:13):
We are injecting $660 million in cash into Arrival to spur growth once we close. We’ve announced our intention to close and the SPAC will de-SPAC, it’s what it’s called when we merge actually Arrival into the SPAC probably in early March of this year. We’ve got another couple of months to go.

Robert Leonard (00:13:36):
You mentioned that SPACs typically have a timeline for when they have to make an acquisition. In your case, it was two years. What happens if no deal happens? What if you can’t find anything?

Peter Cuneo (00:13:46):
Well, it’s not very good for the sponsors. I am a sponsor along with my son, Gavin Cuneo, and another individual, Mike Minnick. We, along with some institutional sponsors actually formed the SPAC originally with our own money. We put up a fair amount of cash, frankly. In our case, it’s over seven figures each. To fund the company while we’re looking for a merger candidate and actually merging. We do not draw any salaries. We don’t really have … It’s all money going out the door and nothing coming to us. That’s our risk. We are essentially making a bet that we can find a good candidate to merge with and effect that merger within two years. There are SPACs that never get it done. Some SPACs have only 18 months, although two years is more of thee norm. But there are many SPACs that never actually find a deal. That’s not very good for the sponsors pocketbook, as well as their reputations.

Robert Leonard (00:14:48):
As you’re looking for the deal, what types of expenses do you have? What are you funding? I’m assuming it’s listing fees with the exchange. I know that’s not cheap. Other than that, what else do you have?

Peter Cuneo (00:14:57):
We have underwriting fees for when we went public, and that’s a big number, those fees. It’s mostly legal fees, fees to investment bankers. There’s a small amount of accounting fees and things like that. Yes.

Robert Leonard (00:15:13):
If this didn’t come to fruition, if you weren’t able to find a deal, you are out all of that money that you invested. But other than that, you get the rest of the money back that’s in the bank, correct? What you would have lost is what you’ve spent to go public? Is that how it works?

Peter Cuneo (00:15:26):
We lose all the money we put up upfront, whether we spent it or not. The 260 million that we originally raised is in the bank earning interest. If we don’t find an acquisition in two years, then that money goes back to those investors. They get their full money back plus interest. There’s not a lot of risk to those initial investors that put up the $260 million.

Robert Leonard (00:15:52):
Just opportunity costs it sound like.

Peter Cuneo (00:15:55):
Exactly right.

Robert Leonard (00:15:57):
One of the people that I love to follow is Charlie Munger. He talks a lot about incentives. As you were talking about how it’s not good for the sponsors who can’t find a deal, it totally makes sense. But how do you manage this dynamic of having the right incentives? Because if you’re getting close to your exploration of your SPAC, and I’m not saying this happened with you, but if it was happening for somebody, how do you manage not buying a bad deal so that you don’t look like you didn’t get any deal?

Peter Cuneo (00:16:24):
Well, that’s up to the sponsors. SPACs have been around for about 20 years, actually, Robert. Up until the last two or three years, they were not viewed very favorably, frankly, by the legitimate financial world. They were typically used for companies that just couldn’t go public any other way. They were not acceptable for the normal IPO way to get public. The underwriters were not big time financial players. The sponsors often were people that didn’t have any particular background in the area that they were looking at and so on. A lot of the deals that did happen when under, were unsuccessful after the merger and so on. But what happened about three years ago is, some people that I think the public knows started sponsoring SPACs. That changed everything, I think. Because we went through our backgrounds and frankly, both Avinash and I didn’t tell you everything in the interest of time. But now the sponsors I think are very high quality. Now all the big investment banks, all the names you know want to do and are doing SPACs, are helping finance SPACs raise money, et cetera.

Peter Cuneo (00:17:34):
In the case of our SPAC, which is called CIIG, by the way, to give you an idea. You heard my background, an operator, if you will, a business, that’s my career. My son was both an investment banker and an operator of businesses. One of our sponsors Mike Minnick has an outstanding career in TMT banking. Then on our board, we have Kristen O’Hara, who formerly was the chief marketing officer for all of Time Warner. Is now the chief business officer for Hearst, which is a very large private entertainment company actually. We have people Dave Flowers, Liberty Media, and he did the Sirius XM turn around, which as big as Marvel was as a turnaround, the Sirius XM was maybe the biggest ever. Dave was very important to that. We have another board member, Chris Rogers, who is a founder of Nextel and another board member, Ken West, who was actually the CFO of Marvel for eight years.

Peter Cuneo (00:18:38):
Then [inaudible 00:18:39] for Martha Stewart and is a great public CFO, recently retired. But we have a great board with a lot of background, a lot of reach, meaning we know a lot of people in TMT. We don’t sit around waiting for someone to call us. We actually have to be very aggressive going out and meeting people, or explaining who we are and why we think their company would be a good candidate for going public.

Robert Leonard (00:19:05):
He’s certainly not the only one, but I think one of the high profile people or investors that has brought a lot of attention to SPACs is Chamath. He’s been doing that lately. He’s the one that actually made me familiar with SPAC. I’ve just started studying them recently, but I can totally understand why before it wasn’t necessarily looked upon as the best option. As a SPAC, can you invest in multiple companies or once you acquire one or merge with one, is the deal done?

Peter Cuneo (00:19:34):
No, you can only do one merger and then the deal is done. However, it is possible, and this has been done, to merge more than one company at the same time. Once that one event happens and you close that deal, then you have “de-SPACed”, meaning the SPAC disappears, but you now have a public company in its place. A fully operational public company. I’ll tell you the other thing, and this applies to Arrival, that’s very unique about SPACs. Is the fact that SPACs make a lot of sense for venture capital situations that require large sums of money to go forward. They may be companies without any sales, maybe actually pre-revenue. That in fact, Arrival is a pre-revenue company. But because the promise is so huge, and we’ll get into that, you’re able to do a SPAC, go public, inject a great deal of money into the company for growth because the investors see the future.

Robert Leonard (00:20:32):
Avinash, is that why Arrival chose to go public through a SPAC rather than through a traditional IPO?

Avinash Rugoobur (00:20:38):
I think to answer that question to chart back Arrival’s history. Arrival was founded six years ago, 2015. We’ve got over 14 employees. We have been developing the technology that we have for the last five to six years. We’re at a stage here where we’ve basically looked at the way commercial electric vehicle segment operates, and six years ago decided that there was a better way of doing it. We have actually designed a whole new method of manufacturing vehicles using micro factories, which are low CapEx, low footprint factories that can be placed in warehouses around the world and turned into production facilities. We’ve vertically integrated the components. We design our own components like the battery, the battery management system, the human machine interface. All of that core technology is in-house IP. That then packages into a skateboard platform. We have a bus, we have a van, we have a small vehicle platform that we’re launching as well. We’ve pioneered this new composite materials, so instead of using metal, we actually use a composite, a fabric that using our own unique process, we can turn into panels that are lighter, more cost effective and more durable than steel.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:21:56):
But also they don’t need a metal stamping plant or a paint shop, which are two large high CapEx parts of the plant. By doing that, we’ve just created a whole new method of production that leads to best in class vehicles. The technology we’ve been developing, as Peter mentioned, we’re a technology company. We are not just the producer of electric vehicles, we’re actually created systems that create vehicles. Those are some of the systems that I just mentioned just now, but also I would add to that the software layer. We have a software layer that allows all of our components to be upgraded over time like plug and play. A company like UPS combined asset that can actually also upgrade that over time. You can keep the vehicle evergreen, but also you help to improve the residual value and keep them fresh. Which also changes the total cost of ownership. All that to say, when looked at where was the company positioned. We have the employee base, we have been self-financed, the founder had a previous successful exit. Self-financed until the investment from Hyundai Kia, UPS, BlackRock that I mentioned.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:23:08):
If you look at the path of our life cycle, we’ve validated this technology and our components have been in test for the last few years with UPS, Royal Mail and other folks. We have two micro factories that we’ve announced, one in South Carolina, one in the UK. We’re at the stage now where we’re producing the buses for trials. We’re in the midst of producing prototypes for that UPS deal that I mentioned, but also for other folks. We’re in the midst of bringing up the factories. When we looked at where we were, we were at a place where the technology move was mature, the team was established, we have an extremely strong vertically integrated IP portfolio. Our main focus right now is on basically execution and bringing that up to scale so that we can be producing those vehicles. The buses will be produced by the end of this year. We have the van being produced next year. When we looked at that, Peter’s point was the right amount of capital to execute our business plan.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:24:10):
When we met Peter though, and we saw that we had in Peter and Gavin and Mike, a team that also believed in the same mission that we’ve got. For example, Peter is actually joining our board. This wasn’t just a financial transaction. It was critically important to us that that wasn’t the only lens that we looked at when we determined the strategy. We wanted a partnership. We wanted somebody that believed in what we were doing, that could help enable what we were doing. Obviously Peter’s background on brands and public companies in the US. We talked about Gavin and Mike as well. That’s now a knowledge base, a partnership that really can help to accelerate the growth of the company. We have the technology, we have the automotive talent. We have half of our teams in software. We have folks in robotics. We have all of that technical talent. With this partnership, we’re really looking to expand that into creating the global brand that Arrival is going to be. Because obviously with these micro factories, you’re going to put them everywhere. We’ve announced two, but they can literally go anywhere.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:25:14):
If you think about cities over a million people, there’s over 500 of those and each one can have a micro factory. When you think about that level of scale of where we wanted to go, the fact that we wanted a partnership that would help further the success of Arrival, the relationships we’ve developed with Peter and team, it was just the right strategy to us. If you think about that versus any other method, there’s direct listing, there is IPO’s et cetera, this was the one that made the most sense for us. But at the end of the day, I think what’s important here is the capability of the company. Because at the end of the day, what we are focused on is their team and the talent and the culture, having the right product at the right price and having the deep technology, and then finally executing on that. If you do that right, I don’t think really ultimately it doesn’t matter which way you’ve gone public. You’ll be a successful company if you focus on those core fundamentals. That’s where all our focus is on.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:26:13):
For us as a leadership team, along with Peter, it was just a really perfect match.

Robert Leonard (00:26:19):
It sounds to me like the biggest advantage to a SPAC in this situation was the strategic partnership that you’re gathering, that you wouldn’t get from an IPO. With an IPO, I mean, it’s easy. You can raise the money for the most part, but you’re not getting anybody strategic on the other end. It’s strictly cash. It reminds me, I love Shark Tank. One of my favorite shows. A lot of times the business owners or entrepreneurs say that they want a strategic investor and that’s why they’re on shark. That’s what made me think of that. Peter, from your perspective, as the chairman of the SPAC, what made you interested in Arrival specifically?

Peter Cuneo (00:26:53):
This will actually go back to Marvel for a second. Because a lot of people say, “Peter, you don’t know anything about electric vehicles. What’s the deal here? Why would you be interested?” And so on. That’s a good question. First of all, Arrival as a company, and this is a big statement, but I firmly believe this, that is changing the rules of the game for an entire industry. We’ll get into some of the details in a second and why that is. When I first went to Marvel, as Marvel came out of bankruptcy and we had a great board and we had a lot of good executives, the culture of the company was also to change the rules of the game for the businesses that Marvel was going to be into. We’re talking about motion pictures, and we’re talking about comic books and what have you, entertainment in general. Because the company recognized that those industries there were a lot of, shall we say practices that didn’t make much sense to us.

Peter Cuneo (00:27:52):
The real reason that Marvel was so successful over that 10 year period comes down to the fact that the culture, the value system of the company was, “No, we’re not doing it that way. There’s a better way to do it. No, we can make that movie for less money if we do the following. No, we don’t need a lead actor to play one of the characters that will cost us $20 million upfront.” Because the characters are the stars, so to speak. The actors will be behind a mask most of the time. What we do need is very good actors and actresses to fill those roles, but we don’t need big names. Which was completely contrary to what Hollywood wanted us to do, as one of many different approaches. Very simply, I think that’s why Marvel was so successful. When I first met Avinash and the founder, Dennis and other members of the Arrival team, the first Zoom meeting we had when I learned that they took five years to think through completely out of do this better. In entertainment, we use the phrase reimagine a lot.

Peter Cuneo (00:29:02):
Well, they reimagined what the electric vehicle business could be and they’ve executed on it. Now, actually the curtain is coming up after five years of their work. Because a lot of people say, “I’d never heard of Arrival until a month or two ago.” They were in stealth mode. But when I saw the culture, the collective value system of Arrival was a lot like Marvel. No, we’re not going to do it the way other people do. There’s a much better way that makes more sense. We’re not going to be tied to a factory that is using an assembly line process. Assembly lines came into existence in the car business 120 years ago with Henry Ford. Of course there’d been some changes. But they said, “No, we’re not doing that. There’s a much better way.” I immediately got excited. It was more about the collective culture and value systems that I believe in and my partners believe in than anything else, but didn’t still know very much about electric vehicles and so on. But I understood their drive very much.

Peter Cuneo (00:30:09):
They brought back lots of memories and frankly, strong feelings, and I wanted to be associated with this management team.

Robert Leonard (00:30:18):
To talk about electric vehicles from a more high level view, rather than just Arrivals. Why have EVs become so popular with investors lately?

Avinash Rugoobur (00:30:28):
I think it’s a combination of what you’re seeing on ESG with climate change, with affordability, et cetera. Let’s talk about the commercial segment for a second. It’s an underserved market. It can be seen a little bit as a dirty industry. I think electrification brings that right to the forefront of pioneering technology. I mean, to a point, if you think about what that interest is, it’s almost like an old industry that no one was really excited about the growth potential if you’re talking about the investor mindset. To a pioneering technology industry where so much innovation is happening, it’s so transformative that I think it’s really grabbed the mindshare. But I think it’s because everybody has understood that the days of the internal combustion engine are numbered and the future is going to be zero emission. There’ll be a combination of electric being, I think the bulk for at least a little while, but there’s obviously going to be other technologies being developed over time. But that mind shift has happened.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:31:24):
People understand that vehicles will be electric, whether that’s because government mandates or whether that’s because the society is driving it or whether that’s because ultimately they’re actually better vehicles. I mean, you’ve probably seen performance tests across electric vehicles against traditional fossil fueled ones, and you’ll see the difference. In the commercial vehicle segment, and if you’ve been following recently, there’s been a whole bunch of interest from investors in the commercial electric vehicle market. That’s because the actual problem set is very clearly defined. An operator is really looking to optimize the ongoing costs, the total cost of ownership of the vehicle. Electrification enables that. What Arrival is bringing to the table on top of that … That’s enabled through things like easier to service and maintain vehicles, you have lower energy costs versus fuel costs, et cetera. What Arrival is bringing is, our vehicles are price competitive with diesel and fossil fuel vehicles upfront.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:32:24):
You’re actually getting an upfront cost benefit compared to other electric vehicles, because right now, most electric vehicles actually have a price premium to it, particularly in the commercial vehicle segment. We’ve removed that barrier. Then you get a better total of ownership. When you add that together, that’s a key focus of operators. The operators have depots, which are fixed environments which simplifies the charging infrastructure problem. Which again, as you think about mass adoption of electrification on the retail segment, the overall charging network require a lot of investment and ongoing investment. But on a commercial vehicle segment, that’s a more contained problem because you know where those vehicles are going to be overnight, they’re returned to the depot. That’s where you focus a lot of that charging infrastructure. There’s no range anxiety. These folks understand their routes very well. Over time, they are ensuring that they actually get that payback back. It’s not about, let’s say the fashion of the vehicle or the design, it’s really functional and operational.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:33:24):
That’s the market that we took on originally, and six years ago is what we started to design a blank sheet for that market. Of course it can be applied to other segments. That’s the initial focus of Arrival. You’ll see now this huge interest in electrification. Obviously Tesla is a pioneer. They really did bulldoze their way into mindshare of everybody, I think in terms of what they’ve actually been able to do and it’s been incredible to watch. The traditional OEMs have been slow to respond and it’s taking them time. Folks like GM and Ford and everybody else, they have now responded, but it did take quite a lot of time. I think we spotted this very early on, like I said, six odd years ago and we’ve put the technology and investment into it. But the investor group, I mean, that’s a huge market. If you think about all of, whether it’s the commercial vehicle segment or the retail vehicle segment and all the ancillary services and all of the ecosystem around that, shifting over to electrification, there’re so many opportunities for growth and return and ROI in this space.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:34:29):
I mean, I think it is one of the industries that’s going through the most transformation in its entire history, and it’s happening in a relatively short period of time. You take the micro factory for example, that we are pioneering, 100 years of producing vehicles, a certain way, five to six years it’s transformed. Electrification is doing that, I think for the overall segment. I think that’s where there’s just a lot of growth. There’s a lot of opportunity.

Robert Leonard (00:34:53):
When EVs were first launched, a lot of people thought that they were going to pretty quickly replace the combustion engine. Some countries have even said that they would only allow EVs in the next five years, some shorter, some a little bit longer. Where do you both see the demand for EVs moving over the next, say five, 10 years?

Peter Cuneo (00:35:14):
I’m going to state what it was probably obvious. I think given the nature of the world has to go green in many areas. Certainly one of the most important ones is automotive. I just think that it’s not just five or 10 years, I think there’s a much longer run here for EVs. Avinash, you could talk to this, but the EVs, particularly the ones that Arrival are doing can be upgraded very easily from a technological standpoint because of the way they are constructed. It is quite easy to, I think he talked a little bit about this earlier, over the long-term value of the Arrival vehicles because they can be upgraded so well. I think we’re in for a very long run.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:35:59):
I would agree with Peter. I think that the whole industry will change to zero emission, the bulk which is going to be electric. I think that it’s taken a bit of time, I would say for the technologies that enable electrification to mature to the point that you’re seeing today. I think that’s been why … It’s typical of many disruptive tech where you sort of overestimate the amount of time it will take, but you underestimate the impact. I think right now, what we’re seeing is the impact of this is huge. I mean the whole world, countries are saying they’re going to ban even the purchase of a non electric vehicle over varying timeframe, some as early as 2025 and on. When you look at that, you realize that this whole industry is going to have to shift really quickly. I just see the demand is huge. For example, for our bus platform, the demand is incredible from governments and operators wanting to shift to a greener future. But also I think what’s unique here is that one of the barriers to the adoption of electrification has been the price point.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:37:01):
As I mentioned earlier, there’s been a price premium. When it comes down to the ESG goals, but also imagine you’re the fleet buyer or you’re the retail buyer, and you’re paying a price premium. You may want to do it, but that’s a barrier to you actually being able to go ahead and make that purchase. Sort of the key thing that we had to make sure we addressed from day one is that we have to be price competitive with fossil fueled vehicles. With our technology we’ve enabled that. That removes the barrier to adoption. Having that similar price point with a better product means that it doesn’t matter if you’re the fleet buyer or you’re the retail buyer. But if you were in a showroom or you’re on a website or you’re buying direct, basically if you can get a better product at a similar price, you’re going to do it. Make no mistake about it, the electric vehicle is a better vehicle. Obviously my whole background has being in automotive, or most of my background. Even down on performance, which is what a lot of really passionate car folks say about sports cars.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:38:03):
I do love my sports cars, but an electric sports car is something else. But our technology can scale all the way down to the more functional operational commercial vehicles that we’re talking about. It’s a better technology. For example, if you look at the way we’ve done our components, all of those components that I mentioned earlier, they all fit within our skateboard platform. They all … Basically, you can think about them almost as Lego. That just go to give a plug and play and using the latest software tech, these components can be swapped in and out. You house that in a skateboard and use that composite material I was talking about to build the body on top. You can make any shape you want. You can do any form you want, and over time we’ll be developing a lot of things. But that floor is actually fully flat. If you can think about just the architecture of a fossil fuel commercial van, you have the engine up front and you have to driver on and you’re carrying the drive trains through the body of the vehicle and under the vehicle.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:38:57):
You don’t have any of that complexity. With the Arrival vehicle, all of that’s housed in the floor of the vehicle. Now, you have a fully flat floor, the driver is able to get in and out of the vehicle easier. They can get to the cargo easier. The user experience is actually better. We spend a lot of time designing around that user experience. In the case of Arrival, which differentiates us from many others, with the software layer, we made it to the hardware that we have. Then we have all of that data that can go to the operator to better optimize their fleet as well. We can change these technologies over time. You’re just getting a better product. I think with the price point, that’s going to drive even further demand. I think the acceleration curve increases significantly more rapidly when you have that price point at the right place. I think that’s what we’ve solved. EV demand is not going anywhere. It’s only going to get stronger.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:39:50):
I think at some point, the younger generation is going to be looking at some of these older vehicles and what they do to environment and asking some serious questions. I think that shift has already happened.

Peter Cuneo (00:40:01):
I think if there’s anything that will be a drag on this, it’s simply infrastructure. There’s an awful lot of people that are working on that, but simply where do I charge up my vehicle? How fast can I charge up my vehicle? Those kinds of questions. Where do I get my vehicles serviced and so on? There’s different questions for commercial versus retail, but I think that’s a factor, but it’s coming. It’s too big an opportunity. There’s a lot of work done on new technology, particularly on batteries. There are going to be some very big leaps, I believe in battery technology in the next five years. I don’t actually know what they’ll be, but there’s so much work going on right now, very interesting stuff that if the technology will be equal to or less expensive than the current technology, there’ll be tremendous boom as well. It’s all very, very exciting.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:40:56):
Charging infrastructure is an interesting one because it is, as Peter mentioned, different from retail to commercial. Commercial it’s, let’s say is more easily solved through the fact that it’s a contained problem because of the depots. But if you think about that globally, I think that one of the biggest barriers is going to be to make sure that the rest of the world can come along with this electrification. Because what we really need here is a transition across the whole globe to more sustainable transportation. As you start to think about the charging infrastructure and branching that out, that isn’t everywhere, significant innovation will continue to happen. The good thing is, when the smart phone first came out, that came out, the app store was pretty weak in terms of what things you could get there. But if you look at that now, it creates an ecosystem around it. That’s what these EV vehicles are going to do. That’s what we’re really excited about because with that production methodology, we can produce it anywhere, but technologies can go on to multiple different applications that can bring multiple regions around the world along for the ride.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:41:56):
Charging infrastructure is going to be one, I think that you’ll see a lot of transformation occurring over the next few years.

Robert Leonard (00:42:03):
When I hear you talk about the price point, I totally agree that that’s going to be a good business decision in terms of driving demand and acquiring customers. But at heart, I’m a value investor, Warren buffet through and through. I don’t tend to typically invest in high tech, high growth companies. For me, my mindset initially goes to profitability. If we see a company like Tesla, massive scale, higher price point, they’re struggling to be profitable. That could be a million different things. I mean, they’re just generally having financial trouble. I initially go to, how can a company that’s selling vehicles at not a premium like Tesla, so at comparable prices, how can they reach profitability? Is it your design of the vehicles and your manufacturing process? You mentioned before that it’s a light CapEx model. Is it those types of things that allow you to eventually reach profitability, even at a smaller scale and at lower price points than a company like Tesla?

Avinash Rugoobur (00:42:59):
I think we’re fully aligned on point that when we started Arrival, it was about making sure you had the right economics for the overall system and for the product, for manufacturers and everything else. I think what you’re touching on is something that is inherent in the existing automotive industry. It’s not just Tesla, it’s anybody in this world. Which is, if you are spending a couple of billion dollars on your factory, and you’re amortizing that across the vehicles, and you have a lot of tier one components that you’re buying and you’re paying the margin to the tier one, you’re eroding your profitability each time for each one of those things that you’re doing. For example, you have this mega factory or giga factory. The argument is, well, we’re getting economies of scale. That’s why you go down that path. But the reality is, if you look at the margins that are being made on the vehicles, it’s just not sustainable. The traditional method just is not sustainable. Because a few years ago you would have fewer models and you would be producing those at 100, 200,000 vehicles and sending them everywhere around the world.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:44:03):
Now, you have a more fragmented market and you have multiple competitors looking at the same customer base. If you’re not going to get the volumes to offset the amortization of these factories, you’ve got a serious problem. Tesla’s tech company. They’ve got great technology. It gets even tougher for some of their more traditional OEMs where they’ve got four to five year development cycles for the vehicles that cost them a couple of hundreds of millions to a billion to just engineer the vehicle architecture because of the way it’s done. Which I think we can go really deep into that. Then you’ve got to spend a couple of billion dollars on the factory. Then you’ve got to assume, if I’m sitting here, I’ve got to assume that I know what the customer’s going to want for five to 10 years away from now. If that changes, because of the way I’m so tightly wound, my business is so tightly wound, if anything goes wrong, I can be in real trouble. That is inherent to the industry and the makeup of an industry, and why, not just Tesla, but profitability is difficult in the traditional sense.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:45:06):
We basically just created something different. You’re right, it’s the low CapEx micro factory as one of the things. If a micro factory does 10,000 vans from a 20,000 square meter factory, that’s 50 million in CapEx. If you were to just scale that out to a typical van plant of the typical industry of 100,000 units, you would find that our model is less than half of the CapEx and one tenth of the footprint. There is no level of scale that the micro factory isn’t better than the large factory approach in our analysis. You can just keep multiplying out the way the micro factory works. Why? It’s not about the micro factory itself, it’s what’s going on under the hood of the micro factory. If you think of a traditional automotive plant, it’s an assembly line. Henry Ford designed that, and it’s made great products, but we’re still using that approach decades later. We’re just optimizing it. The industry is just optimizing it each time, a little bit better, a little bit better, a little bit better. That’s why you see sort of the margins are a little bit better, sometimes a little bit worse.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:46:13):
But the auto industry hasn’t fundamentally shifted the way it does the business. That assembly line runs at one fixed speed and all the parts come into that assembly line and it makes it very difficult to add customization for the product, for example. If you want to do that, you have to add another line. What we’ve done, is instead of doing that, if you were to take the lid off the micro factory, what you would see is technology cells. These are cells. Instead of a line, you’d see cells of four to six robots anywhere between two to six, it depends on what we doing in each cell. Each cell performs an operation. We have autonomous mobile robots that bring the parts to the cell. The cell performs the operation and then the robots take it to another cell for another operation, and another cell for another operation. If you want to build a van, you take certain parts to the cell and you optimize the different processes. You take it to different cells in different orders. You want to build a different product, you do it in a different way.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:47:11):
What you’re doing, is you’re creating … The micro factory, we consider it as a product. It itself has technology upgrades and capability upgrades over time and optimization over time. But say, for example, one cell goes down, you don’t stop production. You simply reroute the path. Imagine when you start to layer in AI and software machine learning over time with the data that you get, you will find the optimum path for the production of the vehicles over time. That’s just a transformation of how it’s done in a warehouse. With that CapEx model, which we’ve covered now, at 50 million and no matter what scale you go to, it’s more efficient than the traditional factory. You can think about as a blueprint of almost a Starbucks, for example. A micro factory is a blueprint. We’re doing the same one as we roll out these factories. It’s the same blueprint, it’s just same thing everywhere. Then we have designed and developed their own components. We’ve picked the components where there is either major cost saving to be had.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:48:15):
We need to redesign it so it can be assembled in a micro factory because the current suppliers don’t provide that. Or we need it to be smart. Which means we want to get the data off so we can create a better experience. All of those, we’ve designed for that micro factory, with that cost in mind. We’re reducing the cost each component. Then we have a composite material, which we discussed earlier, which is more cost efficient than steel. You replace it less. It’s fully recyclable. So we can actually take it back, break it up to its raw components and reuse it. It comes into the plant as a fabric actually and we have a unique process that turns it into a panel. There’s some pretty cool videos of this on YouTube if you want to check it out. But we can take those off cuts and recycle and reuse them. Now you’re taking a fundamentally different approach to the materials that you’re using on the product or the body, and you’re able to use a lot more of the material.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:49:06):
Going back to the plant, you don’t need a metal stamping plant and you don’t need a paint shop because what we do with the fabric, we have a veil that we color and we can actually color the fabric itself. The panels have the color inside it. With a metal panel, if you scratch it, you respray it with a Arrival composite, the colors inbuilt. Even if it gets a scratch, you will still see the color. That’s very important for operators because it means they don’t have to replace the panel on small scratches or respray it, which is costly. But it’s more durable than steel, so you replace it less. Then you’re getting weight savings as well based on the materials we use. When you add all of that together, all of those optimizations, you’ve just got a different cost profile for the vehicle. That’s why our vehicles have industry leading margins, because we haven’t done it the same way and tried to optimize that system to try and get sort of small gains. We just created a new way of doing it with all of that in mind.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:50:05):
Because we asked the question, if you could design a vehicle in 2021, how would you do it? You wouldn’t do it the way it’s being done. You’d apply technologies from a bunch of different industries. You’d add things that are unique and you’d do it in a whole different way. That’s given us a very different thing. When you say value investing, we’re 100% aligned to that. The typical industry is not built for that. That profitability is tough. Let’s just put it that way. It’s tough to maintain that profitability in that approach because the margins are so thin and you’re relying on so many outside factors. But at Arrival, we’ve designed that all in house and we have built around that idea of, okay, we know what price we need to hit in terms of the vehicle BOM cost. We know what the margin needs to be to sell it. We know the cost of production. We’re reducing the CapEx requirements. The funding we get, we use to scale that. It’s just a totally different proposition.

Peter Cuneo (00:50:56):
I want to mention also on the micro factories, a couple of other things, thinking of ESG. The micro factories only rarely require an empty warehouse. We don’t have to build a whole structure or infrastructure like you would in a regular OEM situation where there’s a need for a million square feet, by the way. We’re talking about 200,000 square feet. We find an empty warehouse and we basically put in the cells. That’s what it comes down to. This allows us though to put the factories in any number of different places. For example, a customer may say, “Well, I have my maintenance area right here. Can you put the factory right next door?” The answer would be, “Yes.” Or, “I have an international fleet in the US. I use 200,000 vans a year. Can you give me five factories spread around the United States?” Yes, we can very easily. By the way, those factories employ local people, pay local taxes and are spurred to the EV movement. If we were going to a large metropolitan city on buses, if it was, I’ll say New York, and I’m not hinting about anything here, just an example.

Peter Cuneo (00:52:11):
The mayor of New York said, “We need a factory in the Bronx. We need a factory in Queens and maybe one is Staten Island to support. Because we use, God knows how many buses in New York City, every year.” We can do it. Again, it’s jobs for New York City residents, it’s taxes for New York City and so on and so forth. From the social standpoint of ESG, I think it fits rather beautifully.

Robert Leonard (00:52:38):
There’s two pieces of what both you said that I really like. The first one is the talk about the unit economics. I’m not a Tesla expert by any means. I honestly really haven’t followed the company too much, but the little bit that I did read was talking about how they have no margin on a lot of their vehicles. The argument was, oftentimes with high growth companies is that once you hit scale, they’ll have profitability. For me, I’ve had a hard time understanding how a company or a business model with negative unit economics can eventually become positive at scale. Sure, there’s efficiencies of scale. But I mean, if you scale a negative number, it just stays negative. It doesn’t become positive unless you find massive efficiencies. That’s been my biggest problem with Tesla, or one of them. I like how you guys are focused on the economics and the margins. Then in terms of doing manufacturing different, I 100% agree and I love that. You’re thinking about it differently and not just doing what everybody else has done in the past. To relate it to something that I do, and that’s real estate investing.

Robert Leonard (00:53:35):
I have a second podcast about real estate and I invest long distance rentals. I tell people how I’ve never been to the city that the properties are in. I’ve never seen the properties, nothing like that. People look at me like I’m crazy, and I say, “You guys are living in the past. That was 20 years ago.” I said, “We have technology. Now my real estate agent shows me these properties on FaceTime and it’s like I’m there.” I said, “You’re thinking about this the wrong way. You need to come to the technology that we have today.” It’s a different industry, it’s a different model, but it sounds like you guys are doing something similar with your manufacturing process.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:54:06):
The approach is the same, Robert. It’s exactly the same approach. I mean, you’ve hit it on the head. You use technology to solve the problem, but then people often look at that and say, “Well, no. Why? Why are you doing it that way? It doesn’t make sense.” But of course it does. If you actually look at the way you’re doing that real estate investing through the platforms and technologies that’s enabled, you can actually invest in real estate from anywhere in the world. That’s exactly the same approach here. If you look at it at the lens of a traditional industry, you’re going to ask the question of, what does that mean to produce 100,000 vehicles? Well, it means we’ve got 10 micro factories. It’s just a fundamentally different approach. It’s a step change and it’s why I said at the start of the podcast, I just fundamentally believe that once you producing vehicles from a micro factory, you just can’t go back.

Robert Leonard (00:54:50):
There’s a lot of people, companies, management teams who will use technology, but they’re using technology to make old processes better. They’re using technology to make an assembly line better. Sure, you can do that, but maybe that’s not the best process. You need to think about how to use technology to do things entirely differently like you guys are doing. I totally love that. I want to talk a bit about autonomy and autonomous vehicles. One big promise that Elon has made … You guys aren’t necessarily in the same market as Tesla. But he’s made the claim that they’ll have fully autonomous driving vehicles sooner rather than later. Here on the show, I’ve talked to quite a few industry experts and read a little bit about this. Everyone seems to think he’s way ahead of himself and that’s not really possible on the timeline that he’s set. It goes back to what you said, Peter, about infrastructure. There’s just so many things that need to be built for fully autonomous vehicles. How do electric vehicles and autonomous driving go hand in hand, but how are they also different?

Avinash Rugoobur (00:55:47):
Obviously I was sort of at the dawn of this EV revolution when I acquired Cruise for GM. First and foremost, Tesla aside or Cruise or [inaudible 00:55:56], or any of these players, what’s really driving this? The potential for that technology is well changing. From a safety level, from a business level, commercial level, whichever way you want to look at it, it is truly an extremely revolutionary tech. But it doesn’t just get there overnight. It takes a lot of data, a lot of heavy engineering. I think what Tesla’s done really well is, they’ve actually made the thinking of autonomy mainstream, regardless of when we get there. But Elon Musk has done a great job of just making people understand that this technology is coming. When it comes, we’ll see. I think at the end of the day, it’ll take off fully when everybody knows it 100% safe. When we think about that though, and the impact of that, we know it’s coming. We’ve done a few things at Arrival to ready us for that. Because autonomy and electrification are like brother and sister, they are going to work together.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:56:51):
There’s no way you’re doing an autonomous vehicle and then sticking it on a petrol vehicle. There’s reasons for that, just the way you can control the vehicle and a whole bunch of other stuff that just makes electrification just a better match for autonomy. But going back to what we were talking about earlier, if you engineered a vehicle the way the industry has been engineering it, think about every vehicle on the planet right now basically. You go to a dealership or however you purchase it, you buy it. What changes on that vehicle from the time you buy it until the time you sell it or at the time it ends in a car yard? Nothing. It’s the same vehicle. Sure, there’s a little bit of software upgrades that come now, but it’s essentially the same vehicle. If there’s Bluetooth and Bluetooth 2.0 comes out, you can’t do much about it. You’re kind of stuck. That’s what you’ve got. If you think about autonomy, I think a lot of us understand that the software is going to change rapidly and it’s changing by the hour, by the day just as the process of developing autonomy is.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:57:47):
But the hardware is going to change too. It’s going to like a long time, if ever, where there’s a settled hardware that supports autonomous. That could be the sensing, that could be the processing unit, it could be the compute, whatever that is. What we made sure we did was knowing that that technology is coming, create the architecture where the components can be upgraded. Right now, we have a compute platform, for example, in the vehicle that enables us to do depot autonomy, which I’ll talk about in a sec. But that module can be swapped in and out. If tomorrow there’s a better one, you can literally swap out and put out the new one. That means as the hardware is changing and the autonomous hardware is changing about every 12 to 18 months, if you need to or want to, you can actually take the same vehicle and the same Arrival vehicle and make it autonomous. We call the vehicles autonomous ready. Now, our own autonomy, what we’re doing, and just to finish that, that means we can run our own autonomous software, but we could partner with anybody else as well.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:58:42):
It’s irrelevant to us. All of the data goes through interfaces that folks can access low level control of the vehicle and really control for whatever software stack they may have on it. What we’re doing with autonomy, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Roborace, but it’s something really cool if you want to check it out. Roborace is powered by Arrival. It’s an autonomous racing series and it’s on Twitch. What we do with that is really pushed the extremes of autonomy. It’s got the Guinness World Record for the fastest autonomous car. It’s a racing series. What we do though is, we are able to inject virtual objects for example, on a race course and see how the autonomous system handles it. That’s powered by rival. We have a race team in there and we’re taking all of that and we’re using that to understand where autonomy will go and create our own autonomous systems for the Arrival vehicle ourselves. As mentioned, we can be agnostic. It can be ours, it can be others. Where we’re applying autonomy first is in the depot.

Avinash Rugoobur (00:59:35):
Because in the depot today, you’ve got a controlled environment. You have clearly marked lanes and you know you’ve got a reason for going autonomous already because you’re trying to reduce the accidents in the depot. You’re trying to move a vehicle from the charging station to the cleaning station, to the loading station. We are building depot autonomy into the vehicle. Which can then be upgraded to full autonomy when it’s ready. These two things, they go together like hand in glove. It is the most efficient way right now to run your autonomous system on an electric vehicle platform. One of the things that does occur though, is right now, a lot of the autonomous systems drain about 30 or 40% of the range of the electric vehicles too. So a lot of optimization still to go. But what we like is that we’re creating a platform that enables autonomy as well. That will come to the market eventually.

Peter Cuneo (01:00:25):
I think the other issue with autonomy is, and this is my background in consumer, I’m always thinking first about the consumer behavior. For me, that’s where it always starts. We first started learning about Arrival. I right away thought about, “Okay, how do you sell a bus? Who do you sell it to and what are they interested in?” Not only that, what do the riders feel like? What’s different for the consumer even though they are not the customer? In a way, the consumer of buses are the riders and what do they get out of it? Actually, if we had time, we could talk the amazing things that enhance consumer experience on a bus that have never been done before that Arrival has done. It’s amazing actually. But on autonomy, the only concern I have is consumer acceptance. In other words, going the full load, to get in a car or whatever the vehicle is and turn the driver’s seat around backwards so you could talk to some people in the back of the vehicle and just let the car drive itself is a very big leap for a consumer.

Peter Cuneo (01:01:27):
I’m showing my age here, but a quick comment. I have a car that has the automatic parking. Just flip it on it’ll park itself. I’ve never used it. I’m afraid. I literally can’t take my hands off the wheel. No problem with the accelerator. No problem with all of the other nice things I have in the car, but I can’t take my hands off the wheel. Now, maybe it’s just my age and just me, but it does make me think that it’ll take a while for consumers to make the leap to full autonomy.

Robert Leonard (01:01:59):
To wrap up the show, one of the most valuable things for me personally, is learning from some of the greatest minds in the world like both of you guys. The audience and I have had the pleasure of getting advice from some amazing people, and I know it’s made a big impact on my life. Thinking back throughout both of your lives, it could be about business, entrepreneurship, even just life in general, what has been the most influential piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Peter Cuneo (01:02:26):
Well, for me, I can’t tell you. I don’t have an answer. There’s no one thing, but I will tell you collectively, the best advice I’ve gotten and I’ve gotten it from many, many mentors in my life, both personally and professionally was always to reach beyond what I thought I could achieve. That there was actually nothing to lose. I was a Navy officer. I was in the Vietnam War. I did two deployments into the combat zone at North Vietnam. I served under some great, great Navy officers that pushed me as well. Throughout my career, I was lucky enough to have some great mentors who just collectively pushed me and widened my horizons.? I guess that’s the way I would look at it. I was able to achieve things that actually in some cases never would have even occurred to me. I think collectively, that’s the best advice I’ve gotten and I would give it to anyone. You have nothing to lose to reach beyond where you think you can go in whatever endeavor it is, personal or professional.

Peter Cuneo (01:03:28):
My best personal advice, I got from my sister, when she said to me, “Go ask her to dance.” The scene was, I’m at my sister’s wedding. I’m sitting at table with her and there are a couple hundred people in the room had come in from Hawaii where my ship was home port. I was still a Navy officer. A certainly young lady walked in to come to the reception. I said to my sister, “Who is that?” She said, “Ask her to dance.” So I did, and 50 years later, we’re still together. My wonderful wife, Maris. It sounds like people just like to say this stuff, but I will tell you, in my case, personally, I could never, no doubt in my mind have achieved whatever I have achieved personally and professionally without her. Good words. The best words personally, in my life.

Avinash Rugoobur (01:04:25):
Robert, I said up front, Peter is hard to follow. Actually, interesting enough, my overall advice has been quite similar to Peter’s. Which has been, if you just follow what everybody else does, you’ll never achieve anything great. The other one I got from my very first mentor, and in fact, this is actually a great little thing that you’re doing here, Robert. Because one of the things that I think growing up in multiple places, it was only really when I got to America that I understood how important mentors are and it’s something I think is critically important. I was lucky that when I first started in my career, for some reason, the executive director of the innovation group just took to me and just helped me. One of the career advices he gave me, which I now pass on to others actually is, when people ask about what job they want to do. He said, “Don’t ever think about the title. Think about the role. What do you want to do?”

Avinash Rugoobur (01:05:18):
Then, because if you think about the title, people like to say, “I want to be a manager. I want to be this.” It actually doesn’t mean anything. But if you think about the role that you want to do, the role you want to play, then the rest will come. That was great advice for me. The third came from my uncle, which is just a life lesson, and he’s like, “Listen, if you want to do something and you’re going to get in trouble, you might as well do it because then you’ve enjoyed it and the trouble comes after so it doesn’t matter.” That was the life lesson I got from me.

Robert Leonard (01:05:44):
I love both of your pieces of advice from both of you guys. Thank you so much for sharing that. Avinash, Peter, thank you for joining me today. Where can everyone listen and go to learn more about you?

Avinash Rugoobur (01:05:55):
If you go to arrival.com, you’ll get a lot of information about us. Peter can talk about CIIG and the stock.

Peter Cuneo (01:06:03):
The best place to learn about CIIG, there are various press reports going back. But if you really want to, you can look up the CIIG and the filings with the SEC, which are public. But you got to slog through a lot of info. But if you really want to get in depth, that would be the best place to go.

Avinash Rugoobur (01:06:19):
Also, I would say on social platforms, we’ve got a lot of stuff on LinkedIn that goes into a lot more detail about some of the stuff we talked about today. Instagram, I’m sure you’ll be able to find us.

Robert Leonard (01:06:29):
Thank you both so much.

Peter Cuneo (01:06:31):
Thank you very much for having us, Robert. We really enjoyed it.

Avinash Rugoobur (01:06:32):
We really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot.

Robert Leonard (01:06:36):
All right, guys, that’s all I had for this week’s episode of Millennial Investing. I’ll see you again next week.

Outro (01:06:42):
Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires via The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday we teach you about Bitcoin and every Saturday we study billionaires and the fundamental markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.