The answer is I don't see any correlation between asset owner size and how much data they have. Some of the people that have the best data are the individual owners we work with, where they're just super in the weeds and they've been bugging their parking operator to get that data, or they're tracking it themselves. And then we work with, we've signed a contract recently with one of the largest REITs in the country, and legally not allowed to say their name because of the way they signed their contracts. But they basically have no data at all. It's the standard in parking, basically, is at the end of the month, the owner gets a statement. It says, here's gross revenue we collected. Maybe it's broken down into transient parking versus monthly parking. And then here is all of the expenses we're charging through to you, because we operate in the traditional operators, operate on a pass-through costs on your P&L, very standard model, very different from our model. We work on a revenue share, so we're incentive aligned. And then here's what your net is at the end of the month. And that's all they get. They don't get any insight into which days of the month drove which revenue. Like how much of that monthly parking did we actually collect and what was our uncollected rate, those kinds of things. And so even these large asset owners, they oftentimes don't see it. And it's to your point, it's because a lot of people in the past have not really looked at parking as an area for income. And I think one of the interesting things we're seeing as a trend is that a lot of owners are sort of waking up to parking as an area of opportunity in their portfolio. And I think a lot of that is driven by, you know, interest rates are higher, cost of capital is higher right now, people are not buying as many new assets. And so they're looking at their current portfolio and saying, where can we squeeze more NI out of this? And you know, office leasing activity is down and they've already optimized their multifamily, they've already optimized their hotel and they're saying, okay, actually there's this one remaining segment of our portfolio that we really haven't paid attention to and it's parking. And so often we'll come across an asset where the owner doesn't realize how badly they're sort of getting screwed, right. There's a garage we took over in San Francisco a few months ago in June of last year when the old operator was in there. Their gross revenue was somewhere in the range of $20,000, $20,000 to $22,000 a month gross revenue. The NNY that month was minus $4,000 because the operator charged them so many expenses that they were in the negative. We took, and in the first month in June of this year, their revenue was $40,000. So it was up about 100% year over year. And then we operate on our revenue share. So we paid them, I think, 77% of that revenue. And they made money a lot more than they did last year since they were negative. And I think that there's a lot of owners now that we're seeing, where they're sort of waking up to, hey, parking, we can optimize this. There's money to be made here. And this old way of doing things, there's finally a new different way of doing things. And now there's a lot of owners we work with that we've taken over one of their assets, and then they see our performance in that asset, where, yes, basically the way we typically try to do things is we'll look at their P&L, and we'll say, OK, this is, after all your expenses, this is what you're of netting as a percentage of gross revenue. We'll try to find a revenue share where we're going to put you ahead or at least even on day one. So you're going to get the same net percent even if we don't increase gross revenue. So there's no downside. Ideally, so there's no downside. And there's no upfront costs. We pay for all the upfront costs for license, paper, and cameras for signage, all that sort of stuff. And they're used to with the traditional operators,'ve got to buy $200,000 of gate arms. I was in a garage recently in San Diego where they said they spent $2 million on gate arms for this garage, which is insane. And the gate arms are breaking. And it's just insane. And then you've got to pay for the service. Chaos. It's the McDonald's ice cream machine model. Yes. Everybody has elevators in the building. You're familiar with the model of, hey, we're going to sell you this elevator, but then really we're going to make our money on the maintenance contract. Same thing for parking and parking machines. So we take over these assets. We put them ahead on day one, ideally, even if we don't increase gross revenue. But then we actually meaningfully increase gross revenue as well. So there's a set of garages in Wilmington that we took over recently. And we increased their gross revenue. I think within a few months, it was up about 50-ish percent. And that's with us doing nothing fancy. There was no dynamic pricing we're doing there. We're not really doing any advertising. It was just a matter of they have these garages. They're all attached to their office portfolio. And their prior operator couldn't tell them who is actually supposed to be paying in this garage, who of the people that are supposed to be paying are actually have paid this month, and who's not supposed to be paying. There was people that were getting bills that, you know, hadn't parked there in six months. There's people that are still getting bills six months after we've taken over from the prior operator because they haven't figured out how to turn off their system. And there was tenants, there was one large financial institution tenant that was $60,000 behind on their parking payments, not because this large financial institution is trying to skirt their bills because nobody told them where to send the check and nobody was sitting down to make sure, hey, this is actually being collected. And so if we're able to increase revenue by 50% in a couple months, something was very wrong in that garage. We did not do anything fancy, like I said, no advertising, no dynamic pricing. It was just people were not being billed for what they were supposed to be being billed for. And nobody could say, who was being supposed to be billed and what were they supposed to be billed. And so the president of the company that we now work with there had spent days just on calls with the prior operator trying to go through line by line who is supposed to be getting billed. And now they just we have a dashboard. All the tenants are in the dashboard. All the tenants have a portal where they can add and remove employees without calling anybody. It bills them automatically every month. And you can see in this portal in our dashboard, here's all your tenants. Here's how much they owe us this month. Have they paid or not paid this month?

It just seems much cleaner. Like the way you're working, it just seems so much cleaner. It seems like as an owner of one of these assets, you can go to bed at night kind of knowing that things are being taken care of. Whereas before, it just seems like chaos. I don't know. I in that way where- I think you also shine a light on just how actually operationally

intensive parking is and could be if you have to really pay attention to it. And I think that's why so many people are just used to like, if I can get half of these spaces rented, I'm happy versus missing. you're talking about is huge jumps. I know you shared some case studies with us, like 50 to 100% revenue increases, there's

nothing to sleep on. Like if I could see that across the portfolio, that's huge. And I imagine there's a lot of private capital. I mean, I keep going back to the different size clients you might have, but I think there's probably a lot of mom and pop owners out there who really just need someone to just help them get it together. And it seems to me that's kind of part of what you're doing, too. Now, you're not just selling the software and the tech behind it. It's always as operator manager. So you're coming in and kind of doing

it all, essentially. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, we are effectively a property management company for parking lots and parking garages. So we do everything. And we just do it with tech. And so I think our mindset is just a little bit different from the traditional operators think that the way that you create value in a parking asset is cleaning and sweeping, and graffiti removal, and all those sorts of things. And I think if you went to any real estate owner that owns an office building and said, hey, we're going to increase your NOI by cleaning your building 10% better, they'd look at you and say, you're insane. That's not how we create value. We create value by figuring out what the market rate is for price per square foot and how can we increase occupancy and how can we structure our deals to be the most optimal. And that's basically what we're going to owners and saying is, anybody can handle the cleaning, the sweeping, that sort of stuff. That's the basics. That's not that interesting though. We need to take care of those things to protect value. And where we're going to focus our time and energy is with the data we are collecting, because we have this unified technology system. We can see in real time what's going on in this garage. Now how are we going to optimize income, maximize gross revenue, decrease operating expenses. And like I said earlier, we operate on revenue shares. We have a much better alignment with the owner for the incentive model, where the traditional operators, they'll typically charge you a monthly management fee, like $2,000, $5,000 a month. It's a flat fee no matter what. Flat fee, flat fee no matter what. So you might be, so that's how you end up being in the red. It's just no matter what. And then on top of that management fee, they'll pass through all the operating expenses. So if they have an attendant there, they're passing through that, they're passing through uniform costs, they're passing through ticket costs. There's this large garage that we were looking at with that large asset manager I mentioned earlier who's one of the most sophisticated real estate owners in the world. And the garage, say it makes $300,000 after parking taxes in a year, the owner was walking away with $46,000 as NOI. And I think $130,000 was going to labor and there's not even a full-time person stationed in this garage. I think last year they spent $16,000 on the tickets for the machines and then $30,000 on repairs and maintenance for those machines. And there were just all these random line items that the parking company is happy to charge you because they typically charge it through on a cost plus basis. And so they're marking up those expenses. And they want to give you as many of their expenses as they can. And they have no incentive alignment with the revenue of the garage because they make their expenses money regardless of the revenue. And if the owner is not sitting there every single day saying, why is this expense here? Why is it this amount of money? Can you back this up? And then even sometimes you'll see these statements that these operators send where it's, here's all the P&L. And then, OK, now here's 50 pages of invoices and receipts for justifying those P&Ls. And who's going to take the time to sit there and go through that? And so we just have a totally different business model of, it's a gross revenue share. We only make money if the owner makes money. We have every incentive in alignment to want to make more money because that's the only way we make more money. And we cover all the operating expenses out of our portion of the revenue share. So we cover all those. We don't pass any of them through to the owner. So the owner knows if we strike a 70-30 revenue share in their favor, they're always going to get 70%, even if our expenses are higher than whatever it is. We don't strike bad deals like that. So it never winds up being the case. But basically then we have also every incentive to build the best technology to automate as many of the operating expenses as we can, because then we improve our margins. So it's just like this whole incentive alignment. It's just these structural changes in business models that can drive the way that you think as a company, because these old school companies, part of the reason they haven't adopted technology is because they make money by passing through expenses, and technology reduces expenses. So why would they want to automate things? I have an idea. I don't know. You might already be doing this.

Okay. So this is another Larry David thing, but we have this garage next to our office building in Dallas and downtown Dallas. And I swear I get lost every single time I park my car. I mean, does this ever happen to you? You get lost in the parking garage? You don't remember where you parked? Yeah, I don't know. No, that doesn't really happen to you? I'm

trying to think of the last time I got lost in a parking garage. I mean,

it's happened anyways. I mean, is there like something you can develop that helps with this? Totally. It's just that it works. Is

this a thing?

Elon Musk did this right. It's called Neuralink and they implant it right in your head so it makes you not an idiot. It's actually like in the movie, the Avatar movie, how they connect themselves.

Yeah, totally. That, but for your car. Yeah, you just plug your brain into your EV. That's the future. So one thing we're actually doing right now, you mentioned earlier, dynamic pricing, what we do on dynamic pricing today is we can actually run these experiments to figure out how much should we charge by testing on drivers and seeing how they react to it. And all of that is to adjust based on real-time occupancy. So if your parking lot's getting more full, we'll increase prices. But to your point earlier, one of the things we're doing now is how do you price differently within a parking facility? Because maybe parking on the roof deck of a garage where it's sunny and your car is going to get baked, shouldn't be the same price as parking on the first floor that has an entryway right into the shopping center you're going to. And that just makes sense that you would do that in office buildings. You charge different rates for different floors and different suites and sitting in a hotel room. And so in that scenario, with the way we're building this technology, we would absolutely be able to tell you, hey, this is exactly where you parked your car, just based on the way that that's going to work.

That's very cool. Where are you guys at in the life cycle of your company today? I mean, you started working on this, I think you said 2011.

Right, so you're- 2016, 2017 was the driveway days, and then 2018, June 1st, 2018 is when we took over the first actual

parking lot, I would say. So where are you guys at today? Yeah,

we're really just focused on scaling up as much as possible. So I mean, like I said, 2018, 2019 is when we first took over parking lots. It was kind of this test bed for us to figure out how to run parking lots at scale across the country from day one, because it took over five or 10 locations in Tempe where we went to school. And then our next location was in Austin. And our next location after that was in Ann Arbor. And so we immediately had to figure out how do we be a national operator. And that's been one of our growth strategies. Are you early investors,

like friends and family? Like what type of, are you in CDA right now? Like what's the...

So we raised a seed round in 2019. We raised our series A in 2021, and we'll be raising a new round of funding here in the near future. basically, all of that venture capital, they're giving you money in order to accelerate the growth of the business. And the reason to raise venture capital for people that maybe aren't familiar is basically you should raise venture capital if you believe that there's a way for you to arbitrage money for time of basically, hey, with this money, I can get to 5x the company size that we are today in a year instead of in five years. And so that's the whole point of why we've raised VC. So our original, actually, sort of precede funding, if you will, was while we were students, we would do these pitch competitions that are in these university entrepreneurship programs. And I think we, in total, probably got about $100,000 from those pitch competitions, which is amazing. And there's no, you know, they're not taking equity. It's just they want to support student entrepreneurs and things like that. I would say, for the most part, student entrepreneurs, when they do these pitch competitions, they don't really ever do anything with it because they see it as, it's a little bit of playing house if you will, where you're doing these pitch competitions, you're getting all this praise and it's not actually what it takes to go build a business, but we took that money and actually went and started the company with it. We then moved to Silicon Valley in San Francisco.

We dropped out of school to work on the business full-time. You have to drop out of school when you're a successful startup. Mandatory, yeah. They tell you that. It makes it better. You got to start in a garage even if you don't have a garage. You got to be in

someone's garage. That's funny, Jack. That was the one funny thing

they this week. That was good. I thought I was proud of myself. That's why we named the whole company after the garage. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. So

we moved to San Francisco. We did not know anybody. And our friends and family in Phoenix didn't... My parents ran their own small businesses. They don't have a large amount of cash just sitting around or anything like that. And same for Scott and Chelsea, their parents, very average middle class families and stuff. So we didn't raise any money from those folks. And also, I don't know that I would have wanted to if we had the opportunity because there's already so much pressure when you raise money from an investor who that investor is sophisticated and knows when I invest in 10 seed companies, seven of them are going to fail. Two are going to do OK and maybe return my money one or two X. And then one is going to go 1000 X and that's going to pay for all the other failures. That person has done that a hundred times and they're just very used to it. And if you take money from like your friends and family, they don't necessarily understand the power law dynamics of venture capital. And they're not protected because they don't have a fund from the power law dynamics of venture capital. And so I'm actually glad we did not raise from any of our friends or family or anything like that. Not that we didn't have the chance. We had no choice. But moved to Silicon Valley and just had to basically hustle our way into how do you talk to VCs and things like that. And so where we're at today is the company is 30 full-time employees, which is still pretty small. Feels massive to me because it was three of us a few years ago. And we managed a little under 300 parking lots and parking garages across the country. Is there a region where you're more heavily focused right now? It's been interesting. I kind of mentioned earlier that we sort of just, we went national from day one and part of that was because we want to grow really quickly and there's just, you know, wherever we'll get pulled by the market is where we'll go. And so we built up a good presence in Phoenix, which is where we started. Built up a good presence in LA, which makes sense. A lot of parking. And we have a growing presence in San Francisco, which was always funny, because we never had any parking lots. Parking garage is there. But then we have good presence in Denver, Austin, Houston. Detroit was a good market for us. Chicago, Omaha, weirdly, was a really good market for us, Kansas City. And then on the East Coast, now some of our biggest markets are actually like Baltimore, Philadelphia, Charleston of all places, Orlando's a really good market. And so it's just we've gone wherever the real estate owners take us. And what we typically find is the hardest location to get in any market is the first location because real estate owners are just, I want to see it to believe it, that sort of thing. And so we very intentionally have gone, we're going to go national from day one, try to get the first location in every market. And then that allows us to get more locations in that market. Very interesting. Well, cool.

Well, why don't we wrap this up and you tell us, Jonathan, where do you see the future of this business? Like where is the industry going? How do you fit into it? Um, and, uh, you know, is the way that we're looking at parking today, just completely a thing of the past and in 10 years not going to happen anymore. Cause I know it just seems so archaic to so many of us. So where are things going from here in the next few years? Yeah.

Yeah. Good question. I think that, you know, basically the first step for us is what we're doing today, which is how do we bring this parking real estate online for the first time? If you actually look at it, I mean, parking is one of those things that I think people are blind to, even though it's all around us all the time. If you look at all of the, there's this data, there's this study basically of all the downtown urban cores in America of cities over 300,000 or 500,000 population. And 26% of the land area in those cities in the urban core, so not even looking at the suburban areas, is dedicated to parking. And that's not counting parking assets that an office tower or anything. It's just 26% is dedicated solely to parking. So it makes up this massive amount of our urban landscape. And that's a lot of real estate that is not being optimized and not being utilized like it should. And so even from the beginning, when we were doing driveway rentals, we've sort of been pulling on this thread through the history of the company of basically, there's this large amount of parking in America that is mismanaged. It's underutilized. It's under-optimized. And the reason is because there's no insight. There's no data. You can't see how and when and where and why it's being used. And so from the beginning, basically our thesis has been, hey, if we can bring that data to the table, if we can bring this real estate online, first of all, we can optimize it for what it is today. We can increase NLI for owners today, increase gross revenue, get more drivers in, make it a better experience for drivers. But then also what we can do in the future, and what we started doing with the real estate now, is how do we open up that real estate? Because at the end of the day, it's not just parking. It's valuable urban real estate. How do we open it up to all these other use cases that could be built in the physical world? So I guess the way we think about it is basically, when we started Aero Garage in 2018, with the first parking lot we took over, when we wanted to get started, building a business in the digital world was so much easier than it was 10 years before. So 10 years before we would have had to go buy servers and rack those servers in our dorm room just to even bring a website online. And in 2018 instead, you just spin up an AWS instance. And you can scale up and scale down instantaneously. There's so much less risk. There's so much less upfront cost. And the way we look at it is basically, building a business in the physical world today is sort of in that racking servers in your dorm room era, where basically, if you want to start a food truck, or you want to start a jewelry shop, or you want to start, like Zipcar, the rental car fleet, right? What do you have to do? You have to go work with a real estate broker. You have to go through a months long search process to find the right space. You've got to sign a multi-year lease. You've got to put up all this upfront capital. It's this huge risk and this huge hurdle to get over, just to even see if anybody wants to buy what you're selling. And so our whole thesis is basically, if you can bring this real estate online, we think more people will build businesses in the physical world if you can basically provide them the AWS experience of how do I tap into a network of real estate, how do I spin up and spin down my usage instantaneously. So when Zipcar was started in 2005, I don't actually know the founders or anything, but basically what they had to do is go door to door and knock on people's doors to try to find parking spaces to lease for their cars that they wanted to rent out. In a future where Air Garage takes over all of the parking in America and beyond, they would just tap into our network, scale up and scale down instantaneously, be able to test their idea in one location, and then expand it across the locations instantaneously. So that's really our goal is, how do we bring this real estate online? Like efficiency. Efficiency. And how do we optimize it today for being parking? But then how do we also say, hey, at the end of the day, this is real estate. You're trying to get the best price per square foot for any of of your real estate. And if that best price per square foot might not be a car sitting in your parking space, let's go pursue that. And let's build that and bring that visibility to this large amount of urban real estate that is all around us and impacts the way that we live our lives. And if we can do that, we can build better, more efficient cities. Yeah. It's

really cool. Man, it's really cool. It is. And then it's cool to hear your passion and thoughtfulness behind this. It's refreshing to us. We love learning about people who are so in the weeds of what they do and passionate about what

they do.

Yeah. And I think your ability to explain it with granularity, but simplicity is, you know, it's a big testament to all the hours that you guys have put in. So thanks for coming and educating us. Yeah, thanks for coming on, Jonathan. And our first 15 and the next 15. So. Yeah, hopefully this will bring in the next 15,

those parking nerds. They're going to watch. Totally. This is it. Yeah, for sure. All right. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you for having me.