Innovative Real Estate with Three Squared, Inc.
As specialists in efficient residential and commercial prefabricated design, Leslie Horn, Breck Crandell, and Jill Ramirez of Three Squared, Inc. share their greatest insights, tips, and case studies from their years of experience in the industry. They'll be giving you their best advice through, trainings, guest features, and Q&A segments so you can turn your innovative vision to a reality.
Innovative Real Estate with Three Squared, Inc.
Going to Mars Ain’t Sh*t Compared to Changing the Housing Industry With Jeff Wilson of Jupe
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Want to know something that's more challenging than going to mars?
Creating change in the housing industry.
In this episode we sit down with Jeff Wilson, the founder of Jupe - a disaster relief company dedicated to creating housing solutions for those that have lost theirs.
Jeff talks about how the Covid-19 pandemic set the trajectory for the current model, the importance of volume versus square feet, and the current work Jupe is doing to provide housing for Hawaiian's affected by the Maui Fires.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:
- Introduction of Jeff Wilson and Jupe
- How the climate is creating a demand for housing relief
- What the housing industry can learn from the automotive industry
- Importance of transparency...especially for start ups
- Project highlight of the week: Maui Fire Disaster Relief
To learn more about Jeff an Jupe head over to their website.
Make sure to follow both Jeff and Jupe on Instagram.
Ready to move forward with your project? Contact us here and we will put you in contact with the right member of our team.
Make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to stay up to date on new project releases, trainings, and more.
Welcome to the Innovative Real Estate Podcast with your hosts Leslie Horn, Brett Crandall, and Claire O'Lilla. We're here to make your life easier as a real estate developer and teach you everything we've learned about designing and building innovative homes, multifamily, and mixed-use structures. On this podcast, we'll be giving you our best advice, trainings, and QA segments so you can learn from our years of experience and make your innovative vision a reality. Welcome back to Innovative Real Estate here with Three Squared Inc. My name is Claire. I am our director of sales and marketing here at Three Squared. We've also got Leslie, CEO, and Breck, Director of Design, as usual. And today we've got a special guest on who is Jeff Wilson, the founder and CEO of Jupe, which is an incredibly innovative uh product specifically for disaster relief. And here on the podcast, as you know, we love diving into anything that is in the realm of innovation, sustainability, or just solutions to the housing crisis in general. And so today's going to be a really awesome conversation. We met Jeff years ago, I think it was pre-pandemic in 2020, and had some initial conversations. And we've just stayed in touch. And he's up to some really awesome things now, particularly in Maui for disaster relief. So we're really excited and grateful to have him on the show today. And Jeff, I would love to introduce you and give you an opportunity to share with everyone. Instead of doing one of our projects for the project highlight of the week, can you please share a little bit with our audience about what you all have been up to? And uh specifically in Maui, if that's what you'd like to focus on.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, great. Thank you guys so much for having me on. Um, I'll start with a little bit on Jupe and our journey from pre-pandemic to today, uh, that has sort of led us around the world uh and then back to uh things in the States. And uh then I can yeah, deep dive a little bit more into that project. Um, you know, jupe is uh was a company that was created sort of out of a problem I faced with traditional modular prefab construction, which I'm sure a lot of your audience is interested in. Um, prior to jupe, I had an ADU company uh called Casita with a K, uh, where we factory built housing and dropped them in backyards and eventually wanted to stack them. Innovation is particularly hard in this industry, and a lot of it has to do with the capital stack, right? So you've got banks, uh, traditional developers and whole ecosystem that will fund stuff that they know kind of how it's gonna work. And uh they tend to be a little bit more patient and not as open to innovation. And then you have sort of the really fast money, the venture capitalists, right? Uh, that generally aren't interested in three, five, seven year types of innovation. So, what I wanted to do was to continue to innovate and needed something uh fast. And as you guys know, the slowest thing in the world is going through a coding, permitting, and entitlement process. So a lot of where jupe came from was actually trying to design something that wouldn't be subject to a lot of the permitting. And so we started with the requirements uh of being under 120 square feet, not plugged into the grid, no foundation or piles, no slab on grade, no water in the unit, like all of these things that basically confuse the state of California enough to where they didn't even know what category to put this in. And so that is where Jup kind of started as a sort of prefab modular uh um uh company that wasn't as subject to uh to code. Um, so what we have today, flash forward, uh is a about an eight and a half by 13 uh unit that's about 13 feet tall that has all the stuff in it flat packed, uh, such that you could have a pretty good uh night of sleep. And as far as you know, the the focus on a specific project for this week, I know you guys like to do this at the beginning, uh, is and and I've rambled on for five or six minutes already, uh, is what we've seen uh in Hawaii uh is something actually that's prevalent around the world. Um folks are displaced from their homes in large numbers. In fact, one in 70 people on the planet every year is pushed out of their home by some type of generally natural disasters, sometimes war, other things. So, for instance, like there are things you don't even hear about that much. I didn't even see on Twitter at all X, uh, this pat Pakistani flood, right, that happened not too long ago. Guess how many people were displaced? More than the population of Texas in one flood. 33 million people in a few days were pushed out of their homes. This is freaking crazy in one in 70 a year are. So there's been almost no innovation architecturally or business model in that space in years, maybe 50, 60 years. And so that's what we're really trying to bring um, first to Maui, uh, then to places like you know, Morocco, Pakistan, all over the world. A rapidly deployable, um dignified uh housing unit that could be shipped super efficiently. So we can fit 24 jupes into a container of this next one that we're building. Um, they pop up in a few minutes, they can go in backyards rather than camps, um, and they're really inexpensive. Uh, they're they're about three, four thousand dollars a piece. So that's kind of an overview of what's going on. Um, we're shipping the first container of these next week of our original kind of clamping units, and we are in uh RD on what we call the pop pod, these disaster relief ones.
SPEAKER_01You've actually made quite some uh you've actually improved in I think the product amazing it's amazing. And I also see that there's you know a lot of I mean, just even the homeless, I I just see so many efforts that are so many problems that can be solved as a result of this product. It's an amazing product.
SPEAKER_02Thanks. Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, there when when you look across the entire spectrum of folks that need housing, right? And where these problems lie, you know, yeah, if you live in San Francisco, which I do part-time, it's very much in your face. There's actually many more homeless folks uh in New York. They're typically put in hotels. Um, but you know, you this is not just a problem that happens in some river valley in Pakistan, right? Look at, you know, these million to three to five million dollar homes that were lost in Northern California. Look out your window, right, at certain times during the pandemic or a few months ago in New York, when the skies are red, is the number of homes and the number of lives that are gonna be affected not only by fires, but eventually when we begin to get sea level rise, what are we gonna do with all those houses? Right? Where are they all gonna go? Are we gonna just kind of keep moving them in or come up with some sort of new platform for living?
SPEAKER_03Well, if we uh circle back to your opening statements and just like your frustrations with the process and the red tape and just code and zoning exercises all together, we probably have 15 episodes of this podcast dedicated to every one of those topics. Uh, I mean, we certainly understand this process. And um, as innovators in an industry that is probably the hardest to change of most industries, um, we've come across a lot of parallel paths. That's how we initially met. It was actually through disaster relief efforts. Um, it was it was at the onset of the pandemic when we when we had the uh the container modules that were you know two hospital beds with a shared bathroom in between. And we were trying to we we had a mutual friend who put us in touch who was trying to see how we could roll these out as a disaster relief effort, um, and how our two you know products could could have synergies, which we we did have some very oh that's right.
SPEAKER_02Okay, I remember this very clearly now.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and uh and we we've gone different directions, you know. Three squared has uh all the work that we've been up to, and you have so let me ask you this what what mock jupe are we on right now? Like, what was that process look like to develop from where you were when we first met each other to today? You know, and what were the like the really key changes and the aha moments that led you to the jupe that is like on its way to Hawaii now?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so uh this is actually really interesting, another full circle story. Just prior to us meeting, we you know, are a venture back startup. We're in the heart of Silicon Valley. We went through Y Combinator, which is you know where Instacart, Airbnb, all these folks started. And you know, our our our pitch prior to the pandemic was hey, we're gonna our go-to-market is in festivals, and we're gonna start off in festivals, we're gonna dial in the product and kind of have a roadster model, right? And Elon's kind of evil secret plan. He started with the Tesla Roadster, and then the idea was eventually to get to a model three, right? And so that's what we were doing as well. Well, when the pandemic hit, I got a call from our main funder who had guaranteed us a million dollars and said, Hey, bro, uh not gonna be any concerts, we're out. So suddenly, probably right before I met y'all, I said, All right, well, take all of our renderings and put red crosses on them. We are no longer a Coachella company, we are a COVID company. And that's when I met you guys. Now, at that point, I had renderings, I didn't even have a prototype, I hadn't even nailed two boards together, right? Because I needed funding to start all of that. Well, then it turned out, as you guys learned as well, we didn't really need permanent hospital beds. Number one, uh, the hospitals didn't overflow as much as we thought. Number two, there was no budget or anyone to pay for any of that. There wasn't really a customer or a need, which is sort of a problem when you're you know trying to scale something. So we then went into a glamping type market. We tried uh everything from greenhouses, bathrooms. Um, as you do when you're trying to innovate, uh, you go through a lot of kind of pivots. Now, forever, like since the beginning, even since the before the company started, I was interested in solving this problem for 1.5 billion people of having adequate housing. And now we're just kind of back directly on that target. So to answer your question in brief, we're on version 5.2 of the jupe. Um, you know, it's become significantly less expensive, stronger, easier to move, lighter, more tech enabled, all those kind of things. And but we're gonna stop making that version and we're gonna essentially move from like, I don't know what you would call this, a MacBook to an iPhone, right? We have an entirely new product uh that we are now designing and prototyping that is specifically made for this use case.
SPEAKER_03Amazing, yeah, fascinating. So I the I guess the next topic that I want to bridge is just like all right, forgive my my architectural perspective on the situation, but you are you're actually servicing a really fascinating middle area of this industry because you're you're not you're not a tent, you're not transient construction, but you're not full like foundations on the ground hooked to utilities. You're this you're this in-between of this, you know, very vast profession. And I think that's really fascinating. Uh, I know you've been working a lot on you know these off-the-grid solutions. Um what what is it, what is like a life cycle of a jupe look like to you? Because we get a ton of clients that come to us because they're they're making like a campsite or they want to do like you know a series of Airbnbs that are around, you know, like a central like clubhouse kind of thing. Um, these are all you know categories that I think fit well with this product, but but give me a give me a sense of uh a timeline or a lifespan of a jupe once it's been deployed.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we think they're short and and short gonna last about 10 years, um, you know, which is relative to say the tent you buy on Alibaba, right? Uh the bell tent's gonna last maybe a year. Um the uh the only things, you know, we've had some of them out there now about three years. Um the only real uh issues we've had have frankly been with the electronics and the uh off-grid stuff. Um we we haven't had any problems with the chassis. They're huge. They have about 12. Um, they have about 12 uh foot interior ceilings on them. Um so uh yeah, lifespan probably 10 years on the chassis uh canvas, call it five years, and then uh the electronics, you know, the off-grid stuff uh uh replacing a little bit more frequently. Um that whole thing you said about the category being in the middle um is important because we don't we don't really want to fit into a category, right? Uh it's important for us moving very fast. So we're trying to give you like the comfort as close to the comfort of like an ADU or a tiny home as possible with the permitting structure of a tent.
SPEAKER_01I mean, just the fact that they're just they're so you don't have to keep like this big storage area full of these homes on wheels or I mean it's just they're flat packed, and I think it's just once once a disaster hits, just the deployability is super fast. Um and gives people, I think, that sense of security of oh my gosh, at least I'm I'm I've got something over my head. I'm so impressed that it's got you know heating and you can have air conditioning. And there's like storage. I mean, it's like a real like solid bed, it's nothing that's got from formaldehyde in the walls and things. I mean, it's just quality. It's just quality.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I mean what we like to think about is dignity, right? Like you think about having lost your home in a flood or a fire, and then you're immediately thrown into a camp, right? In a tent with no amenities, sleeping on a cot or maybe sleeping on the floor. And so what we're trying to figure out is how to give folks another level of dignity. Now, there's a couple of other things that this juke, what we call the pop pod, um, is specifically designed for, uh, that that no one else has really designed for before. Um, one of those things uh is the ability to fit into a backyard and a new kind of model that gets rid of camps. So rather than a disaster happens, this is what we're trying in Maui, and you put everybody in a camp in a park, right? In a bunch of tents, what we've done is we're partnering up with Airbnb.org through Global Empowerment Mission, and we're going to people that have Airbnbs or families whose family members lost homes and said, Hey, why don't we just put jupes in your backyard? Now we can connect to the grid, they can use the bathroom, they can use the kitchen, and they're not in a huge camp, right? And then we can actually pick that jupe up, and almost like a turtle moves around with its home on its back, right? We can pick that jupe up, and as the person transitions back to their home, whether it be across an international border or across town to where the fire was, well, now they've got a jupe in their backyard. They're back near their community, right? Their their schools, their bodegas, their churches, if they do that, right? So it's a whole new way of thinking about disaster relief, and you really need the product that enables that.
SPEAKER_03That's I mean, that's a really interesting topic because there's just a lot of history behind, you know, selling, and I and I hate to make this this parallel here, but I think we have to. We're in the space. Trailer homes, right? I mean, the the original modular home that like built America, you know, Indiana basically pumps out all of these that go across the room. Yeah, they all come out of there, right? Yeah, there's a true stigma around this construction type from financial aspects, from construction aspects, from user aspects. Um, and a lot of this has to do with they tell you that this home is on wheels, right? But once it's put in place and kind of like locks, it's not it's not moving. And if it does move, the cost of transporting that object away from the location it was originally set in is more than the value of the building itself. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I mean, um, the the well, sorry, did you have a question about it?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I do I do. So I what I want what I want to give you the mic for is um this relocation aspect is is really a fascinating topic. And so I want to give you the opportunity to speak on what does that process look like when you relocate a juke? Like when you you know it's it arrives as a flat pack. How many people need to move it? Like, do you need any equipment? Like, what's the process look like?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the current process is these jupes weigh about 1300 pounds, the current one, right? The what I call the V1, right? Or V5. Uh, this this kind of we the the chassis we actually officially call the Oka Teo, which is a cactus flower out here in West Texas. Um, so the um the the the current use is these things come off a trailer, a flatbed trailer, and they um go onto the ground. Uh in about two hours, they've been leveled out, even if it's not a level uh sort of slope uh and set up.
SPEAKER_03Well, how do how do they come off the trailer?
SPEAKER_02Just so they can oh with a fork right now, right? So uh you need a forklift to get them off. Uh we can even move them faster with this little spreader bar kind of thing, but they essentially come off uh with a fork. And then uh yeah, they're just set down and kind of self-leveled out and popped up. The new units we're developing uh will be no more than 300 pounds. So per OSHA, those can be lifted by six people. Uh, if it's not an OSHA type situation, you know, probably uh, you know, as few as like four. So that allows us then to slip these into backyards or into much sort of smaller spaces where you couldn't even get a forklift. And they load into the container vertically, right? 24 at a time, so that even if you've just got the width of a fence to go through a door, you can actually slide these into a backyard. So the idea is to get to get rid of all the equipment. And I don't want to show up anymore, right? What we should essentially have is a global fleet of these that are being kind of pushed around on the uh chessboard, right, to wherever the disasters are, and then the people on the ground can unload them and set them up and then repackage them.
SPEAKER_03I just want to point out how ironic it is that uh your product is transported and none other than the ubiquity.
SPEAKER_02Well, and I think we got into this. I are you guys still doing a lot with containers?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'd I'd say uh, you know, a good portion of the work that we're doing is is still definitely and this is why I remember you guys now so well, because uh, and I think I told a few other people containers, you guys know this, are so freaking hard and generally end up if you don't know what you're doing, way more expensive and way more painful than a stick.
SPEAKER_02Thing. And that's why I send people to you guys because y'all have actually figured it out. And I can count on one hand, probably on two fingers, the number of people that have figured it out. It's just really, really, really hard. And so I've taken I've taken the approach of saying, like, okay, I know containers are really good at moving stuff, at containing stuff. I'm not going to try to make houses out of them, but I will use them to contain many houses.
SPEAKER_03That's funny. Well, yeah, I just in a nutshell, I mean, Jeff, what we've been up to is that we have we figured out the process. So when people come to us and they really truly want a container home and they've done their research and they know what they're in for, we can absolutely help them make their dream a reality. And that's a lot of the work that we're doing is still custom residential. We're doing a lot of transient lodging cabins, you know, for Airbnbs. And these are for both individuals and for larger developers. But what we have discovered through our work and our process is that there is a time and a place where containers make a whole lot of sense. And so the container applications that we're doing outside of those custom projects is really mixed-use multi-family applications. That I mean, yeah, make containers make a lot of sense. Yeah, those scale of projects.
SPEAKER_02And I will say, just you know, for you guys, um, if anyone is listening and thinking of watching YouTube and trying their own container project, like what I always say to quote those people, the container people, is when they come start asking me, I say, guys, containers are amazing. I will help you on your second project for free. You just do this one and listen, like, no one has ever come back because it's such a shit show. So, what I would say to people now is I will either help you on your second project, but if you want to ever think about a second project, you should go over there there to these three squared guys and let them help you and work out the the because like there's something, let's just talk about it for a minute, because this is a major thing I like to like go on a soapbox about. I think it's something very deep in our like monkey brains that loves containers, right? And why I say that as you look at a resource, right? This sort of thing that it just all makes sense. You've already got walls, a ceiling, a floor, a door. Like it just makes total sense that this resource is just sitting there for you to pick up off the ground and eat, right? The lowest for hanging fruit. And that doesn't turn up being that way, right? Like you actually, it's very difficult to kind of recook and mold that fruit into something you can use, but it's the same thing. I think it's activating the same part of the brain of like, have you guys seen boxable? Those box houses that kind of pop open and double. Anytime anything where like space is magically created from smaller space, also like just tends to blow people's minds, right?
SPEAKER_03Any of these sort of things, but it challenges like all the notions of architecture and construction taking months, years to produce an actual building. It's like turns out that's not the hard part. No, the hard part is cutting through the red tape that is that is just throttling, you know. It's I I'm personally building a house here for myself in the city of Detroit, uh, or attempting there too. And uh, you know, this has been a two and a half year process to just get through the red tape in order to get to the point where I can break ground. And once I break ground, like we've got everybody lined up, ducks in a row. Like I we've got our stuff together, we can hit the ground running. That's not the hard part. The hard part is that the legislation in this nation and being, you know, one of the most litigious societies on the face of the earth, uh, it it challenges the process. Um, but in those unique projects where there is just a clear-cut path or there are no rules, it's amazing how fast you can actually produce shelter for human beings.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I mean, like uh the jupes we can make in four hours, we can get to a site in a couple hours, we can set them up in a couple hours, and somebody can sleep in it that night, right? You could literally pay for a jupe in the morning and have somebody sleep in that jupe. Then the the we've done this that night in Austin, right? Like it it was designed for that. And my secret master disaster, like nasty plan, right, is to figure out how to get so fast and so comfortable that these things can get in there before and out before anybody could even blink, right? What you're saying about, you know, something you said earlier about how this is one of the hardest things to do uh in the world is right, you know, Elon's pretty good at hard problems, right? Electric vehicles, going to Mars, right? These are pretty hard problems. Going to Mars, I'm gonna say it here, it isn't shit relative to like trying to disrupt the housing market and how code zoning, NIMBYism, financing, weather, developers, unions. I could like list about 80 other things that don't exist. Nobody's gonna tell you they don't nobody's gonna have a neighborhood vote about the color of your Tesla and shut down you from parking it in your driveway. That happens in San Francisco. We don't like yeah, in San Francisco, we don't like the color you want to paint your ADU, which has been pre-approved by the state, right? Oh, we're gonna have a vote, and guess what? You're not gonna put in that shit there. Yeah, everyone's like when you get into the process.
SPEAKER_03These are problems that do not exist. Going to Mars ain't shit against trying to change the housing market industry. I love that.
SPEAKER_02There's probably a reason why. I mean, Elon's has not got involved in housing, it's the biggest market in the world, but he's probably like looked at and be like, uh, you know, I'll try something a little easier, like going to Mars.
SPEAKER_03So you went through this whole certification process, and I don't I don't even want to begin to get into the weeds on what that looked like for you. What I'd like to start to talk about now is the jupe is an interesting object. Uh, I mean, visually, the experience, I you have maximized volume within these spaces. I mean, like a 12-foot ceiling within a tent, like that is like people today, uh, good designers have realized that volume is a more precious resource than square footage. Like, it doesn't matter if I have a small footprint if I feel like I'm in a space. And and so I just want to I I want to allow you for a minute to talk about the design process because I have a feeling you're pretty involved in that process. But did you have a vision for what these were going to look like? You know, was there a thousand sketches, 10,000 sketches? Like, how did you arrive at what the dupe looks like today?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so first off, I I did take a cue from Elon where I noticed that I think at Tesla, he had like named himself CEO president and chief engineer or something. And you know, I love designers, a lot of great ideas, they're empowered 99.9% of the time. But at some point you don't have to apologize. It's okay. On LinkedIn, I changed my title and at the company to CEO and chief designer. There you go. Just in case I needed to ever like, so you know, most of these things actually came from a really brilliant team of designers that I had, but there were a couple of lessons that I took from earlier experiences. Namely, prior to my last startup, I lived in a dumpster for a year. In fact, here in Marfa where I live, most people don't even know my name. They just call me Professor Dumpster. Well, in the dumpster, I noticed that when I opened up and added a lot of light, it became even bigger to where it didn't even begin to feel like 33 square feet anymore. Um, and so I said, then in our next startup, let's put high ceilings and an ADU, 10 foot, and let's put a massive window on the front, and then let's keep it pretty zen, right? Not a lot of stuff on countertops and on the walls. And folks said, wow, this doesn't feel like 356 square feet. It feels like 500. And so we kind of took those cues um from the uh same uh kind of spot, right? Of like, let's let's bring a lot of light in and high ceilings. So uh yeah, that that was kind of the origin story of why we did that. Uh, it all came out of the dumpster.
SPEAKER_03Well, you beat me to one of my next questions, which was gonna be where did your Instagram handle come from? Professor Dumpster. And yeah, I already explained it. I love I love that name.
SPEAKER_02Um that's yeah, I was literally a professor and I lived in a dumpster behind the dorms on campus in Austin. So uh it actually is quite a literal, uh quite a litter, oh, there's too many puns.
SPEAKER_03Um uh description. Oh, that's good. So, my my last question for you, I I know you're you've ramped it up. I mean, we've been watching you know from a distance for a while, um, because you are most certainly in the realm of innovative real estate. So we really appreciate you coming on today and having a conversation with us and giving us a bit of an update. But give me an idea of like the production capacity and the scale at which you are like currently operating and what your ambitions are in the near future.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So look, the the person that designed the jupe designed the cyber truck, right? Like, you know, I don't I have I have had was not the lead designer, but one of the designers. Um, my co-founder used to build an escalade every 57 seconds, right? Push one out of a factory. So, you know, I purposely went to designers and hired folks that are in highly scalable industries. And so if you can build a Cadillac escalade every 57 seconds, you can certainly build a juke faster than that. And we need approximately 110 million shelters a year. Um, that, crazy as it may sound, is attainable. It's a long shot, but there's a non-zero chance we could produce that. Even right now, with almost no automation in our factory in Houston, we can make 480 jupes in a year. And I would suspect, or at least what I've been telling investors, right? And I think we can hit this, is that in a couple of years we'll be making 5,000 of these pop pods a year. And I think we can scale that exponentially to make 50 the year out of after that. So this is a scale problem. It's gonna continue to grow with climate change, and it's a challenge, you know, be it crazy or not, be it harder than Mars or easier than Mars that we've decided to take on.
SPEAKER_03Well, sometimes you come to the table with a proposed solution and then you work yourself to the bone trying to solve that. Other times you solve a problem you didn't even realize you were applicable to. And the I just watching the production of jupe and what you're doing, and you know, the large-scale relief efforts is just inspiring. How many times have you heard us on this podcast explain to the listeners that like housing is the hardest market to change, and you are doing something here that is that is truly inspiring. Um, and we're all working together on these solutions here. Uh, this is absolutely incredible and inspiring the efforts that you're putting in here um to get to to get to the scale, because we we still build housing the same way we've done for 400 years, but we don't make houses the way that we make authors. And so comparing housing to automotive facility in production, like we're in the same mindset. Like that is that is key. Like we have to change how we're producing housing to to utilize the modern technologies and the industrial manufacturing capacities that we have at our fingertips. And the the fact that we haven't like all realized this, the fact that like we are still the hyper minority in this space is just mind-boggling to me because we have the tools, we have the resources, and you're on top of that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I I mean, like, let me just say is um look, it it is really hard to mass manufacture stuff, but that's not the hard part here, right? That's not why I would say housing's harder than Mars. It's because of all of those other things, right? Code, zone, financing problems, weather, you know, NIMBY's, politics, union, like just most other industries, you don't have this Rubik's Cube of problems that when you move one side, all the other sides move. Um real quick, like uh Claire, Claire, Leslie, um, was there anything uh yeah, anything you you guys wanted to ask about?
SPEAKER_01I I I Breck has um actually been great on questions. I think um I think the only question, I mean, as an entrepreneur, you know, we all we we often talk about it is just the persistence, right? And the the perseverance um and the level of focus and the ability to pivot. And I think you've done that really, really well with Jupe. And it show it it actually showcases, I think, just the the perfect way that entrepreneurs and and the mindset of that entrepreneur, I think you're I think you're in this in a good seat. Oh I don't have a question.
SPEAKER_02As you as you know, like all you guys know, it's really, really, really freaking hard.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Right? It's not for everyone. Um, you're constantly sort of shifting around, but it's rewarding, right? Look, yeah, but if we do figure some part of this out, um, and that's what kind of keeps me going, right? Just one of the biggest problems on the planet, might as well uh work, you know, work on that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I got it. I I do have one last question, and Breck. I know you've got a hard stop at the top of the hour. So if you have to hop off, please do. But Jeff, I noticed that we have a lot of shared core values between Three Squared and Jupe, um, a lot of them being around just being open and transparent and being good stewards to each other and the earth and simplifying things. And so I'd love to ask you, you know, from that visionary perspective and having been through the journey that you've been with jupe, what is one shining example that you've been really proud of the way that those values have shaped that journey?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think um, you know, the uh we we've we've actually kind of cycled through, um, not cycled through, but we're you know, continuously sort of revisiting those values. And I think the idea of like transparency is really, really important. Um and I you know what folks think the assumption is oh, only the big bad corporations are the ones that have problems with transparency, right? But uh actually, especially in the startup world when you're pushing out equity and there's all kinds of vesting things and valuations, like this is the stuff that you know, as you guys know, a part of this, right? That that often is not shared with employees. And if you're not sophisticated about it, right, uh, there is uh, you know, it can build a lot of kind of mistrust. So we try my co-founder and I have tried to do that uh really well. Um, and you know, that also translates kind of out to the broader uh mission. I think the number one thing uh within all of this is that I I know we talk about being focused on the bigger mission, is that you know, folks that come to work for us, if they are not motivated about solving disaster relief uh or you know, housing for 1.5 billion people, then it's just not gonna work. It's too hard, right? They may be attracted the shiny object. Wow, this thing's cool. It looks kind of like a cyber truck. Oh my God, you guys were in TechCrunch, you raised money, you were in Y Combinator. If that's what they talk about when I ask why you want to work at Jupe, you're not going to work at Jupe because it's not gonna be good for you or us or the problems we're trying to solve. So I'd say those are the couple of the things that you know we try to stay on.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Thank you for that. All right, I think we are good to close out here. I don't think Brux's got anything else. Usually he's got little final comments. I always wait and see if he goes off mute, but we're all good. Jeff, we're so grateful that you shared your time with us. I know you're out in Marfa, which is just magical land. So thank you for coming on the podcast. And we would love to close out just by letting you offer up where can people find you? And is there anything that you would specifically like to point people to or direct them to?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, on uh X, formerly known as Twitter, I'm uh Prof Dumpster, also on Instagram and uh Jupe is Jupe Inc. on both J-U-P-E I N C. My my um uh DMs are open. So if you want to hit me up there, um, and then our website's jupe.com. So uh we're really interested in talking to folks about disaster relief. Uh we're you know always interested in design. Uh, we're about to open up another uh fundraising seed fundraising round. Um, so whatever interest folks have, please, you know, reach out and would love to connect.
SPEAKER_00Amazing. Thank you so much, Jeff. We'll put all those links down below for everybody listening so you can find him and Jup easily. And with that, we'll catch you all in the next episode.
SPEAKER_02Thanks, y'all.
SPEAKER_00We hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you found it so valuable, you want to connect with us one on one, click the link in the description to tell us all about your project so we can help you get started.