August 7, 2025 • 26 mins
In this powerful episode of Stories Worth Hearing, host John Quick welcomes Galiano Tiramani, the Co-CEO and co-founder of Boxabl, a company that is redefining the future of housing. What started as a bold vision has grown into a global movement, with Boxabl delivering high-quality, affordable, and rapidly deployable homes designed to solve some of the world’s most pressing housing challenges.
Galiano shares the journey from the earliest prototypes to securing a 3.5 billion dollar Nasdaq-bound merger, offering a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to scale a groundbreaking idea into a worldwide phenomenon. He opens up about the challenges faced, the innovations that set Boxabl apart, and the mission to make housing faster to build, easier to transport, and accessible to more people than ever before.
From addressing housing shortages and disaster relief needs to creating opportunities for more sustainable, efficient living, Boxabl is more than a company — it is a movement. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur, a believer in disruptive innovation, or simply curious about how one big idea can change lives, this episode will inspire you to think bigger, dream bolder, and build for a better future.
Check it out here: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/boxabl-and-fg-merger-ii-corp-sign-merger-agreement-to-pursue-a-boxabl-public-listing-on-nasdaq-302521738.html
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome back to Stories Worth Hearing.
I'm your host John Quick, and today's story is about vision,
grit and the kind of bold thinking that can change the way
we live. My guest is Galliano Tiramani,
Co CEO and Co founder of Boxable, a company that's not
just building houses, but reimagining what's possible for
housing itself. From the early days of a big
(00:21):
idea to a $3.5 billion NASDAQ bound merger, Galliano's journey
is proof that when you challengethe status quo with innovation,
you can disrupt an entire industry.
Voxel's mission to deliver high quality, affordable and rapidly
deployable homes has already captured the world's attention
and they are just getting started.
(00:41):
This is more than a conversationabout a company, it is about how
one person's determination, paired with the right team and
the right vision can create solutions that truly change
lives. So get ready.
This is the story behind Boxable, told by the man who
helped build it from the ground up.
Let's dive in. Well, this is exciting.
(01:01):
We have somebody back on the show they were on once before,
and it'll be fun to hear some ofthe kind of new and interesting
news that's happened with the company Boxable.
So, Galliano, welcome back to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I'm one of the founders
of Boxable. We are trying to fix housing
affordability by mass producing buildings in a factory in Las
(01:23):
Vegas. That's awesome.
So some kind of huge headlines just happened.
I read it a couple days ago, there's a merger that's going to
be happening in a potential IPO that's going to hit the NASDAQ.
Can you talk to me a little bit about how that came about?
Well thank you for asking but I'm not allowed to comment on
anything like that during this period unless they're like pre
(01:44):
canned lawyer approved answers. So I just direct everyone to
head over to our website, check out our social media, check out
our FAQ page, look at our press releases and you could read more
about it on there and channels. But it's definitely exciting
times. It's been a wild ride so far,
and you know. That's awesome.
So let's rewind for a second foryou.
(02:05):
When was that light bulb that went off with boxable where you
thought, man this could be a real game changer.
You know, it was actually an invention that my father had
over 20 years ago when he decided when he built a modular
house and he's spirit experienced all the problems
related to general building construction and related to
(02:25):
modular specifically. And he invented the idea and
patented it to fold up the houseso that it would fit on the
road. And that's super important
because in order to have mass production, you need to build a
lot of product really fast in a factory and you need to be able
to ship it to a large geographical radius.
And if you and you can't do thatif the products too big to fit
(02:47):
on the road and therefore too expensive.
And we think that's what's held modular back.
So now that we've shipped that fixed that shipping logistics
issue, we believe we'll be able to mass produce at a really high
rate, which we think will lead to the lowest cost.
So for example, automobile manufacturers like Ford or
Tesla, they put out one car off their assembly lines every
(03:10):
minute or less. Every minute or less they build
a car. We want to build a house every
minute or less. But if we made that many houses,
we'd have to send them all over the country.
And you can't do that if if it'sexpensive, cost prohibitive,
wide load. So that was really a big
innovation. And then in 2017 had another
business that was kind of on autopilot and I was looking for
(03:30):
new ideas and I decided to give it a shot at Boxable and created
the website. So I'm showing it to people and
got some traction and here we are.
So tell me about some of the roadblocks or speed bumps that
has come up along the way. I'm sure that you're breaking
into a segment of business that hasn't been disrupted in a long
time working with city, you know, local governments and
state governments. Talk to me about some of those
speed bumps that you've that you've come into.
(03:53):
Yeah, certainly. You said it, city governments,
etcetera. That's the big problem and
that's really half the problem with building instruction.
You know, 1/2 is the way they'rebuilt using manual hand tools on
site, slow, expensive, one at a time, skilled tradesmen.
We've pretty much solved that part.
(04:13):
And then you have regulations. Regulations really are holding
back the entire country, not just possible.
Every traditional builder, if anyone's ever tried to build
anything, they understand that it's quite a process.
There's a lot of bureaucracy involved.
It's slow, it's expensive. Any real estate developers
watching know that it could takethem 123 years to get a project
(04:36):
completed. And that's not because it took
them that long to build it, it'sbecause they got held up by the
government. So I knew that was going to be
an issue going into this and we quickly found out how think of
an issue it is. So you basically have a million
different bureaucrats who can stop you at any point along the
way based on their own own whim.And you have 50 states that all
(04:58):
use different versions of the building code.
You have a building code that's very specific in the way it
tells you to build and also veryup for interpretation for a
building inspector and say this is not good.
Then in addition to that, you have state programs that
regulate factory built housing that add another that is really
just repetitive because the state programs do the same thing
(05:19):
the building departments do, butyou have to go through both of
them. So we're kind of fighting
through all that. And then another kind of issue
is that the sales cycle for building construction is long.
So we can, we can build all these houses, but from the time
a customer comes in and says, I want to buy one to the time when
they can actually receive delivery, there's a long
(05:40):
timeline there. So if I was manufacturing, you
know, a hat and and somebody want to buy it, I would ship it
to them, they'd get it in three days.
But with a house and we kind of have this big long sales cycle.
So we're fighting through that. We think it's going to snowball
over time. Things that we were working on
18 months ago are coming to fruition now and that'll
continue to build and build. Talk to me a little bit about
(06:01):
the kind of tenacity that you have to have to be behind a
project like this because I think most people would have
probably just given up. You know, most people want to be
the the CEO of a company the dayone on the job.
They don't really want to have to put any money their own in.
They don't want to have to probably work 90 hours a week or
longer like you've been doing. So talk to me a little bit about
(06:23):
the hustle and the grind that ittakes to see something like huge
like this come to fruition. Well, any entrepreneur knows
that they're going to definitelyhave to put in.
I certainly do. It's in my nature though, to be
working every waking hour into and it's certainly being a bumpy
Rd. there. I have so many outrageous
stories of things that have gonewrong and there are so many
(06:45):
people that, you know, wish us to fail, but we haven't yet.
And we keep surviving and here we are.
And if we do, if we are successful in this mission,
there's a lot of people that stand to benefit from it.
Because I think that factory mass production of housing is
the only way to bring down housing costs, which, you know,
(07:07):
effects everyone. Statistics out there about the
percentage of people's income that they spend on housing and
it's, it's enormous. If you're, you know, an average
guy, you make 50, sixty, 80,000 a year, but then your rent is 2,
three, $4000 a month. The numbers don't really crunch
on that. So it's a big problem.
There's a 5 million housing unitshortage in the US And you know,
(07:32):
we're, we're here to make a big impact in a big way.
Nothing about what we're doing is small.
It's a big operation with a big product and a big overhead and a
big upside if if we pull it off.Well, for folks that have never
seen one of these, describe a little bit about what the
casita. I think the casita is the main,
yeah. The one.
(07:53):
Describe it for folks that are listening to the podcast because
usually what people think of, they're thinking of a mobile
home. This is not a mobile home.
This is something different, unique design.
So talk to me a little bit aboutwhat it looks like and feels
like. Yeah.
So mobile homes are built to a different code.
It's a federal hug code. They usually stay on a trailer
frame with wheels sometimes, butours are built to regular
(08:15):
residential building codes, so they can go in different
configurations in any place thata regular building can go.
And our first product is the Casita.
So it's roughly 360 square foot little studio apartment with a
bed, couch, kitchen, bathroom. So it's this rapidly deployable
room module that's fully finished in our factory.
Plumbing, electric, insulation, windows, flooring, lighting,
(08:39):
kitchen, everything is done in the factory.
Then it folds up. So it folds from about 20 feet
wide down to 8 1/2 feet wide so it can ship.
And then when it arrives on site, it unfolds.
It's deployed in about a day andthen you have a place to move
in. And from the time that maybe
you've made the, the first one rolled off the factory floor
till years later where we're at now, has has they changed?
(09:00):
Have they changed much or have they kind of stayed the same?
The casita? We started off the company with
me and my dad, a few other guys in basically a garage and we at
this design and we got an order for 150 houses from the United
States military. We took that, we leveraged it to
(09:20):
get ourselves a warehouse building.
First one was 170,000 square feet.
We installed billions of dollarsof equipment.
We hired hundreds of people, ramped up, delivered that order
in full and kind of throughout that process we tweaked things a
little bit. But overall we're producing that
same product today. It's a little more refined now.
It works great. However, we just released what
(09:44):
we're calling our phase two products, which is different
room modules, so different size rooms that can connect and stack
together to build single or multi family housing.
And it also uses different technology in the walls,
different manufacturing methods.And everything we've learned
over the past few years, we're dumping into this new product,
(10:05):
which we think solves a whole range of problems.
Friction points, brings down thecost of the product, increases
the structural strength of fire rating on and on.
Working on that right now. And we have a few other products
as well that are little small, smaller houses on wheels.
So they're actually RV's technically and yeah, it's
definitely, we are a technology company.
(10:27):
We are constantly doing R&D. We are constantly trying to
solve for the various issues that we bump into and and pivot.
Does getting a Trump in office as opposed to a Biden, is that
been helpful at all to your company or does it not really
affect it? Well, Trump's gone in and
flashed the bureaucracy right with the help of Musk and his
chainsaw, so I'm really happy about that.
(10:48):
You know, less regulators slowing down American innovation
is amazing in my book. I'm Terry and I believe in
maximum freedom equals maximum benefit for society.
So I'm happy about everything sofar.
And I know they're, they've talked about doing some
different housing reforms. We'll see if that happens.
We're trying to have our say in that because we know what the
(11:11):
problems are. We know what the easiest buttons
are to push to to change things and I'm asking him for a
national 50 State Building code,1 building code for the whole
country, one modular approval program for factory build
housing for the whole country and it's a no brainer.
It would open up a massive amount of building construction.
So if he that's something that the administration could do to
(11:34):
be helpful regardless of what state these are shipped to.
Is there anything else that the Trump administration could do to
be helpful to somebody like yourself that's trying to
breakthrough, you know, a category of the economy that has
seen little to no innovation in 60 years, 100 years?
You know, there there's a lot ofdifferent nuances, you know, to
(11:56):
to the answer to that question. It's going to be a huge ordeal
for them to undo the regulatory bureaucratic nightmare that's
evolved in every industry, not just building construction, and
it's pull it off. I know there's a lot of laws
being passed on the local level in a lot of places.
California's actually done a great job.
(12:17):
I always shout them out when I'masked this question because
they've passed a ton of laws to enable people to build without
being told no and done things. Like for example, if you want to
build a backyard Adu in California, the building
department has to approve or deny it within 30 days.
I've had other states where it takes 7-8 months for them to
even give you an answer. Probably a year or.
(12:38):
Sometimes, yeah. And by the way, just that being
a law in California, some placesdon't honor it.
They don't follow their own law,and you have to actually
threaten them with lawyers to get them to approve and deny
you. So that's just like the old
guard resisting. Yeah, well, if somebody, you
know, there's the only folks outthere that they're watching this
(13:00):
video, you do not have a shirt on during this interview.
If people have followed you before, I think I've seen
interviews or clips where you had a huge mullet on and you
seem to have a fun time with, you know, the hustle and the
grind of working. Talk to me a little bit about,
you know, just that attitude andhow that plays a role in how you
lead the company. So like I told you before, I am
(13:22):
not wearing a shirt, but I am wearing pants.
That's good. But I just did this to make a
point. That's how we fueled the whole
company and the whole vision. We were able to leverage the
social media algorithm to get people's views and those views
are worth a lot of money. No matter what product you're
(13:44):
selling. If you can get someone to stop
scrolling on TikTok or Reels fora split second-half a second,
whatever, the algorithm is goingto then send you more views.
So maybe someone's scrolling through our podcast clip is
going to see a guy with no shirtand say, huh, and wait a second
and look what it is. And then it's going to get fed
(14:04):
to more and more people. So that was something I
discovered early on because I'd never done any marketing or
social media marketing or anything or structure or
anything besides the point. And before I started this, and
once I kind of tried a few things and got lucky and
realized, wow, this is a really powerful way to get, you know,
investors and customers and employees and media coverage and
(14:27):
everything. I, I ran with it and I did
everything I could to stop people from scrolling so that
more views would come our way and we could drop those views
into an effective sales funnel and capture those leads and
close on those leads. So absolutely critical to the
capital we've raised and the amount of orders we have and the
amount of interest we have in our company is just my way of
(14:49):
approaching that was just doing weird shit to get people to stop
for a second look. Nice.
Well, you've also done somethingthat I think some folks you know
wouldn't do, which is do business with your family, which
I think is really cool. What's that been like for you?
Because I think some people are always like, don't ever do
business with your family. But you and your dad, I think
are Co CE OS, right? And so how does that work?
(15:11):
Yeah. So my dad is historically like a
mechanical engineer and inventordesigner, so that's kind of his
arena. I'm doing a lot of different
stuff, you know, definitely sales, sales and marketing and
other things. And yeah, we make a really good
team. I yeah, when I was a kid, I used
to be in his office a lot. So we started, you know, kind of
(15:32):
working together back then. Like I said before, he had the
idea to do the houses long time ago.
And then I was in California working on another project.
And I just called him one day and said, hey, you want to give
a shot at making the house thinginto a company.
And he said, yeah, give it a try.
And since then we, we've been init together.
It's really great to work with your dad.
(15:52):
I've, I have kids too. I would love to work with them.
We're we're a great team. We have complementary skill set
and you know, there's not a lot of people you can trust, but
hopefully your your dad you can trust.
So that's a good thing. Hopefully he's on the list for
folks that you can trust your parents.
So what it what about five yearsfrom now?
What? Ideally, you could flick a
(16:14):
switch. Where would you like to see box
ball? So right now the company is
going into sales mode. We have been building this
machine that is just starting tofire on.
We're now changing the way we dobusiness and handling projects
from start to finish idea to keys to the front door.
(16:34):
Whereas before we were trying tosell room modules to builders
and developers. And that's, you know, a smaller
market. Someone come in with an idea or
they want a backyard Adu and yousay, yeah, I'll do it all.
That's a bigger market. Down the line, I would like to
be buying the land, developing the projects and selling the
houses to the end user on Zillowat less than market rate.
(16:54):
So they sell quick and that's the biggest market.
So we're working on ramping thatall up right now.
Sell, sell, sell. My plan is to keeps to sell more
than we can make, keep going back to the markets and saying
support this, grow, grow, grow. And then as we scale up, we
believe our costs will come downand no one will be able to
compete with us is the division that we hope for.
(17:17):
So what about somebody wanting to buy one now?
Let's say, you know, there's going to be folks interested as
they listen to this to go check out the website and do all those
kinds of things. If somebody wanted to purchase
one now, is that something that can happen?
And what's the time frame on like somebody getting one if
they put an order in? Yeah, you.
Can so you can head over to our website, we can sell the
backyard casitas in 15 States and we can do bigger projects in
(17:41):
pretty much every state. So if you want to go and buy a
backyard casino, you go to our website.
You, you pay a small fee so thatwe know you're for real.
So we have a lot of leads and then sales team will reach out
to you. They'll help you get financing,
they'll get you permits, they'llprep your land, get your
foundation and then get a box installed.
So we are ready to go. We're selling to go to the
(18:03):
website and go to the projects page and you can see all the
houses that we've built so far. So my guess is you like go to
probably conferences, whether it's marketing conferences or
builder conferences, what do people think?
Like what's their response when they see the CEO of Boxable show
up because everybody else is doing the same thing, especially
in construction type stuff. What's their response when they
(18:26):
when they see you? Are they starstruck?
Are they scared to come see you?Are they, you know, give us,
give us a little peek behind thecurtain.
Well, you know, it's funny beingwhat more more well known
online, you know, and then goingto like industry events where
people know about your niche. You know, they do sometimes they
do act funny when they when theymeet you, but usually I'm just
acting weird, scaring everyone. So it's funny like I went to
(18:50):
this. It was like a venture capital
convention. It was, it was like all the
people I said fuck you to raising the money for the
company the way I did. And I was just wearing a
ridiculous outfit. I had the blonde mullet back
then and I looked totally insaneand I ran around, harassed
everyone, handed out Flyers to everyone, went totally nuts.
(19:12):
And it was funny because those are like, not my people.
Those are the people wearing suits and acting real serious.
Yeah, there's a little. Those are a lot of the people
who said no to you as well, right?
But yeah, when we started the company, I sat once we got to
the point where we had spent ourown money and we realized we
needed a lot of money, more money than we had to make this
(19:33):
vision a reality. I started, you know, cold
calling investors and BC's and private interest calls.
I was on the phone every day, all day, and I got a big long
list of people that said no. But we made it happen.
But you kept trucking along. Yeah, we kept trucking along and
now we've raised over $230 million and it's grown into 3
(19:56):
factory buildings, 400,000 square feet of warehouse space,
you know, hundreds and hundreds of houses built and just proving
the concept that we've figured out and cracked the code on how
to make housing more cost effective.
So what about tariffs? You know, tariffs.
You see them all over the news. Trump's, you know, figuring out
a way to fund government withouttaxing people more.
(20:19):
Are tariffs going to affect yourguys's business in a positive or
negative way? Yeah, I don't think that's going
to fund the government because it's just job change compared to
what they spend. But you know, I certainly agree
with with his approach on on tariffs.
I don't think he wants to be taxing anyone.
He just wants to negotiate a stronger position for the
country and probably sees it as a means to an end.
(20:41):
And you know, that's, that's fine with me.
And we've seen a little bump in our costs.
Nothing game changing though. And we were trying to source
from America anyway before that because when we went live, we we
immediately entered into COVID and almost got destroyed.
One of the many things that almost destroyed us was a
manufacturing company during record setting logistics and
(21:04):
inflation and shipping containers being 20,000 each and
all this crazy stuff. So right when that happened, I'm
like, we don't want to rely on overseas.
We don't rely on, even without COVID, it's, you know, four
months to get something from China and it's not good.
And it's not good. You know, the way kind of we've
tweaked historically tweaked theeconomy, tweaked the way we
(21:27):
inflate the money and are the asresulted in less and less
American manufacturing. But it's not a good position to
be in. It's not a strong position to be
in. And you know, we should be doing
it in our country. And you know, when things
adjust, you know, we can't compete with China, etcetera.
You know, China's interesting. You know, we, we don't just buy
things from China because it's cheap, because we're exploiting
(21:47):
slave labor. We buy it from there because
they're really fucking good at building shit and they're
insanely fast. They're faster than us, they're
better than us. And that's why, you know, we go
to China for, for some of our stuff, some of our prototyping.
But certainly we we prefer to rely on United States suppliers
when we can, but we can't always.
Yeah. So what's some advice you'd give
(22:09):
to maybe the 19 year old kid whois, you know, trying to start
his own business for the first time?
You've you've, you know, not only started Box Bowl, you've
had previous businesses that have been successful.
What kind of advice would you give to that person?
Doesn't know where to start, hasno idea what they're doing, and
just needs to start somewhere. Get ready to lose 100 times, but
(22:34):
know that you only need to win one time to come out ahead.
That's good. That's good.
What? What were some of those, like
big lessons for you? You know those 99 times that
maybe you swung? Against if I lost my.
Or just, you know, just sometimes things don't work out
right and you only like, for me,I've only learned.
I learned a lot from my failuresand they've helped me to succeed
(22:56):
better. Have you had some of those
lessons along the way yourself? So many it's, it's basically,
you know, it's, it's life and it's like suffering and learning
and growth. And this is just training camp
for whatever happens next. The road is not going to be easy
no matter what path you choose. That's just the nature of our
(23:18):
reality. You see housing five years from
now, boxables, you know household name and people are
using a Casitos all you know in all 50 states.
Do you see the housing industry being able to shift to meet some
of this demand? What do you think the rest of
the housing industry is going todo 5 to 10 years from now?
Well, I think if Boxable can prove to the market that we are
(23:42):
a better solution that can sell houses less faster, that we will
be able to grow really quickly with the with the things that I
want to leverage. And then maybe we'll be able to,
you know, enjoy a little monopoly for a while before we
get copied. You know that's how it goes.
And our, where are you guys located?
(24:04):
I, I know that, you know, there's going to be folks here
that maybe they're going to think, man, I want to work for
this company. Like are you guys hiring where
you located? Just for folks that are hearing
about you for the first time. Yeah, we're always hiring all
kind of different positions. We're located in Las Vegas.
Anyone who wants to come by can take a tour of the factory
anytime. We have full time tour guides
(24:26):
and we'll show you everything we're working on.
That's cool. So somebody could show up and
they'd actually get a tour of the actual facilities.
You can book a a meeting online or you can just show up.
Because we have so many people show up.
We have to have full time tour guides.
Like we've had literally thousands of people come over
the years. We have a board in the front.
(24:47):
Anyone who books a meeting or a tour will get their name on the
list. So like every day when I walk
in, there's just so many names on this list of people coming to
check it out. And maybe it's because it's
Vegas. Or maybe because it's cool.
So I've heard that Elon Musk hasa boxable potentially.
Is there any other famous folks out there that have these that
you can share about? Or is it all top secret?
(25:09):
Yes, and I cannot disclose who the others are, but the only
reason I the only reason I can even say Musk is because he.
I think he mentioned it and he like he had one in Texas or
something like that. Yeah, he he eventually spilled
the beans. Before that I just said no
comment because there was an NDA.
But then I just, I just copied what he said after he disclosed
(25:31):
it. But yeah, we've got a few other
famous people with them too. That's awesome.
Well, I appreciate you hanging out with me.
Do you have any closing thoughtshere before we head off?
I'm excited for your guys's potential merger.
I think that's very exciting. I encourage folks to go check
that out. I'll put the press release in
the description, but the floor is yours.
You got any closing thoughts? Yeah, thanks for thinking of me.
(25:52):
And if anyone wants to learn Morehead over to the website,
e-mail us, call us, text us, keep an eye on social media.
We post constant updates of whatwe're working on and stay tuned
for what happens next.
Welcome back to Stories Worth Hearing.
I'm your host John Quick, and today's story is about vision,
grit and the kind of bold thinking that can change the way
we live. My guest is Galliano Tiramani,
Co CEO and Co founder of Boxable, a company that's not
just building houses, but reimagining what's possible for
housing itself. From the early days of a big
(00:21):
idea to a $3.5 billion NASDAQ bound merger, Galliano's journey
is proof that when you challengethe status quo with innovation,
you can disrupt an entire industry.
Voxel's mission to deliver high quality, affordable and rapidly
deployable homes has already captured the world's attention
and they are just getting started.
(00:41):
This is more than a conversationabout a company, it is about how
one person's determination, paired with the right team and
the right vision can create solutions that truly change
lives. So get ready.
This is the story behind Boxable, told by the man who
helped build it from the ground up.
Let's dive in. Well, this is exciting.
(01:01):
We have somebody back on the show they were on once before,
and it'll be fun to hear some ofthe kind of new and interesting
news that's happened with the company Boxable.
So, Galliano, welcome back to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I'm one of the founders
of Boxable. We are trying to fix housing
affordability by mass producing buildings in a factory in Las
(01:23):
Vegas. That's awesome.
So some kind of huge headlines just happened.
I read it a couple days ago, there's a merger that's going to
be happening in a potential IPO that's going to hit the NASDAQ.
Can you talk to me a little bit about how that came about?
Well thank you for asking but I'm not allowed to comment on
anything like that during this period unless they're like pre
(01:44):
canned lawyer approved answers. So I just direct everyone to
head over to our website, check out our social media, check out
our FAQ page, look at our press releases and you could read more
about it on there and channels. But it's definitely exciting
times. It's been a wild ride so far,
and you know. That's awesome.
So let's rewind for a second foryou.
(02:05):
When was that light bulb that went off with boxable where you
thought, man this could be a real game changer.
You know, it was actually an invention that my father had
over 20 years ago when he decided when he built a modular
house and he's spirit experienced all the problems
related to general building construction and related to
(02:25):
modular specifically. And he invented the idea and
patented it to fold up the houseso that it would fit on the
road. And that's super important
because in order to have mass production, you need to build a
lot of product really fast in a factory and you need to be able
to ship it to a large geographical radius.
And if you and you can't do thatif the products too big to fit
(02:47):
on the road and therefore too expensive.
And we think that's what's held modular back.
So now that we've shipped that fixed that shipping logistics
issue, we believe we'll be able to mass produce at a really high
rate, which we think will lead to the lowest cost.
So for example, automobile manufacturers like Ford or
Tesla, they put out one car off their assembly lines every
(03:10):
minute or less. Every minute or less they build
a car. We want to build a house every
minute or less. But if we made that many houses,
we'd have to send them all over the country.
And you can't do that if if it'sexpensive, cost prohibitive,
wide load. So that was really a big
innovation. And then in 2017 had another
business that was kind of on autopilot and I was looking for
(03:30):
new ideas and I decided to give it a shot at Boxable and created
the website. So I'm showing it to people and
got some traction and here we are.
So tell me about some of the roadblocks or speed bumps that
has come up along the way. I'm sure that you're breaking
into a segment of business that hasn't been disrupted in a long
time working with city, you know, local governments and
state governments. Talk to me about some of those
speed bumps that you've that you've come into.
(03:53):
Yeah, certainly. You said it, city governments,
etcetera. That's the big problem and
that's really half the problem with building instruction.
You know, 1/2 is the way they'rebuilt using manual hand tools on
site, slow, expensive, one at a time, skilled tradesmen.
We've pretty much solved that part.
(04:13):
And then you have regulations. Regulations really are holding
back the entire country, not just possible.
Every traditional builder, if anyone's ever tried to build
anything, they understand that it's quite a process.
There's a lot of bureaucracy involved.
It's slow, it's expensive. Any real estate developers
watching know that it could takethem 123 years to get a project
(04:36):
completed. And that's not because it took
them that long to build it, it'sbecause they got held up by the
government. So I knew that was going to be
an issue going into this and we quickly found out how think of
an issue it is. So you basically have a million
different bureaucrats who can stop you at any point along the
way based on their own own whim.And you have 50 states that all
(04:58):
use different versions of the building code.
You have a building code that's very specific in the way it
tells you to build and also veryup for interpretation for a
building inspector and say this is not good.
Then in addition to that, you have state programs that
regulate factory built housing that add another that is really
just repetitive because the state programs do the same thing
(05:19):
the building departments do, butyou have to go through both of
them. So we're kind of fighting
through all that. And then another kind of issue
is that the sales cycle for building construction is long.
So we can, we can build all these houses, but from the time
a customer comes in and says, I want to buy one to the time when
they can actually receive delivery, there's a long
(05:40):
timeline there. So if I was manufacturing, you
know, a hat and and somebody want to buy it, I would ship it
to them, they'd get it in three days.
But with a house and we kind of have this big long sales cycle.
So we're fighting through that. We think it's going to snowball
over time. Things that we were working on
18 months ago are coming to fruition now and that'll
continue to build and build. Talk to me a little bit about
(06:01):
the kind of tenacity that you have to have to be behind a
project like this because I think most people would have
probably just given up. You know, most people want to be
the the CEO of a company the dayone on the job.
They don't really want to have to put any money their own in.
They don't want to have to probably work 90 hours a week or
longer like you've been doing. So talk to me a little bit about
(06:23):
the hustle and the grind that ittakes to see something like huge
like this come to fruition. Well, any entrepreneur knows
that they're going to definitelyhave to put in.
I certainly do. It's in my nature though, to be
working every waking hour into and it's certainly being a bumpy
Rd. there. I have so many outrageous
stories of things that have gonewrong and there are so many
(06:45):
people that, you know, wish us to fail, but we haven't yet.
And we keep surviving and here we are.
And if we do, if we are successful in this mission,
there's a lot of people that stand to benefit from it.
Because I think that factory mass production of housing is
the only way to bring down housing costs, which, you know,
(07:07):
effects everyone. Statistics out there about the
percentage of people's income that they spend on housing and
it's, it's enormous. If you're, you know, an average
guy, you make 50, sixty, 80,000 a year, but then your rent is 2,
three, $4000 a month. The numbers don't really crunch
on that. So it's a big problem.
There's a 5 million housing unitshortage in the US And you know,
(07:32):
we're, we're here to make a big impact in a big way.
Nothing about what we're doing is small.
It's a big operation with a big product and a big overhead and a
big upside if if we pull it off.Well, for folks that have never
seen one of these, describe a little bit about what the
casita. I think the casita is the main,
yeah. The one.
(07:53):
Describe it for folks that are listening to the podcast because
usually what people think of, they're thinking of a mobile
home. This is not a mobile home.
This is something different, unique design.
So talk to me a little bit aboutwhat it looks like and feels
like. Yeah.
So mobile homes are built to a different code.
It's a federal hug code. They usually stay on a trailer
frame with wheels sometimes, butours are built to regular
(08:15):
residential building codes, so they can go in different
configurations in any place thata regular building can go.
And our first product is the Casita.
So it's roughly 360 square foot little studio apartment with a
bed, couch, kitchen, bathroom. So it's this rapidly deployable
room module that's fully finished in our factory.
Plumbing, electric, insulation, windows, flooring, lighting,
(08:39):
kitchen, everything is done in the factory.
Then it folds up. So it folds from about 20 feet
wide down to 8 1/2 feet wide so it can ship.
And then when it arrives on site, it unfolds.
It's deployed in about a day andthen you have a place to move
in. And from the time that maybe
you've made the, the first one rolled off the factory floor
till years later where we're at now, has has they changed?
(09:00):
Have they changed much or have they kind of stayed the same?
The casita? We started off the company with
me and my dad, a few other guys in basically a garage and we at
this design and we got an order for 150 houses from the United
States military. We took that, we leveraged it to
(09:20):
get ourselves a warehouse building.
First one was 170,000 square feet.
We installed billions of dollarsof equipment.
We hired hundreds of people, ramped up, delivered that order
in full and kind of throughout that process we tweaked things a
little bit. But overall we're producing that
same product today. It's a little more refined now.
It works great. However, we just released what
(09:44):
we're calling our phase two products, which is different
room modules, so different size rooms that can connect and stack
together to build single or multi family housing.
And it also uses different technology in the walls,
different manufacturing methods.And everything we've learned
over the past few years, we're dumping into this new product,
(10:05):
which we think solves a whole range of problems.
Friction points, brings down thecost of the product, increases
the structural strength of fire rating on and on.
Working on that right now. And we have a few other products
as well that are little small, smaller houses on wheels.
So they're actually RV's technically and yeah, it's
definitely, we are a technology company.
(10:27):
We are constantly doing R&D. We are constantly trying to
solve for the various issues that we bump into and and pivot.
Does getting a Trump in office as opposed to a Biden, is that
been helpful at all to your company or does it not really
affect it? Well, Trump's gone in and
flashed the bureaucracy right with the help of Musk and his
chainsaw, so I'm really happy about that.
(10:48):
You know, less regulators slowing down American innovation
is amazing in my book. I'm Terry and I believe in
maximum freedom equals maximum benefit for society.
So I'm happy about everything sofar.
And I know they're, they've talked about doing some
different housing reforms. We'll see if that happens.
We're trying to have our say in that because we know what the
(11:11):
problems are. We know what the easiest buttons
are to push to to change things and I'm asking him for a
national 50 State Building code,1 building code for the whole
country, one modular approval program for factory build
housing for the whole country and it's a no brainer.
It would open up a massive amount of building construction.
So if he that's something that the administration could do to
(11:34):
be helpful regardless of what state these are shipped to.
Is there anything else that the Trump administration could do to
be helpful to somebody like yourself that's trying to
breakthrough, you know, a category of the economy that has
seen little to no innovation in 60 years, 100 years?
You know, there there's a lot ofdifferent nuances, you know, to
(11:56):
to the answer to that question. It's going to be a huge ordeal
for them to undo the regulatory bureaucratic nightmare that's
evolved in every industry, not just building construction, and
it's pull it off. I know there's a lot of laws
being passed on the local level in a lot of places.
California's actually done a great job.
(12:17):
I always shout them out when I'masked this question because
they've passed a ton of laws to enable people to build without
being told no and done things. Like for example, if you want to
build a backyard Adu in California, the building
department has to approve or deny it within 30 days.
I've had other states where it takes 7-8 months for them to
even give you an answer. Probably a year or.
(12:38):
Sometimes, yeah. And by the way, just that being
a law in California, some placesdon't honor it.
They don't follow their own law,and you have to actually
threaten them with lawyers to get them to approve and deny
you. So that's just like the old
guard resisting. Yeah, well, if somebody, you
know, there's the only folks outthere that they're watching this
(13:00):
video, you do not have a shirt on during this interview.
If people have followed you before, I think I've seen
interviews or clips where you had a huge mullet on and you
seem to have a fun time with, you know, the hustle and the
grind of working. Talk to me a little bit about,
you know, just that attitude andhow that plays a role in how you
lead the company. So like I told you before, I am
(13:22):
not wearing a shirt, but I am wearing pants.
That's good. But I just did this to make a
point. That's how we fueled the whole
company and the whole vision. We were able to leverage the
social media algorithm to get people's views and those views
are worth a lot of money. No matter what product you're
(13:44):
selling. If you can get someone to stop
scrolling on TikTok or Reels fora split second-half a second,
whatever, the algorithm is goingto then send you more views.
So maybe someone's scrolling through our podcast clip is
going to see a guy with no shirtand say, huh, and wait a second
and look what it is. And then it's going to get fed
(14:04):
to more and more people. So that was something I
discovered early on because I'd never done any marketing or
social media marketing or anything or structure or
anything besides the point. And before I started this, and
once I kind of tried a few things and got lucky and
realized, wow, this is a really powerful way to get, you know,
investors and customers and employees and media coverage and
(14:27):
everything. I, I ran with it and I did
everything I could to stop people from scrolling so that
more views would come our way and we could drop those views
into an effective sales funnel and capture those leads and
close on those leads. So absolutely critical to the
capital we've raised and the amount of orders we have and the
amount of interest we have in our company is just my way of
(14:49):
approaching that was just doing weird shit to get people to stop
for a second look. Nice.
Well, you've also done somethingthat I think some folks you know
wouldn't do, which is do business with your family, which
I think is really cool. What's that been like for you?
Because I think some people are always like, don't ever do
business with your family. But you and your dad, I think
are Co CE OS, right? And so how does that work?
(15:11):
Yeah. So my dad is historically like a
mechanical engineer and inventordesigner, so that's kind of his
arena. I'm doing a lot of different
stuff, you know, definitely sales, sales and marketing and
other things. And yeah, we make a really good
team. I yeah, when I was a kid, I used
to be in his office a lot. So we started, you know, kind of
(15:32):
working together back then. Like I said before, he had the
idea to do the houses long time ago.
And then I was in California working on another project.
And I just called him one day and said, hey, you want to give
a shot at making the house thinginto a company.
And he said, yeah, give it a try.
And since then we, we've been init together.
It's really great to work with your dad.
(15:52):
I've, I have kids too. I would love to work with them.
We're we're a great team. We have complementary skill set
and you know, there's not a lot of people you can trust, but
hopefully your your dad you can trust.
So that's a good thing. Hopefully he's on the list for
folks that you can trust your parents.
So what it what about five yearsfrom now?
What? Ideally, you could flick a
(16:14):
switch. Where would you like to see box
ball? So right now the company is
going into sales mode. We have been building this
machine that is just starting tofire on.
We're now changing the way we dobusiness and handling projects
from start to finish idea to keys to the front door.
(16:34):
Whereas before we were trying tosell room modules to builders
and developers. And that's, you know, a smaller
market. Someone come in with an idea or
they want a backyard Adu and yousay, yeah, I'll do it all.
That's a bigger market. Down the line, I would like to
be buying the land, developing the projects and selling the
houses to the end user on Zillowat less than market rate.
(16:54):
So they sell quick and that's the biggest market.
So we're working on ramping thatall up right now.
Sell, sell, sell. My plan is to keeps to sell more
than we can make, keep going back to the markets and saying
support this, grow, grow, grow. And then as we scale up, we
believe our costs will come downand no one will be able to
compete with us is the division that we hope for.
(17:17):
So what about somebody wanting to buy one now?
Let's say, you know, there's going to be folks interested as
they listen to this to go check out the website and do all those
kinds of things. If somebody wanted to purchase
one now, is that something that can happen?
And what's the time frame on like somebody getting one if
they put an order in? Yeah, you.
Can so you can head over to our website, we can sell the
backyard casitas in 15 States and we can do bigger projects in
(17:41):
pretty much every state. So if you want to go and buy a
backyard casino, you go to our website.
You, you pay a small fee so thatwe know you're for real.
So we have a lot of leads and then sales team will reach out
to you. They'll help you get financing,
they'll get you permits, they'llprep your land, get your
foundation and then get a box installed.
So we are ready to go. We're selling to go to the
(18:03):
website and go to the projects page and you can see all the
houses that we've built so far. So my guess is you like go to
probably conferences, whether it's marketing conferences or
builder conferences, what do people think?
Like what's their response when they see the CEO of Boxable show
up because everybody else is doing the same thing, especially
in construction type stuff. What's their response when they
(18:26):
when they see you? Are they starstruck?
Are they scared to come see you?Are they, you know, give us,
give us a little peek behind thecurtain.
Well, you know, it's funny beingwhat more more well known
online, you know, and then goingto like industry events where
people know about your niche. You know, they do sometimes they
do act funny when they when theymeet you, but usually I'm just
acting weird, scaring everyone. So it's funny like I went to
(18:50):
this. It was like a venture capital
convention. It was, it was like all the
people I said fuck you to raising the money for the
company the way I did. And I was just wearing a
ridiculous outfit. I had the blonde mullet back
then and I looked totally insaneand I ran around, harassed
everyone, handed out Flyers to everyone, went totally nuts.
(19:12):
And it was funny because those are like, not my people.
Those are the people wearing suits and acting real serious.
Yeah, there's a little. Those are a lot of the people
who said no to you as well, right?
But yeah, when we started the company, I sat once we got to
the point where we had spent ourown money and we realized we
needed a lot of money, more money than we had to make this
(19:33):
vision a reality. I started, you know, cold
calling investors and BC's and private interest calls.
I was on the phone every day, all day, and I got a big long
list of people that said no. But we made it happen.
But you kept trucking along. Yeah, we kept trucking along and
now we've raised over $230 million and it's grown into 3
(19:56):
factory buildings, 400,000 square feet of warehouse space,
you know, hundreds and hundreds of houses built and just proving
the concept that we've figured out and cracked the code on how
to make housing more cost effective.
So what about tariffs? You know, tariffs.
You see them all over the news. Trump's, you know, figuring out
a way to fund government withouttaxing people more.
(20:19):
Are tariffs going to affect yourguys's business in a positive or
negative way? Yeah, I don't think that's going
to fund the government because it's just job change compared to
what they spend. But you know, I certainly agree
with with his approach on on tariffs.
I don't think he wants to be taxing anyone.
He just wants to negotiate a stronger position for the
country and probably sees it as a means to an end.
(20:41):
And you know, that's, that's fine with me.
And we've seen a little bump in our costs.
Nothing game changing though. And we were trying to source
from America anyway before that because when we went live, we we
immediately entered into COVID and almost got destroyed.
One of the many things that almost destroyed us was a
manufacturing company during record setting logistics and
(21:04):
inflation and shipping containers being 20,000 each and
all this crazy stuff. So right when that happened, I'm
like, we don't want to rely on overseas.
We don't rely on, even without COVID, it's, you know, four
months to get something from China and it's not good.
And it's not good. You know, the way kind of we've
tweaked historically tweaked theeconomy, tweaked the way we
(21:27):
inflate the money and are the asresulted in less and less
American manufacturing. But it's not a good position to
be in. It's not a strong position to be
in. And you know, we should be doing
it in our country. And you know, when things
adjust, you know, we can't compete with China, etcetera.
You know, China's interesting. You know, we, we don't just buy
things from China because it's cheap, because we're exploiting
(21:47):
slave labor. We buy it from there because
they're really fucking good at building shit and they're
insanely fast. They're faster than us, they're
better than us. And that's why, you know, we go
to China for, for some of our stuff, some of our prototyping.
But certainly we we prefer to rely on United States suppliers
when we can, but we can't always.
Yeah. So what's some advice you'd give
(22:09):
to maybe the 19 year old kid whois, you know, trying to start
his own business for the first time?
You've you've, you know, not only started Box Bowl, you've
had previous businesses that have been successful.
What kind of advice would you give to that person?
Doesn't know where to start, hasno idea what they're doing, and
just needs to start somewhere. Get ready to lose 100 times, but
(22:34):
know that you only need to win one time to come out ahead.
That's good. That's good.
What? What were some of those, like
big lessons for you? You know those 99 times that
maybe you swung? Against if I lost my.
Or just, you know, just sometimes things don't work out
right and you only like, for me,I've only learned.
I learned a lot from my failuresand they've helped me to succeed
(22:56):
better. Have you had some of those
lessons along the way yourself? So many it's, it's basically,
you know, it's, it's life and it's like suffering and learning
and growth. And this is just training camp
for whatever happens next. The road is not going to be easy
no matter what path you choose. That's just the nature of our
(23:18):
reality. You see housing five years from
now, boxables, you know household name and people are
using a Casitos all you know in all 50 states.
Do you see the housing industry being able to shift to meet some
of this demand? What do you think the rest of
the housing industry is going todo 5 to 10 years from now?
Well, I think if Boxable can prove to the market that we are
(23:42):
a better solution that can sell houses less faster, that we will
be able to grow really quickly with the with the things that I
want to leverage. And then maybe we'll be able to,
you know, enjoy a little monopoly for a while before we
get copied. You know that's how it goes.
And our, where are you guys located?
(24:04):
I, I know that, you know, there's going to be folks here
that maybe they're going to think, man, I want to work for
this company. Like are you guys hiring where
you located? Just for folks that are hearing
about you for the first time. Yeah, we're always hiring all
kind of different positions. We're located in Las Vegas.
Anyone who wants to come by can take a tour of the factory
anytime. We have full time tour guides
(24:26):
and we'll show you everything we're working on.
That's cool. So somebody could show up and
they'd actually get a tour of the actual facilities.
You can book a a meeting online or you can just show up.
Because we have so many people show up.
We have to have full time tour guides.
Like we've had literally thousands of people come over
the years. We have a board in the front.
(24:47):
Anyone who books a meeting or a tour will get their name on the
list. So like every day when I walk
in, there's just so many names on this list of people coming to
check it out. And maybe it's because it's
Vegas. Or maybe because it's cool.
So I've heard that Elon Musk hasa boxable potentially.
Is there any other famous folks out there that have these that
you can share about? Or is it all top secret?
(25:09):
Yes, and I cannot disclose who the others are, but the only
reason I the only reason I can even say Musk is because he.
I think he mentioned it and he like he had one in Texas or
something like that. Yeah, he he eventually spilled
the beans. Before that I just said no
comment because there was an NDA.
But then I just, I just copied what he said after he disclosed
(25:31):
it. But yeah, we've got a few other
famous people with them too. That's awesome.
Well, I appreciate you hanging out with me.
Do you have any closing thoughtshere before we head off?
I'm excited for your guys's potential merger.
I think that's very exciting. I encourage folks to go check
that out. I'll put the press release in
the description, but the floor is yours.
You got any closing thoughts? Yeah, thanks for thinking of me.
(25:52):
And if anyone wants to learn Morehead over to the website,
e-mail us, call us, text us, keep an eye on social media.
We post constant updates of whatwe're working on and stay tuned
for what happens next.
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