The AR Show: Jeri Ellsworth (Tilt Five) on Mentorship (Part 2)

8:41PM Jun 8, 2023

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Jeri Ellsworth

Keywords:

mentors

game

ai

ham radio operator

ar

started

investors

talk

learn

cool

focus

build

silicon valley

compelling

years

experience

1000s

loop

electronics

heard

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. Today we continue my conversation with Jeri Ellsworth. As a reminder, Jeri is the co founder and CEO of Tilt Five a company that has created AR glasses that bring tabletop multiplayer games to life. Prior to Tilt Five, Jeri was the founder of cast AR, which was also making an augmented reality hardware and software platform, and one that had raised $50 million in venture funding before shutting down in 2017. Previously, Jeri was a racecar driver, computer shop owner and toy industry veteran. She was also recruited to Valve to lead the hardware R&D team with a mandate to research novel user interactions to bring the entire family together in the living room, which is where the story of Tilt Five originates—check out part one if you've missed that story. In this conversation, the second of two parts, Jeri shares her fundraising journey and offer some practical advice. She also offers an honest look at early product feedback and discusses what users really care about.

We talked about hardware all the time, but really what we're selling is holograms on the table games on the table. That's our real product. So the glasses if I could do away with them. I would I mean, it's just a means to the end right now. So it's all hands on deck focusing on like great content.

Jeri goes on to share a deep reflection on mentorship, including important mentors in her life, and how to best find and utilize your own. We also touch on AI for creators and game players. And given this was recorded before Apple's announcement about the vision Pro headset, she shares her expectations for the device, and its impact on tilt five. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website thearshow.com. And please support the podcast at patreon.com/thearshow. Let's dive back in.

Love to explore a couple of things from here, one of them is going back to this fundraising journey that you had been on need noted that the team is so committed to the vision that even during the rough patches over the last, you know the first few years of the company, they stuck together. And you found a way to kind of keep going every time you hit one of those little rough patches. But now you're shipping. You know, now you're profitable. Now you have developers content students coming to you saying hey, can you please can you please, you know, distribute my product on your platform? What does this fundraising conversation sound like look like today? Is it getting easier?

No, hell no. Never is. It's so funny. I participated with a lot of fundraising during cast AR. And even though we raised some money pretty quickly, I started to get a taste early on how investors were. And for till five, now we've been going over five years, I mean, I must have done hundreds of pitches, hundreds pitches, to so that's my job, I constantly raise money, that's my primary job to make sure that I keep the lights on we can do the next marketing thing. Or we can buy, you know, buy the license to the next game. It doesn't matter what stage you're in. And there's always it's almost like the carrot and stick, you know, or the line in the sand. So you'll talk to a certain class of investors. So there's like the early investors. So these are the folks that often will like invest in like a dream on a napkin. But they'll still like, you'll take something to them like a working prototype. And they'll be like, I could invest. If you could show me your first 100 sales or whatever, to some arbitrary things completely arbitrary. It's like, okay, great, great. Go out, you do the thing. And you come back to him like, we did it, we did it in record time there like, you know, you really need to double that. And so there's a lot of that that's constantly going on, it's it's, I don't want to come across too disparaging of investors, like sometimes out of those things where they like, keep drawing new lines in the sand actually convert into money down the road. But it's really hard on founders because you you get your hopes up and they get crushed over and over and over again. And so now still raising money, always raising money, feel the same thing. Like you've shipped so many units per month. That's great. We'd like to see that five times bigger are like, Oh, this sounds really familiar. And, you know, and of course we want to like quadruple our sales or 5x or sales, and we're going to do the work. But, you know, I'm a little bit more pragmatics like yeah, chances are I'm gonna go back and talk to that investor says they're going to be in when we do this other activity. They're not going to be in and there's a lot of reasons for that, like, right now. XR was super hot. You know, Zuckerberg came out and he's like the metaverse is going to be everything and horizon worlds is going to be amazing. And so you know, all of that's imploded, and Facebook's pretty much face planted in the last year. So the luster of Metaverse is completely gone, right. So there's been conversations We've had where people were investors. Were Metaverse crazy. Now they're AI crazy. And so we're gonna go there, and they're gonna be like, well, you know, we just need these other metrics to get there.

Yeah, if you just incorporated chat GTP, we would interest.

On that note, I've been using chat GPT to make all kinds of little projects for tilt five, I'm absolutely in love is using chat, TTP. Tongue tight. As my coding assistant, it's better than searching Stack Overflow, in my opinion, I'm just a chip designer hardware person. So I work in wires. So I'm more of an appliance operator, I just want like something in unity to cause something else to happen and check GPT if you can slice it thin enough. You know, like, I want two objects to always follow this other object, it can do that like perfectly for me. And it's been a great tool. That's pretty amazing. But that's not going to help me raise any money.

Maybe if you ask the right question, they'll tell you who exactly will be the person to invest?

Yeah, the investors that have been really good to us are a lot of strategics that really want us to exist for various reasons. So those are always really great partners. So constantly raising money from strategics that have a reason for us to exist. And we can do partnerships with and you have a couple of those things underway. So you know, even though everyone's AI crazies, it's just a numbers game. That's just what I had to learn early on is kissing lots of frogs to find your prince or princess. And there's realities in fundraising, too. It was nice when one of my mentors taught me like, why I was getting these strange reactions from investors that seemed really excited. Like, it's very uncommon for us to go to an investor where they don't aren't. Yes, slack jawed and like going, Wow, oh, that was so fun. And then they don't want to invest for some reason. And there's just some realities, like, you know, they have limited partners, their LPs that are like, now you got to invest in AI, we hear that's the latest thing Quit screwing around in XR, we don't hear that it's hot anymore. So there's like, their limited partners are telling them where they have to focus. There's also the fact that, you know, a big Venture Fund may have like five or six partners, and those partners only do a couple of deals a year. So they're probably seeing two or three deals a week at least. So your odds are extremely low when when you go in there. And then all the market shifting around constantly.

If you had to give advice to another founder today, who had this brilliant idea for a piece of hardware, or hardware plus software, focused on AR VR, Mr. XR, what advice would you share? On the fundraising side?

I think it's stuff I've been dancing around this entire hour, we've been talking, first of all, really have clarity in your audience that you're going after, what's the value proposition, you're very, very clear what you're delivering laser focus, try to describe it in one sentence, your elevator pitch, they say, but really, you got to do that. The other piece of advice is really understand. You know, if it's like a system like ours, you know, understand the unit economics very, very precisely as soon as you can, you know, in the early days of fundraising, when you're doing friends and family and seed stage, you can be very fuzzy on this stuff. But we always try to figure out these pieces like unit economics. You know, if there's a software component to it, which your attach rate, you're going to sell and number of units, and not all of the people are going to attach, you know, the software piece of it where you make your money, they're not going to actually go through the process you expect. So try to understand what that's going to be so you're not caught flat footed. When you're talking to investors. You don't sound naive, you walk in the door, like we're gonna sell 100,000 units and out of the 100,000 units, they're all gonna pay $9 a month on whatever service they're gonna laugh you out of the room because like they know that never happens. And as you go through your fundraising journey, like when you start off small, like you may raise a few $100,000 Like we did it till five like we didn't just few $100,000 We had a clear goal. This few $100,000 is going to get us to this first goal. And we hunkered down we didn't over hire we just hired or contracted. We worked late nights and we just watched the money really carefully that we could hit our goal. And then the best piece of advice I got when I started off was one of my mentors. He's like your CEO now. Do you know it's the letter CEO stands for? Like yeah, I know a CEO stands for Music, I don't think you do. It stands for cash extraction officer, as much as you want to be in there like soldering and working on optics, you have to be lining up those investors for when you hit that goal, that they're ready to see that goal be hit and give you the next check. So, whoever's on your team, someone's got to take that role, and they have to spend 120% of their time, you know, plotting out how you get to the next, you know, chunk of money, that's just how the game is played, and venture capital backed companies, it sits, it's a tough business, you can never achieve what you want in the amount of money you have, until you're already wildly successful. Like, at some point, I hope that you know, till five is going to start taking off. And you know, it's gonna be exploding so big that we almost don't need the venture capital. And that's when all the money's going to flood in.

Right, when you don't need it. When you get it. That's when it's easy. Yeah. So as you look out over the next 612 months, where's the focus for the company? Where's the focus for the product? Yeah, so

we have a pretty solid product, right now, there's a couple things we're gonna fix, and, you know, bugs, things like that. So we're constantly trying to improve the onboarding experience for the user. We just surveyed all of our majority of our customers like, what do you like about it, what you don't like about it? It was, it was a bitter pill to take, when we saw like the candid feedback come in. It's like areas that we thought we were doing good, you know, people are like, you really letting me down in this area? You're like, Ooh, Oh, you know, and then they're shared it with the entire company, it was a bit of a shock to us all. But you know, the whole company rallied like, okay, you know, they don't like this aspect of the onboarding experience, or one of the things that shouldn't have came to a surprise to us, but was a bit of a surprise to some in the company was some of our earliest customers that got their system, like, say, in September, were complaining, like, I bought it because I was going to be able to play, you know, this type of video game. And then we're like, Wait, we have three of those type of video games, why are they upset, and it's like, Oh, you're so stupid. Like, we spend so much time trying to market outward to new customers, we completely neglected our current customer. So when they got their system, we didn't have three of those games, they were unhappy. And then we never bothered to go back. And like, let them know that their favorite games there. So that, that's really cool. That's gonna be one of our focuses is, you know, communicating better with our customer, like, hey, the thing you want, it is now online and working. And it's content content content, like I remind the team all the time, like, we talk about hardware all the time, but really what we're selling is holograms on the table games on the table. That's our real product. So the glasses if I could do away with them. I would I mean, it's just a means to the end right now. So it's all hands on deck focusing on like, great content.

That's so amazing. It really is just, unfortunately, we're at a stage in this this technology cycle where the emphasis is on the hardware, because for the most part, it's still not good enough. Yeah. And you and your team have found a solution that delivers on this type of experience that is viable today, which is incredible, in so many ways. But fundamentally, as you noted, consumers want the hardware to be invisible, you know, it's successful if it disappears as much as possible, either literally or figuratively. And they get to focus on the experience that you're enabling for them.

Yeah, I find it so funny, as I look at a lot of other companies out there, like what do they put prominent on the way that they promote their product, and it's like, you go to their website, and it's just like field of view and Pixels Per Degree and yada yada, yada, it just like all these stats, which, for some audiences, that's really important. And I kind of feel like VR and AR isn't there for the mass market. When I go buy a television as a savvy consumer who isn't a television technology enthusiast, like I know enough. Now I've been educated over the years that you know, 4k is better than 10 ADP, and 8k is better than 4k. And you know, those stats really matter for like the average user. I don't think they're particularly helpful selling to a broad audience. And I think that's kind of the failing of some of these other devices out there that are over hyping the stats, like of course all of us in our little bubble like probably everyone listening to this podcast you and I like to geek out on like, oh, yeah, it's got this field of view or this sensor in it and that average Joe on the streets like Does it make holograms for me? Can I play my favorite Catan game, like and so we try to keep that in mind and like focus, you know, our website and our message on like, yeah, it's games. It's just games and it's low cost, and you don't have to worry about breaking it. And you can buy three of them for, you know, invest in, you know, for when your friends come over, invest in when your family wants to have a game night,

here available today, the experience is king

is cool. We've been watching our sales stats. And so we were not sure I mean, to get started with our system is 359, that gets you the game board, which is our deluxe game board, it gets you your first wand and your first headset, so pretty, you know, right on par with gaming systems and other VR AR systems out there. And then every headset you add afterwards is just $300 more for the wand and headset. So you can like do groups, group packs. And so our one player packs don't sell really well we actually, I keep looking at all of this inventory sitting in the three PL logistics warehouse. And I keep it bringing up to the team like why don't we put those all on pallets and bring them to the office and turn them into two and three player kits. Because on average transactions, people are buying two player and like, we keep running out of two and three player options. Like instead of not making those sales, when we convert those one players to two players,

people want a social experience. Yeah,

it's exactly what we wanted to wanted to see. It's just funny that we botched it a little bit when we projected what we were going to build. We just also introduced our Android drivers. That's pretty cool. That's gonna get a lot of attention in the next year. And in fact, I just saw our first two player Android experience running off one device. So right now our system plugs for headsets into one PC. I mean, just a mid range PC can drive one headset, that now you can plug into Android devices and being mobile and walk around the table. And we're start seeing more content. And the other day, I was talking to the team. And it's like, why some of these messages in there about, you know, player 1234 In the Android stuff. And they're like, Yeah, because it supports it. But what what do you do that? And they're like, Well, you know, one of our partners is doing an Android device that has plenty of USB ports. And in fact, they just came over and showed us a demo today. I'm like, oh my god, this is amazing.

That's so cool. Yeah. As you look ahead on the hardware side, and you plot version two, what are the things that you're most looking forward to improving?

Yeah. Well, we're learning so much right now about what's working for people and what's not working for them. I think that's going to change a lot over the next period of time. Yeah, no clue when we're going to release a gen two, because you know, gen one is just fine right now. But I imagine it's going to be things around, you know, ergonomics. Definitely around like a lot of complaints about the cable. I mean, it uses a cable to plug into your phone or into your your PC, it's a bit more of a problem with a PC. So we'll definitely look at like, what did we do to lessen the problems with the cables? So it's just a little easier for for users does even have a cable? I don't know. So those are all the things that we're thinking about? We definitely, you know, we talk about it now. Like, you always have to think about what's the pieces of technology that are going to be there too expensive today that are going to be available and say a year or two from now. We're constantly looking at like what's on that cusp of like, just too expensive for where we want to be, but we think it's going to like, you know, topple over. That's the magic in the toy industry. They do that all the time, they just obsess on like, Okay, this little sensor, or this little material is just too expensive. But as soon as it drops below this threshold, then it goes into our toy, and we'll be the first. And so we think about that a lot. It's like, what can we be the first stat that's kind of on the consumer grade, not the professional grade.

So one of the things you know, that we've heard through this conversation is that on the one hand, you've had a huge variety of experiences, everything you've noticed that it started off on a was a quarter mile, half mile dirt track, yes, in all different types. They're building cars, incorporating technology, and indeed gone to Silicon Valley and made your own path, build a bunch of games, toys, different systems works at Valve, and you tell yourself so much along the way. But one of these, one of these elements you've referenced a few times is the importance of mentors that helped you along the path. So I'd love to explore a little bit this process or approach that you have from cooperating mentors into your journey, maybe just start with how important have they been? As you've kind of found yourself to where you are today?

That's such a great question. And it really touches me so deeply, too. You know, I grew up in rural Oregon, you know, way out in the middle of nowhere. And I was the nerdy kid that was interested in technology, I was very fortunate that I had a supportive father, who let me be really geeky and take things apart and invested in technology when we really didn't have the money back then. So, you know, he thought it was important that I have a computer. So he spent, you know, 1000s of dollars on a Commodore 64 system in the early 80s. Like, I know, he was bootstrapping his business at the time. That was a real, he went without, just so I could have a computer. But I lived there. You know, there were no other resources around. It wasn't like Silicon Valley, it would have been amazing to live down here, because I probably could have walked down to Steve Wozniak door and knocked on it. And he probably would have taken me in under his wing as a mentor. However, like my first big break, living in this little community, I was at the public library. I was quite young. I don't know how young I was. But I was looking at the like five books on electronics that were from like the 60s or something. And this gentleman walked up to me, he's like, are you interested in electronics? I'm like, Yeah, and he's like, I'm a ham radio operator. I like electronics, too. You know, let's talk electronics. And so this was my first real like, outside mentor to come in outside of my father. And there were, there was another ham radio operator in town, we'd get together at the library, and we talk electronics. And I think what worked and I stumbled on this by accident. And it's helped me through my entire life, I was so hungry and eager and appreciative that they were teaching me about electronics, that instead of this virtuous loop between us where they would dedicate time to help me out. And so these amateur radio operators, gave me my first oscilloscope and volt meters and all of this stuff that I would never be able to afford or gain access to. Because, you know, how, how do you even How do you even find this information in the 80s, when there was no internet, like there was just nothing out there. And so I learned so much from them, very appreciative. They always wanted me to get into amateur radio. I wasn't too interested in their hobby, I got into pirate radio instead, which they were very offended by. But I think maybe secretly, they thought it was kind of cool because I was making bootleg transmitters and stuff. And I did a bunch of stuff. And they helped me out. Then when I got into racing cars, this was kind of a phase I was going through, I was going through my wild teenage years. So I was hanging out with all the bad kids. And it was kind of my defense mechanism. And I just was looking for things that were kind of Outland landish and wild and crazy. But my father had bootstrapped this gas station service station that he had built from the ground up and I spent a lot of time at, you know, helping them at the gas station. So I knew about cars. And occasionally we'd go out to the racetrack that was nearby, and we'd watch the races like once or twice a year. And I thought that was really cool. When I got old enough to have my own car and driving around, and I was going being kind of wild and crazy. I'm like, I'm gonna go to the racetrack. I think I want to be a racecar driver just impulsively just decided it was the craziest thing I could ever do. And I just go to the racetrack every weekend, very much like roller derby. This sounds very similar story. I go to the racetrack, and I'd watch and at the end of the night, they would shut down the races and they'd open the gates and I would just go into the pit area afterwards. And I would just start talking to people in the pit area, asking them like, did you build your race car? How did you do it? And that led to some folks that pointed me towards like some books and videotapes, VHS tapes on like building racecars. In fact, it was like a bootleg copy of a VHS tape. Like fourth generation copy is what gave me the you know this grainy video I watched 1000 times that gave me the confidence that I could actually build one and I was trying to convince my father like, will you help me build this racecar which he was adamant not to help me build a race cars like you'll kill yourself? No way. You straighten your life up. You're hanging out with all these bad kids now you want to go hang out at the racetrack? No, no, no, no, no. But I was motivated. So I went out and I started going around to all the machine shops in town. So we're in a logging town. So a lot of little machine shops that serviced you know, lumber equipment. I found this one guy, single person shop, kind of grumpy old guy I mean, he's like, I'll teach you how to weld and machine that you got to work for it. So I'd come in on Saturdays, and he'd work me to death cleaning his lathe, and he started teaching me little things about setting machines up, and he would make me do stuff. And then he would exchange he would, you know, teach me how to drill holes. And well then do all the pieces. And I started to gather all the skills from this mentor, and convinced him to let me build start building the racecar in the back of his shop. So I started putting this thing together. And that's when my father kind of turned around. He's like, Okay, if you're gonna actually do this, I want to be involved. I don't want you to get killed. So it was nice. My father got actively involved. But yeah, he mentored me. And it was really a special relationship. I was so eager to learn from him. And he would let me break stuff in his shop. I know he did. You know, when you're like tapping a hole, there's a certain speed if you're going to power kaput, you know, and he'd see me set the lay the to power tap a hole, and he knew that tap was going to break. And I plunge that tap in there to snap off. And, you know, he square up a storm. And you know, I could see him with like, kind of a corner of his mouth read stuff like, yeah, and those are the valuable lessons you have to learn. And he allowed me to learn those. Later on, I opened my chain of retail computer stores after racing cars. And again, I was the bad, you know, gothy kid wearing dark makeup and coffee clothes and Doc Martens, not very relatable to customers. But I wanted to do this computer store, across the street was an insurance salesman who happened to be kind of interested in computers, but took an interest in like just chatting with me at lunch, and he started taking me under his wing and teaching me you know, there's thing called relatability. You know, if you dress like that, you know, you'll relate to a certain audience. But you know, most of the world expects this. So you probably should like dress and talk in the way that the rest of the world expects, if you want to have a successful business. And so that was like the computer stores and multiple mentors helped me through that teach me these valuable lessons. And then, and again, I never went to school for any of these things, racing cars, or machining or running a business or even electrical engineering, which got me started in Silicon Valley. It was only after the failure of my computer stores when the market changed, and computer stores were no longer viable. I took this hobby that I was doing, which was electronics, and I just brute force my way into startups in Silicon Valley. And it wasn't easy. I was living up in the Portland area and flying down until I ran out of money to Silicon Valley to get my first job. Then I started taking the Greyhound bus down. Yeah. And then I start taking like minimum wage jobs up in Portland that were flexible enough that I could get to Silicon Valley to try to like meet people. And that's where a lot of Silicon Valley mentors came in. And I mentioned Steve Wozniak, it's like, I never thought that there would ever be a chance for Steve Wozniak, to mentor me. But you know, throughout the years in those early days of being around Silicon Valley, like, through 1000, little connections, you know, people are like, you're a lot like Steve Wozniak, you should meet Steve Wozniak, and then being so eager to learn from him, like, you know, he would get back to me, and we have that relationship where you would pass on his wisdom to me, you know, Nolan Bush now, like now, I talked to Nolan Bushnell, all the time. Yeah, founder of Atari, like I could have never imagined being the snot nosed kid in the 80s, in a town of 3000 people that would ever, like have those people there to help me. And so, a piece of advice to founders, just kind of tie it in with your previous question is surround yourself with advisors and mentors. And be very grateful for what they give you. And like, be sure to tell them, just tell them this how much you appreciate it, because if you tell them, you know, they'll give it back to you in like multiples. And then just to close out the story on mentors, something that's a little bit humbling, which is cool. And this is why I started my YouTube channel is to be kind of a virtual mentor. And I do a lot of mentoring myself these days. And tying back to these ham radio operators, these ham radio operators, they're they're long gone now. Right? They felt they were quite old and they've passed away and in the moment, I told them that I really appreciated but I really didn't get a chance to tell them like because of them. Today. I get to be living my dream of trying to build this company that's going to delight millions of people around the world. And they planted the seeds That got me to this point, which is really cool. And I'm a ham radio operator today. So they planted those seeds to and ham radio is pretty fun. So they weren't completely wrong back then that I probably would have liked ham radio, I hope to have another 50 or 60 years of mentors. And I have plenty of mentors that are much younger than I am. I'm getting up there. And I'm a lot older than I was when I started this whole journey. But mentors come in all different ages. And you have to be receptive to that.

You mentioned the importance of gratitude is one of the key elements in being able to really take advantage of and give back to the mentor. And that is the mentee and the relationship. In the story that you shared, there was a lot of fortuitous, fortuitous, right, you ran to the radio, ham guy in the library, or the insurance guy across the street. And partially is that you yourself, were open and willing to accept and listen and learn and incorporate what you thought made sense for you at the time. But I think I suspect that that some listening may not know how to go and seek the mentor, good advice on how to find or approach or incorporate a mentor into your life.

As I reflect back through the different decades, in particular, like my 20s, I thought I knew everything. And then I got to my 30s. And then I realized I didn't know everything in my 20s. And then I was absolutely certain I knew everything in my 30s. And I'm now in my 40s. And I know I didn't know shit back in the 30s, my 30s I'm definitely not perfect at like being completely open. And there's probably hundreds of interactions I could have had with or 1000s Even of potential mentors that I rejected just because of my bravado. And I struggle with that today. So I think it's difficult when I was breaking into electronics, right. And in my late 20s, coming to Silicon Valley, early 30s. I felt like I had to have this bravado of like I know how to do everything, like I got it, I got this. And that held me back a lot. So if I could go back in time and tell my young self, like, being able to admit that you don't know something is one of the stepping stones to get mentors, because we have these little interactions all the time with people. And you can be off putting on accident just because you think that you have pretend you that you're smarter than you are or whatever. So that's maybe Lesson One is, I just cannot point to anything in my life where anything like horribly bad has happened when I've said like I just I don't know, like the only good thing seemed to come from when I say like, I don't know, can you help me? I think the other piece of advice and trying to think of how I picked this up and maybe it it just came because I was in such a small town and I kind of got that early exposure to running into those ham radio operators that can help me out that I realized that I could seek out people. And so mentors come in very strange ways to me. And many times I'll go to an event, it may seem funny, you were saying that I'm a good storyteller and sociable or whatever earlier. This is a learned skill. I'm actually very introverted. And it's I have to force myself to be outgoing, especially at events. And so when I was trying to break into electronics and Silicon Valley, I think that's where I learned pretty quickly that I had to force myself to be very social at events and be the social butterfly that goes around and talks to people. Oh, gosh, this takes me oh my goodness, I'm sorry, this so rambley this takes me back to another mentor. That helped me so much when I was younger. So living next to us was an older lady. She was phenomenal. She needed help around her garden and I would go help her and she gave me like $1 or two to help her like move something in her garden. But mostly she just wanted some companionship. But she was in World War Two. She was a psychologist that helped the Navy or Army or someone come up with the proper way to train military personnel to recognize the silhouettes of airplanes flying over overhead to know if their enemy or allies and she used her training to come up with programs to do that and really amazing stories on that In the 60s or something like that, she helped invent the by tonal siren. Because a lot of emergency vehicles were crashing into each other and emergency vehicles would crash into each other because their sirens were all the same tone. And she used her like training to come up with a way to make the bike tonal random sounding siren. Anyway, she would spend hours just talking to me about stuff. But there was one thing that she told me that stuck with me that later became very helpful when I had to go socialize. Somehow it came up that she said, if you want someone to like you, just ask them about themselves. And if you're nervous in a conversation, just ask them about themselves. And if you don't know what to say, just keep asking them about themselves. And so that stuck with me throughout the years. And that became a crutch. When I went to the social events are these events, like embedded systems conference? You know, I just walk around and like, just ask people like, you know, what do you do? Oh, that must be fun. Can you tell me more? You know, what's your claim to fame? Like? Yeah, yeah, getting people talking. They'll they tend to walk away like, Oh, she's wonderful. Like, yeah, I feel like I know her so well. And in fact, you know a lot about them. And they probably don't know as much about you, as you know about them. Anyway, that was my little crutch to get me less introverted. It's just like, these little things I could say, to get people talking about themselves.

So recognizing you don't know, that was a major hurdle. Having the confidence to go in and chat to begin with. But then to ask the question, can you help? was a key second part of that, actually,

yeah, that's probably the third right is like, you have to understand what they get them talking. Yeah, and file away, like this person is really good at business. You know, they are really good at this technical thing. And you could follow that away. And if you have a good relationship with them, then they can actually be activated as mentors later on, you can, you know, if you have a good relationship and call them up, like you were telling me about this business thing, and I don't know anything about it, like sharing a little bit, and then boom, you have a mentor that you have that good feedback loop. Yeah, that's I noticed that going back to them as this machinist, it was a single shot machine, as he spent all day in there by himself, he didn't have any helpers. And probably, I'm just guessing most people in his life just didn't care about machining. So he didn't have many outlets to talk about this technical thing that he did. So to have this young girl come in here, like just like, so hungry to hear about every little aspect of machining, like now, here's an outlet for him to talk about all this wisdom that he has. And I feel good. Like when people come to me and ask me about like something technical, I've done that, you know, no one ever asked me about, I'm like, oh, so recognition for this thing I slaved over. That's a cool thing, and probably any business. But a lot of times you work on things that no one ever knows about. And every once in a while, someone will be like, That is the thing I'm into, and you get to talk about it. And it's like, Oh, my God, two years working on this weird chip that no one cares about. Now, finally, someone cares. And I can tell them all about it.

The recognition is so key. Yeah. Let's wrap the few in lightning round questions. Ooh, yeah. Sounds fine. mix up a little bit here from my usual set apart, because we had you answered some of this as we kind of just went through this here. But we'll go with this one. First, what commonly held belief about this area of AR and VR spatial computing? Do you disagree with?

I strongly disagree that in the next 10 to 20 years, a mass market audience is going to be interested in completely synthesized experiences. You know, the metaverse? I think we've seen it before, you know, with Second Life, you know, think it had it, certain audiences are interested, I think it's really misguided to think that a broad audience is going to like that. I think that we'll be better off like augmenting people's beautiful lives and not trying to synthesize their entire life.

Ready. Player one is not our future, at least not next couple of decades.

I think that's a large, large, large lift to educate consumers to get them excited about doing that.

Besides the one you're building what tool or service do you wish existed in the AR market?

Well, you know, I'm pretty stoked about AI. I think, in this space, if we get to have more AI driven game development tools that are tightly integrated into the game engines, we're going to see an explosion of creativity that we haven't really seen up to this point, because there's a lot of barriers for creative people to get in and create immersive experiences.

I, I love this notion so much that one of the great uses of this current emerging generation of AI is that it is a creative enabler. If the building blocks are easier to find and to use, then you have more builders building more interesting things with those blocks.

That's like my story I was sharing earlier. I'm a chip designer, like, that's what I've done most of my career, I've done optics and electronics and stuff like that. I really never cared to know all the nuances of programming. Now that I can go to chat GPT and just dice up this creative idea into little tiny pieces and have chat GBT create like functional code may not be the most efficient, you know, I can now instead of like, trying to master one more, like skill, my brain is pretty full. With all this other stuff. I can just take my creative idea and like stand it up. And in fact, you know, I've done two or three of these projects, and the team has taken like these things. I've stood up just as weekend projects. And now they're like, this is pretty good. Alright, let's go fix it and make it not crummy code. And let's like put it up on our labs page. That's very cool. It's exciting thing being appliance operator, not a, you know, a master coding expert.

Right? Yeah. Do you have any hope, ambition vision for how the AI helps maybe not the creator of the content and the experience, but the user of the experience in the moment in real time.

I think this is interesting. You know, since I come from a gaming focus, and one of the things I learned at Valve Software, that was a bit surprising to me, and it comes down to the psychology of gaming that I had never thought about too closely up until working there. And I used to love going to the QA balls, where there were a lot of folks working on gameplay mechanics, gameplay loops, AI for NPCs. And one of the things that I heard quite commonly is really smart NPCs in AI, aren't fun to play, many games that you play are kind of reduced down to tiny game loops that are predictable, and it's kind of human nature. And I see, you know, everyone's jumping on the AI hype train right now. And they're like, Okay, we're gonna have aI NPCs that can just can go off and do anything, and my enemies can go off and do anything. And I take that all with a grain of salt. Now that I've learned a bit about like, how really fun, compelling games are made, where you need those tight game loops that are very predictable. And it when you stop to think of it, like almost every game you play, like the monster makes the same noise just before it jumps out. And it moves almost in the same way. And once you learn that little loop there becomes very satisfying. It's like, Ooh, I hear a dragger down in the cave. I know, you know, it's going to be blind to me. So if I'm go really quiet, you know, it's and then it becomes really addicting to play those game loops. If my draggers in the caves, adapted and got smarter, I don't know if it would be as fun.

Humans are pattern recognition machines. It's all about Yeah, and we find a lot of satisfaction in recognizing this, just as you just noted, it's that's the puzzle, we're trying to

actually this brings up the valve story that brought me a lot of discomfort. And this is where AI could maybe go in a bad direction in gameplay. Yeah, as much as you a lot of people are hyping. Like, you know, NPCs could be completely sentient, sentient like creatures out there. You could also prompt you know, these AIs to make search for the most addictive game loop. And where I got uncomfortable valve is when we were doing these biometric feedback tests. Where we were trying to get make games more compelling, aka more addicting is if you want to use a different word is and we started looking at research papers from casino gambling companies, and starting to realize like casino games are highly optimized to have this addiction loop to them and their big innovation they had in the 90s. Maybe it was the late 80s was to go from one quarter every time you pull the handle on a slot machine. You either get a winning sound or a losing sound. To let you put four quarters in or 20 quarters or whatever in you pull the handle. Even if you lose three out of your four quarters, you get the win sound and all the win, flashing. So psychologically, you feel like you're winning even though you're losing three quarters of your money constantly. So yeah, video games, you can make them too addictive. I think, too, I wouldn't want to have an unhealthy gaming experience for folks in AI. We see this Facebook, their algorithms that you know you better than you know, yourself and know the perfect time to insert an ad to manipulate you into buying that thing. Pretty scary stuff that we're gonna have to deal with in the next few decades and fear how to manage it.

Yeah, there's a lot of characteristics of the human being the human experience that made sense, maybe hundreds or 1000s of years ago that now we have an opportunity to exploit not necessarily in our own individual best interest or in our communal best interest. And those are the those are the ways we need to make sure that we're our benefactors not hijacking. Yeah,

it's gonna be rough. I mean, like anything, it's the red flag laws when automobiles came out and stuff. It's there's, there's gonna be a lot of vacillating back and forth with extremes, you know, as this new technologies brought on board. It's It's interesting AI has so much exposure out there. I don't, I can't think back to anything that's had as much exposure. You know, to the entire world. It could have been electricity. I don't know that must have been might be the closest thing to, to AI that changed the world so quickly. In AI is probably going to do it a magnitude faster.

Yeah. And electricity in every home, plumbing and every home indoor refrigeration. Yeah, those three had pretty massive impacts on our day to day experience. Speaking of innovators, this episode's gonna get published right after WWDC. So Apple will be there, announcing new stuff. One of the rumored announcements is around potentially the sort of VR rig with video pass through this, Mr. thing? What's your best guess? What do you predict Apple will have to say or show regarding VR, Mr.

I'm, frankly really excited about Apple laying their cards on the table and showing us what they have. Because there's always this reluctance to progress forward in business, if there's like a big boogeyman around the corner. So like investors, like will slow down, developers will wait, you know, everyone's like, what's Apple going to do? Or what's Facebook going to do? So Microsoft, so cards are on the table, Microsoft, Facebook, HTC, like, we know, like state of the art for those guys. And I suspect there's no silver bullets and optics and electronics, they're playing with the same laws of physics all of us are, so I want them to get that out there. And it'll generate a lot of hype, which will be great for us, because we will look radically different from them. So rumors are they're gonna be quite expensive, which is cool. Like, there's going to be people that will invest in, you know, many $1,000 headset from Apple, because it's how Apple, but it really doesn't have the same reach that our system potentially has. And, you know, apples always been really good at like bundling one or two really compelling use cases for all their hardware. Starting back in the Steve Job days when he came back, it's like 1000 songs in your pocket. pretty compelling. Like, even though there were a lot of iPod like type devices out there. They found out how to bundle it together in a nice tight package. You know, iPhone is another example. Like, you know, two out of the three, you know, killer apps that came on the first iPhone, were pretty good. So I suspect they probably have a handful of really cool things, they're going to be really good. I mean, or they wouldn't release it. Like we've been hearing. I laugh. I've been in the space for 13 or 14 years. Now, Apple, since I was at Valve is going to be coming out with some kind of AR or VR thing. So what I've heard through the rumors, I haven't been able to get my head completely wrapped around how compelling it's going to be like I've heard a rumor like 1000s of iPad applications. I don't know didn't work for for meta, like, you know, screen replacements and stuff. It's almost like video viewers I was mentioning earlier. It's like I'm still like trying to figure out how that's like super compelling health fitness makes a lot of sense. We've seen traction in VR for health and fitness. I see that as like a really interesting thing for Apple like considering the their watch, you know, think that when it was first released, it really didn't have as much health and fitness focus. And then they found that as the killer app, so maybe they're extending that over So that's, that's one of my predictions, I think that will actually be pretty cool. I've heard communication. I don't know, like, Horizon worlds meta versus like, really, there's only been interesting to very niche audiences. I don't know how Apple's going to crack that for, for average users. What else have I heard so many rumors, I know it's not going to be, it's probably going to look a lot like the quest Pro and everything else out there. Like, it's going to suffer from vergence accommodation, I don't think they've cracked, you know, light field technology. So it's going to, just like all these other devices, we were doing video pass through at Valve, and we just struggled to like, make it feel good, where it didn't feel like an out of body experience. So like, if you use like an Oculus quest Pro or any of these, you kind of have this odd feeling like something that isn't right. And it's all of this stuff you're having to do to adjust for the camera positions to try to reprojected back in your eyes, and the depth of focus isn't the same. And you just kind of feel like you're out of body? And I don't, I don't think they're going to crack that. So I'd be surprised if a lot of their applications are really mixed reality focused. We haven't seen any, like heavy focus from HTC and meta on mixed reality, like, not a ton of compelling stuff there. Yeah. So I don't know, I'm excited, I can't wait to see, I want the last big player to be out on the market.

I am with you, I think the health and fitness one, hold that one as the potentially the most compelling of the initial offerings. And the communications realm, Apple has never done anything other than real human to human interaction. And there have been a virtual world sort of thing that they've enabled. But there has been with FaceTime with with iMessage. With these sort of things, it's more of the basic, how do I communicate with another human in a more realistic way? So if they were to do something related communication, I would imagine it would not involve a horizon world's esque sort of virtual environment to go along with it. But who knows what's going on?

I would be really, I'd be really surprised if they went that direction. Yeah. Horizon world just seems like a bad seemed like a bad idea from the start, in my opinion. It's easy to say now that it's not not working quite so well. But yeah, and I mean, I don't know why they would launch if they didn't have something that's compelling. And so yeah, the only thing that, from my super biased perspective is, you know, health fitness type things. And I think that's pretty interesting. It's not games, they haven't been able to stick the landing in games, and it's not really great for, it's not going to be it's not going to compete in our space in the group gaming space, if it's the price that's rumored, you know, no family is going to have more than one of these properly. So that's just only good news for us. I'm excited. And the last boogey man out there, I don't think there's any other boogeyman out there that I mean, Facebook's already announced that their first real AR was 2024, or five, and then their immersive AR is 2027, which is so funny, like they were supposed to be out with their AR and 2019. And it just goes to show how hard it is to pull off really great AR that's immersive. It's really, really, really hard to be

really complicated in turn, 27, three years out, that's the magic number in the hardware world. Three years out is like oh, and it's possible. It's possible three years. But you found the hack, you found the way to

I love it, I love it. It's just so wonderful. You know, while everyone else was over here, focusing on this, we just went over here and made a really polished product, you know, that locked up all the patents and IP around it. And it's gonna be very viable for years and years and years to come. Like, of course, we're gonna work long term, like my dream is like to sprinkle pixel dust on the table and holograms pop out of it. And I'll always be looking for like, how do we do that. And there's some really cool tech, when I start looking, there's some of these light field displays. They're hideously expensive and take tons of compute, like it's going to take a good part of a decade before we can even consider having one in our home that can generate a full light field out of like these super high res displays. I mean, that would be better than having glasses on period for like our experience, but it's just so far out in the future. Like maybe someday you know, once we've mastered this tabletop, living room gaming experience, we just transition to one of those displays.

I'm chatting with David futbol from Laya is going to be coming guest speaking of light field displays. Yeah, that'll be amazing.

It's good stuff. It's good stuff.

Yeah, well When do I get to run my tilt five experience on a Mac or iOS device?

Oh, that's great question. Mac. Uh, one of our engineers is a Mac, she likes to develop on Mac. So she accidentally did Mac support just so you could do. So that's going to come out really soon. iOS is tricky. We use USB C. So

maybe when the higher end, iPads could form the hub, the core compute for it, that abuse USBC.

Yeah, there's nothing besides just engineering time that stopping us from iPads and the new iPhone that's going to have USBC in theory, unless they block us in some way. But it's also kind of our, it's based on our focus of content, like, Mac hasn't really been Mac desktops and laptops really haven't been a destination for games. So it's a bit of a challenge, like how do we get a bunch of games over to Mac to for such a small audience. But we will do is definitely there will be games, eventually I'm guarantee it. But we think the biggest advantage is like people that like to develop on Mac will be able to develop our tools are amazing. Like we didn't even touch on the tool. So my co founder, that's his obsession is making tools to make developers lives easy. So you know, to use our system and Unreal and Unity, it's basically drag and drop. So if you have an existing game, you want to have it rendering on the table, you just drag in our plugin and Dragon, a game board, Gizmo. And you just see the game board show up in your your game space, and you can scale it however you want. If you have a character that's running around on the map, you can actually attach the game board to the character. So as the character runs, it just drags the game board through the maps, you can have these giant maps and it all scrolls past you as if your character standing in the middle of your table. You can have multiple users with their own game boards. The best thing for developers, anyone that's developer XR, it can be quite painful, because you can see what's happening. As you're developing in real time. We have tight integration into Unity and Unreal. So when you're in the editor, you can actually see what as you move game objects around, you can see it in real time, you can be wearing the glasses. So developers that work with us, they're always skeptical, especially if they've done VR and or other AR experiences are like, no, it's gonna be really easy for you. And they come back. They're like, yeah, that was easy. We had it rendering in like five or 10 minutes, and then we just hooked up controls, attached the game board to the player, and

then boom, that's probably the reason why you can get that 20% of folks who are not gamers are beginning to invest in your platform to go and do whatever else they're doing with it. And maybe it's architectural visualization, because you've enabled a developer ecosystem developer platform that's so easy to utilize.

Yeah, at GDC, we were showing off some games. But one of the things that resonated a lot with folks is internally one of us put together just a cat and Porter, where you could import CAD models. And we thought, yeah, it was kind of fun. It had some nice tactile feel to it when you pull things apart and nice sound and stuff. And we're like, why don't we just load our glasses 3d model and and let people at GDC like, just rip apart our glasses with the magic wands just click on the shell and pull it away and pull out every lens out of it. Super compelling people. And there's a button to reset it. So just kind of do this whooshing sound, it all kind of pop back together in the right place. And we have people that are like, reset it again, reset it again, I want to pull it apart again. And it's all collaborative. So we just sat there around the table with people we could point and and show like, well, here's the lens that does this. And then it bounces off here. Yeah, that's cool. But that was enabled because our tools were so easy. Like, we didn't have to put much work into the CAD importer at all, like it was, you know, kind of an open source piece of importer software, and we just loop in our stuff and like oh, hey, now we can load any CAD model we want into our system.

So cool. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share? Oh, my

goodness. Closing thoughts. Man, we've covered so much from roller derby race cars, mentors, machine, sharpest machining? I think, yeah. I think everyone should seek out mentors and try to be humble if they can muster it, it's hard at times. Try to find those mentors. It's just so rewarding. So I highly recommend it.

Excellent. Where can people go to learn more about you and your efforts there until five,

so till five is all spelled out. So it's T il T tilt and then five F IV E. You can go there. You can buy your system there. 359 for the base kit and then $300 For every headset after that for me if you want to see my complete rant Random train of thoughts on Twitter. As long as Twitter survives. I'll be on there. So that's really easy. Find me Jerry. Je R i and then Ellsworth ELL SW or th, LinkedIn. Same thing, Jeri Ellsworth. Don't use Facebook products, rip that band aid off a while ago. So those are some of the best places to reach reach me. For developers. If you want to reach out to us, there's a developer link on our website. We'd love to talk to you. If you want to come by the office and visit drop us a note our office like a museum, lots of vintage devices, game consoles and stuff. It's a fun visit. Plus you get to play all of the not quite ready for public viewing. Tilt five stuff, which is pretty interesting.

Can't wait for Catan that'll be a great one.

Catan is going to be fun, and I can't wait to announce the next two. I'm so excited. They're right up my alley. Less board gaming more action.

Amazing. Joe, thank you so much for the conversation. It's been another fun fun time.

Thank you. It was fun. Thanks for letting me ramble.

Absolutely. My pleasure. Before you go, I'm gonna tell you about the next episode. In it. I speak with Sophia Dominguez. Sophia is the director of AR platform and partnerships at snap. She joined snap three years ago after co founding and selling a company that created the first API and SDKs researching and rendering 3d face filters. We get into our entrepreneurial background or early experiences with Google Glass and our current focus at snap. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation and please consider contributing to the podcast patreon.com/theARshow. Thanks for listening.