The AR Show: Alon Grinshpoon (echo3D) on Building the AWS for 3D and Founder-Market Fit

11:41PM Nov 19, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Alon Grinshpoon

Keywords:

3d

people

ar

startup

founder

content

investors

echo

company

vr

world

techstars

build

market

metaverse

big

fundraise

developer

games

find

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's conversation is with Alon Grinshpoon. Alon is the co founder and CEO of echo 3d, a 3D-ready cloud platform that helps manage and deliver 3d AR and VR content to apps and devices everywhere. Echo3D recently closed a $4 million round of funding to feed continued growth after seeing a tremendous amount of momentum over the last year.

Alon started his career in the Israeli intelligence service working on encryption in cloud technologies. After earning a BS in computer science in electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University, he spent several years as a software engineer working on improving the performance of cloud based and client server computer systems. Alon went on to receive his MS in computer science from Columbia University with a focus on computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and human computer interaction. In this conversation, we discuss how allones background made him a good fit for solving the unique set of challenges for developing an AWS or Akamai for 3D alone as a passionate entrepreneur with great advice for early stage startups. We talked about his perspective on the concept of founder market fit.

The reason that kind of we were able to grow really fast is that if you read the founders resume, there's nothing else he can do. In my case, again, you're literally seeing that kind of connection. And I think, as you mentioned early, well, that kind of founder market fit I think a lot of people focus on product market fit. But the reason for you as a founder to create a startup that you have this personal a professional connection to the problem, that you have the motivation of waking up in the morning in, you know, tackling this problem in the market needs to be really, really strong. And I think clients resonate with that investors resonated with that users resonate with that potential employees resonate with that,

Alon goes on to discuss founder investor fit and the importance of pragmatically de-risking a startup as you go along. He also shares his funding and growth journey through the RLab and TechStars accelerators and subsequent rounds of VC funding. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website. var show.com. Let's dive in.

Alon, like you, I love a good road trip. In fact, this past summer, I got to go on an epic road trip with my family. We were on the road for over 11,000 miles. We visited 39 states is pretty, pretty amazing. A lot of ways. What was one of your favorites.

Yeah, definitely. One of my best friends is actually my twin brother, who's also my co founder at Echo in we are known for doing the most amazing, and epic road trips ever. I think our first one was driving car from Denver to Las Vegas, stuffing all these national parks. And it was really, really cool experience kind of definitely a bonding experience. But also for us as twins kind of running around it specifically Las Vegas, people will always kind of jump at us like it's oh my god like to have you something that we get all the time who will actually asked us, you know, to snap photos of us on the subway here in New York. So it's a really cool thing. Something I always tell people is get a twin, it's the best thing you can have kind of a companion for your entire life. And if you're close friends enough to open a startup together even better

twins. So people always snap in trying to capture YouTube in the same place at the same time. Just in disbelief that you are not the same person.

Yeah, which kind of ties in beautifully. It's kind of what we stay at Echo, which is kind of the world of AR VR. The Metaverse, everyone wants a digital twin, I was fortunate enough to you know, get a real one.

Very nice. Very nice. Way back in the day earlier in your career, you had a chance to spend some time with the Israeli intelligence service, which I think is really amazing. I know that in Israel, military services is a common part of growing up in becoming an adult, that product contribution, but you got to work with the Israeli intelligence service, working in leading a software development team. And this was even before you went to college. Yeah. What are this kind of passion for your, you know, for software development, even your literacy within software development kind of emerge for you as a young person?

Yeah, I love that question. I mean, as an Israeli American, I mean, every kind is really goes through that process, when people go to kind of Spring Break most Israeli disenroll to the Israeli army. It's a really humbling but also maturing experience. For me, I knew early on that I really loved computer science. And I really loved programming like the double majors and kind of in CS. In high school, I was like, that's the thing that I want to really, really do. And serving in the Intelligence Corps that really gives you the opportunity to be ski, get like on job training, lead a team if you're good enough, and basically can explore really, really innovative computer science concepts and things around coding and cybersecurity. That was basically my first introduction to kind of client server communications in kind of a Hinton from the you know, intelligent community encrypted data as well, which again, kind of kick started my process like going into the world of cloud and network infrastructure. So I was definitely definitely very grateful for that. And I also think it's again, it's a really interesting experience. If you think about the people who are equivalent to what I did back in the day when I was 18. Here in the US, these are people who are 50 year olds in the NSA. So it kind of gives you kind of a head start on what do you like? Where do you want to go? What what is the kind of field a specification that you want to really focus on? For me, it was definitely cloud and was definitely kind of computer science. And I was fortunate enough again, to kind of know that early on.

So because you had that understanding of yourself, you ended up then going on to Tel Aviv University and studying that. Did you know do you got a BS in classical computer engineering, computer science? And then you went on to join a startup. And there were to a number of these cloud related technologies. I think that company was acquired by NVIDIA at some point in the process. Were there is that right?

Yeah. So that was like my first job was working at Mellanox, one of the biggest software companies in Israel, I think last year was kind of acquired by Nvidia. They were a global company. I think their choice was between and kind of, I think they were already IPO that maybe was like a post IPO acquisition. But again, most of the things I did there were client server communication, low latency communication. And this is something that again, kind of really is core to my character, in a sense, like, I really wanted to figure out what's going on under the hood, what's going on, in kind of the invisible stuff that we're when we're talking about computers, which is cloud, which is networking, which is streaming, and we're talking about that later, but then when I got into the world of AR VR, Metaverse, 3d, these are actually the most hyper visual stuff that you can see. So kind of bridging those things together something that I'm really, really passionate about kind of connecting the invisible stuff and the visible stuff. And there's super, super interesting challenges there. Specifically, when we're talking about 3d content.

Yeah, connecting the visible to the invisible, which is, which is probably what

the metaverse is all about, right, like kind of creating that invisible layer does kind of there. So again, brief report of that.

Yeah. So you ended up then making your way to New York? How is it that you kind of found your way to studying computer science at Columbia, and in finding your way into augmented reality?

Yes, so my story definitely starts on the Microsoft Store and fist out. So if you're ever in New York, Microsoft has an experience store on Fifth Avenue. I went there with my dad, and they had an HTC Vive headset there, basically that everyone can kind of use, I put it on, and then my life was literally changed. I played Tilt Brush. I literally paint around a fire bended. It was the most surreal experience. That moment was the moment that I felt Oh, my God, like I found my calling. I love this. I want to be a part of this, the same way how I was super passionate about like understanding what's happening under the hood, when it came to cloud infrastructure selling, I want to say, how do you do computer graphics? How do you create these hyper visual experiences, I was blown away. And then that kind of really pushed me to apply to the master's program at Columbia University. I knew that there is a professor there, Professor Steven finer, was a seminal researcher in the world of AR VR, 3d and human computer interactions. I said, I want to do a thesis with the guy. I went to his office, I was like, I'm going to do a thesis with you like it's a thing. It's like, let's start with a project. Regardless, it was an amazing experience. My time at Columbia really gave me that understanding of, okay, this is what you can do with 3d. This is where the world is going. Here's this amazing lab. And he's amazing resources when it comes to AR and VR. And my, again, my specification, like came to cloud, felt really needed in that world. And that's where my journey kind of started.

Yeah, so tell me about that. How did this concept and motivation around eco 3d emerge there from those studies in that passion, the past experience you had all kind of mixing together inside of you?

When I did my thesis project, I call him University. We did this AR for surgical for surgery application, our tagline was AR for the AR, VR was really cool experience. We took CT and MRI scans, converted them into 3d, then put them on the Microsoft HoloLens, this kind of high end smart glasses by Microsoft, and the physician was basically able to see the patient's heart floating above them during surgery, it was an amazing experience, I got the chance to scrub into over 10 surgeries, it was completely surreal. Definitely, as a kind of Israeli American kid, nobody would check my ID, you just walk into toe art and start kind of they start drilling, really, really amazing experience. But the problem was that in order to do that, I honestly have to do something I really, really hate and that's waking up super early in the morning, I had to be in the ER at Columbia medical at like 6am to take those kind of 2d scans, convert them to 3d models, put them on the HoloLens. recompile, the application that was written in unity, by the way for all the technical listeners. And that process was so frustrating and took so much time and for me as a developer. While it was cool to be in the VR in general, what am I doing here, like anyone can drag and drop 3d assets I'm kind of hard or yada, and then have that stream into the device but we didn't find a really good solution for that to be ski allow you to manage and deliver 3d content to AR devices. And then me and my co founder started to skate interviewing people specifically in the Columbia University lab that kind of handles a lot of AR VR projects. But other projects, not just surgical ones they want to talk about gaming in general Training and data visualization and E commerce and busy, they all said the same thing that there is really no easy way to manage and deliver 3d content. And then we look to the past Well, you don't need to be a web developer to view the blog post, right? You can drag and drop an image or video suddenly that appears in web or mobile. We went through this evolution from web to mobile to now AR VR, 3d immersive color river. And we have solutions for 2d content for images and videos. So we ask yourself, like, who's going to be, you know, the next offer for this new type of content? And you're looking at it, or listening at the display?

How did you at that time, as you're just getting started? How did you articulate the vision for the company? The problem you're trying to solve and and kind of where you're gonna go with it?

Yeah. So that's a really interesting question. Because always the first articulation of a problem and solution is really bad. It takes so much iteration to kind of figure out how to kind of tell your message specifically, when you're in a startup setting, or even like any product manager was listening, probably has the same thing, how do you kind of communicate your message of like what the product needs to be. So in the beginning, we really found that we need to create an kind of hold your breath here, server side solution for 3d applications, not a kind of catchy tagline. But then we realized that kind of a lot of, again, my passion back in the day from from cloud infrastructure and client server communication that I had in the Israeli army, or during undergrad or doing or working in video needs to kind of be implemented in the world of 3d. And then we kind of talked a lot of people, I think we did over 300, quote, unquote, customer discovery interviews, and then we came about the kind of the phrasing of cloud platform which resonated well with people, and really was expected, similar to how those solutions exist in 2d for images and videos. And that's how we started the process.

So this notion, you've talked kind of throughout the conversation so far about this passion that you discovered for kind of the cloud related technologies, understanding how things work under the hood, it's been a lot of time understanding and refining how data moves across the web, the internet, how it's being transported in terms of encryption, and how to make it more optimized as it's moving as well. This fits really well to this other problem you discovered as relates to AR, which is why we have this new type of asset 3d content. And there isn't really a good solution for this particular asset type, within, you know, the world of 3d within the world of AR. And this seems like a really good fit for you and your background. Specifically, do you think that this notion of founder Market Fit impacts the success of the startup? How does that end up playing out? Do you think over over the course of a startup

100%, I think the reason that kind of we were able to grow really fast is that if you read the founders resume, there's nothing else he can do. In my case, again, you're literally seeing that kind of connection. And I think, as you mentioned, really well, that kind of founder market fit, I think a lot of people focus on product market fit. But the reason for you, as a founder to create a startup, that you have this personal and professional connection to the problem, that you have the motivation of waking up in the morning in, you know, tackling this problem in the market needs to be really, really strong. And I think clients resonate with that investors resonate with that users resonate with that potential employees resonate with that. The fact that the problem that you're trying to solve is something that you're really passionate about is really, really important. And I think it's key to a lot of successful startups that you see today. I mean, I can't even think of a startup that, you know, I don't see a really strong founder market fit between the, the CEO or the originator of the startup to the actual problem that they're trying to solve.

So you don't advise that a founder just because they have a good idea and how to solve something that they don't live every day and feel every day, you don't advise them to go and jump in and just do it anyway,

I would advise them to start becoming the person that could solve that problem, and to talk to as many people as you can become an expert at the problem that you want to solve. And then you have those credentials of basically saying, yeah, there's a kind of founder market fit, you don't have to kind of be born with it, right? But definitely, it requires work. If you have a great idea. And you think that you can revolutionize industry X, become an expert in industry X, talk to as many people that you can, and really kind of try to understand those problems again, personally and professionally.

What is the practical tactical implication of having that level of insight having that sort of founder market fit?

I think, again, it goes back to how you tell your story. I think stories are extremely important. The reason why you know people listen to podcasts, they want to kind of join into the conversation. And the minute that you are able to establish yourself as a kind of credible source, any conversation that you will have and your intrapreneurial journey if it's with clients or again, investors or potential hire ease, it all becomes much much easier because even if I'm talking to someone who's not an expert in AR, but in the first you know minute they realize that I am the conversation is much easier, and I'm able to kind of bring them into the world of AR much easily.

Is there any implication on the decision making process how you structure The time that you're gonna be spending with the limited resources that you have,

I would say that you know, the way everything is really hectic in the beginning, when you're a startup, you're really trying to kind of juggle all these things. But I think in general, the thing that makes a startup Seth was the team and the commitment and the passion for the for the product. And when we said earlier, the fact that I wake up in the morning, and have that kind of passion for this industry, that I think I found a problem and I want to solve it, and kind of be first to market or become like, kind of providing that value to our customers. I think it's super, super important. So one of the things that I think, again, is not talked enough, when it comes to kind of entrepreneurship, and startup is the kind of notion of de risking you as a founder, where you're constantly doing all the time is de risking your venture in the eyes of investors, clients anything. So every time you're kind of doing any decision, your startup, it's really again, a point for you to make your startup more credible. If it's through your personal background, like we said about getting your founder market set, or through your product or through your customer interviews. Every I mean, at the end, when you're going where as an entrepreneur, if you're applying to an accelerator, or you're talking to investors at the end, they want to see that this is not a risky investment. And you can definitely assure them that that's that's the case, I think a lot of the action that you're doing in your startup. And again, it could be a vast a vast things that you do is around de risking your startup.

As you look back to 2018, you're just getting this off the ground. What did you see at that time as some of the biggest risks that the startup was facing? And how did you kind of go about de risking that company in those first couple years?

I can tell you even last year, we had around 300 users on our platform today, we have over 12,000. So how do you achieve that growth? How do you kind of go about it? So I think in the beginning, it was all about trying to figure out where are our users coming from? How can we organically bring more and more users into our platform, it was also about kind of going through the bottom up approach, what I believe is the right kind of approach for startups talking to as much as people as you can, constantly going through an accelerator program in the beginning, we went through an accelerator program, with our lab at NYC Media Lab that really kind of supports early strengths finders. After that, we went through TechStars, one of the most amazing accelerators in the country, I got investments from angels. After that we did the kind of VC Round Two weeks ago, we did another VC round with a bigger fund. So I think this is again, it's gonna seems really natural, that kind of bottom up approach like understanding your market scaling up, as opposed to what we see in industry that some people just blitz funding with raise billions of dollars for something that we've never tested. I'm a big believer, if the kind of lean startup methodology that we see again, starts from bottom up and scales up. And I think it's, it's the right way to de risk your startup to kind of show validation. And if you're talking to investors, today, six months from now, you're going to be in a different place. And they're gonna see through that journey. I'm saying that's really, really important.

You noted that a year ago, you're sitting at about 300 or so customers engaging with the platform. And now you're at 12,000. That's a tremendous amount of growth over the course of 12 months. Was there something about the product itself that you were learning that needed to change or evolve, that ended up contributing to that growth?

Yeah, so I think it definitely an understanding of the user journey inside the product, how do we need to oriented to kind of work, I think the biggest metric that we had is time to hello world. So this is basically how much time it takes for someone who registers to echo to build an app. And we really, really, really tried to minimize that metric to say that it should be easy, 15 seconds or less, 15 minutes or less, but not not an hour. And even if you're a non techie, how easy it is for you to deploy your content with no technical skills. So these are the things that we really, really kind of focused on the product and made sure that we can really quantify that. And that seems to work. The fact that you can register to occur today, 15 seconds later car on your phone with no kind of app installation, somebody there kind of really, really resonates with our users. And also the quick integrations that we have with third party technologies like Echo is a verified solution. With unity, one of the biggest game engine in the world, the fact that you can drag and drop the Unity SDK, that echo has clicked play Sony model stream out of thin air. And it's all again, it's literally a matter of minutes. So that's one of the core values that we believe in. How can we help developers build faster?

Yeah, so this kind of time to realization of value was really a key area that we're focused on. It was sounds like less about kind of the core value within the platform, around being able to manage and serve content, wherever he happens to be convert content. We'll talk a bit more about that as well. But it's really about how they understood and were able to access that value as quickly as possible. 100%. Yeah. And he noted, the Mark has really responded positively to this 300 to 12,000. Was there a contributing factor around COVID? How do you manage kind of that piece of the the extra externality, I guess, in a puzzle, you're trying to grow over that time

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I think there's multiple factors here. One is definitely the fact that Zoom or video interaction is the new normal. So everyone is trying to kind of find what's the next thing. So it might be 3d content, it might be holograms, you name it. And also the fact that like everyone's at home, they're exactly in a sense where I want them to be right. And marketing wise, we're sitting in front of a computer waiting to build. So our marketing campaigns were really effective. And our go to market worked really well because of that. And I think also, if you think about like we had with, like, really big companies kind of pushing hardware everywhere. So air ready hardware VR hardware, the Oculus quest sells out, almost, you know, like it cheaper and sells more than any console out there. Every phone out there has AR capabilities built in Apple, Google, they're all adding, you know, cameras, which I look at as AR sensors, to their hardware to kind of push you to buy their phone. So that kind of also helped with like, suddenly, there's a proliferation of air how hardware out there, which definitely kind of, you know, brings the question of how the platforms are there. Now people want to build something on it. And Echo can be that tool for that.

How is it now that you've evolved, you've been three years refining both the product and also your storytelling around the product? How do you describe what your vision is today? How do you describe the company today?

Yeah, so we're today kind of our vision has become the number one service AI solution for 3d. Basically, we're building the AWS for 3d, or the Akamai for 3d, basically becoming that go to tool for 3d development. If you think about again, today, what echo does is we provide tools and infrastructure for companies and developers who want to build 3d applications, it could be games, it could be air of your applications, it could be any 3d experience that you can think of. And what we want to get to is the point is very similar to what we said earlier that you don't need to be a web developer to update a blog post, you drag and drop some image or video, and it works. The same needs to apply for 3d. The fact that today we're looking at any 3d experience they can think of, let's think of the biggest social network today fortnight that people who are younger than you and me are fully immersed in that playing around with it. There's not a lot of user generated content out there is that there's no drag and drop that I can kind of drop something to fortnight tomorrow, drag that to Roblox, and then put it on my phone. And the reason for that, again, the way I see it is just the under the hood stuff or not kind of well defined, there's not a lot of network capabilities, a lot of like content management tools. And that's what we're trying to kind of revolutionize in this space, allowing for 3d content to be much more easy to manage much more easy to distributed, and making sure that you don't have to handle any server setup or any kind of technical optimizations for that just work everywhere in any network.

Why is 3d content different? Why isn't Akamai or AWS good enough for the 3d world?

That's my favorite question. If you think about images or videos, you as Jason, you can't move an image or video on a website. But you can definitely move a 3d couch faster. So that needs to be able to in the cloud 3d cameras much more localized and much more spatial than just 2d content. And also, the file format is so different. If you think about, again, image or video, it's a single file. But in 3d, you can have the texture and then the mesh, and then nation and all these different in the skeleton of the model in all these different things can be hundreds of files, sometimes if you have a lot of textures, but they actually considered like one single entity. And that is something that we don't have like kind of logic we don't have in in 2d at all, the location and the the change of having a model but then having different textures to add misgiving different variants, something that can only exist in 3d. And another thing I'll say is just kind of there's no standard out there, Apple only works with the USD Z file format. Web works really well with GL B's. Unity works with FBS. So all these different platforms are trying to kind of create their own format, we're going to pick a horse. And in my case, we don't bet on the horse, we bet on the track, use any platform, you can upload stuff to echo, every format will convert to any format, we will decimate every CD model to a smaller version of it. So you'll be able to stream it in different network environments. And you'll be able to change things remotely without doing a lot of technical work. And I think the fact that 3d models again, or sometimes are so kind of large, even like you can have a collection of files is like 500 100 megabytes. How do you stream that to a mobile device really rapidly? That's definitely a challenge. So if echo we do those kind of automatic conversions and the compressions, and it just works,

it just works, just works. If somebody wasn't going to use Echo 3d, what else would they do? How else do people solve this problem today?

So the same way, if you can ask yourself, I want to build a website, but I don't want to use AWS. So kind of good luck of setting up a server hooking up to kind of a DNS provider, trying to kind of make sure that connects to the internet, I can establish different loads, a few users coming in. Yeah, that's definitely a challenge like for you. I mean, it's possible you can kind of recreate the wheel every time and every company can kind of recreate their own, but we really focus on creating a really generic solution for every use case that you can Connect your applications to the cloud and start streaming data really rapidly.

You'd mentioned a couple of these already, maybe you can restate them, well, what are the top few features that developers value most on the platform?

Today, it's the easy kind of how easy it is to store, manage and deliver 3d content. So when you upload data to eco easily accessible, you can share all the models that you have with anyone in the world. And then you're able to kind of basically stream it automatically across different platforms. So if you want to jump from Android, iOS to magically to unity, you can do that really quickly. The content is yours, you're not vendor locked to use a specific platform. And you don't have to, again, reinvent the wheel every time you want to kind of put your application somewhere else. And also, that kind of content management aspect of it kind of decouples, the software production from the complication, a kind of developer can focus on developing in a non technical team member can drag it off to the assets, and suddenly they appear in web, mobile, AR VR, you name it. And I think that is something that we kind of really take for granted. When it comes to 2d content, like we know the roles like social media manager exist. What are these roles in 3d in the world of 3d content? How do we empower those people as well, to inject 3d content to different platforms? And as we kind of look to the future, how do we allow user generated content to be kind of shared automatically between users and between platforms? And between games,

users, platforms? Games? What are kind of the top few use cases for the products that are being built on your platform? Is it primarily games are there are other other types of content as well?

Fortunately, we're really getting a bird's eye view of what people are building with echo building and streaming. So we actually can see what what content is doing well. So definitely, I would say the biggest protocols that we're seeing right now are games, e commerce, those are the capsulate, NF Ts, and advertisements. So these are kind of the big three that we're seeing people either use Unity, or web or kind of native mobile to achieve that. And I think again, it's really, really exciting. One of the things that if you think about it, back in the day, when websites were all the rage, people will ask what do you need a website for? And now it's obvious that, you know, you can use a website to create a social network or a ecommerce website. Five years later, you had the same thing. People asked, What do you need a mobile app for? And now you have dating apps and ride hailing apps. Five years after she went from web to mobile to New York new technology, which is AR VR 3d immersive, we basically asked like, what can you do with it, and we're fortunate enough again, to, to have that realization and get a bird's eye view of what people are actually building and become that place that will inspire creators to build whatever they want. You're limited only by their imagination,

to have games, ecommerce, and advertising. Exactly. Do you anticipate that those three will kind of continue to be the main three? How do you imagine this will evolve over the next handful of years?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I think even a few years ago, I would imagine that NF T's would become such a big vertical and like digital assets, kind of selling digital assets online would be such a strong kind of trend, which again, that's why I'm a big proponent of like, not betting on the horse, but rather betting on a track, use Echo for whatever NF T's are your thing you do. I am personally leaning towards games being a really, really large, vertical, I think games are becoming more the term game needs to kind of be redefined in the sense because we're seeing something like fortnight, just the game. But if we look at it closely, it's actually a social network, people jump in to talk to their friends talk with that kind of different avatars. I think games will at some point will also become like E commerce experience. So you can kind of shop around in a virtual store. Brands are already injecting ads into kind of 3d environments. So that kind of ties into advertisements. And I think maybe kind of encapsulating term that a lot of people are trying to kind of push today's like Metaverse, which is kind of fitting because we are creating this kind of digital universe that we're trying to kind of build. And we hope that echo could be that kind of ether of the metaverse, that kind of connecting invisible thread between everything, that you're able to share data stream data connect to data remotely. And hopefully that kind of answers your question.

So all of this momentum again, you talked about going from 300 or so customers about a year ago or so, up to 12,000. Now, all this momentum has really contributed to this, this recent fundraise, you know, just a couple of weeks back, you've closed another round. I think it's around 4 million or so. Yeah. How did you kind of manage this fundraising process from home during COVID? How was how was that for

you? That's a great question. It's hard. I mean, again, five years ago, it might not have been imaginable to fundraise remotely, you know, fundraising, but people that usually want like a really personal connection with now you can't even meet them. It definitely provides opportunities for people around the world to kind of realize that now, there's more opportunity to fundraise because you can literally fundraise from everywhere. You don't have to be just on the coasts. They usually kind of most VC funding goes to seven definitely definitely great. I love our new investors from convoy ventures. I will kind of let the previous round and also space capital who joined and reimagined ventures who is obsessed with them. They invented their previous round as well. LC went through TechStars as I mentioned, we got a grants from Y Combinator and yc Media Lab and you know angels from GitHub in Data dog and Facebook. This is a really cool collection of people that can share the same vision that you and I are talking about 3d In the metaverse. So for you as a founder or someone who is looking to kind of fundraise, definitely realize that now you're closer than ever to people because you can talk to them remotely. And also, you have, you know, more people, they can share your vision. And it might be that your perfect investor, like I'm in New York, apparently, my perfect investor was in Colorado, and now even without going to physically meeting, we can kind of lead lead around. And in general also say that, when I met them in person for the first time after we closed while they're much taller than I imagined,

one of the many surprises I think that's a zoom zoom world. Yeah, really, but you know, enables us to have these kind of delightful moments. Oh, wait, man, you are? Yeah, different than I than I imagined, as you kind of thought through the process. And to the extent that you're able to be very picky about who you ultimately selected to be as part of be an investment partner for you. How did you kind of think through that process? Why was the the few investors that you mentioned the right group for you?

That's a great question. So we already kind of mentioned product market fit. And we talked about founder market fit. Now let's talk about founder investor fit. This is definitely another concept that is kind of under discussed, and this Sunday, you kind of need to realize you are going on a journey with these people, they're investing in your company for the long run, in our case, so you're gonna want to IPOs you can at least have 3d. In order to have that you need to have partners who understand that like you need to have people who are aligned on your vision on where you want to go. And it's hard like when you when you're doing it as a founder, you're, it's it's more than just like, you know, adding money to your bank account. It's more about finding the right people that can help you accomplish that mission. When you start out this the kind of is the founder, every investor to add you on LinkedIn, you're like, Oh, my God, googly eyes, and it's like, Oh, my God, they'll grin invest in a company. But but that's never the case, like the same way you chose a specific startup to build, they chose a specific VC firm, to establish like they have a thesis, they have something that they're interested in. So you need to find those people that are interested in the same thing they're interested with. I mean, it's going to be no surprise to anyone to understand know that convoy ventures invest a lot of games and network infrastructure. So that's why they kind of chose to invest in Echo, it would be surprising to hear that maybe someone in the consumer tech space invested in a company that does medical devices, right, you have to find the right investor. But again, going back to what we said that they you have that personal and professional connection with and that you're very aligned on where you want to go together. And for every founder listening, you have to find the kind of the people that makes sense through to appear in their portfolio. When I met reimagine ventures, when I met convoy want to mid space, I was like, Okay, our logo needs to be at that portfolio of page. Like, it's so clear to me, there's a fit. So try to kind of look at, look at that from that perspective, and find that kind of sounder investor fit. And if that's not a fit, that's totally fine. Move on to the next one. There's amazing people out there.

What's the implication what's what happens if there isn't good founder investor fit?

I think investors, again, their partners, their active members, in your startup, it's more than just here's the money. Remember, the seamless updates, the interest, they can provide the network sec, they can kind of establish the people that they connect you with, they need to be relevant, like they like when we went through our due diligence process. And we kind of, you know, discussed our vision, we were like, who are the people that we want to target, who are the customers that we want to bring in. And then we realize, oh, this investor can make this intro, Oh, this guy knows this. They can kind of work together, they have a portfolio company that worked together, maybe we can work with them as well and kind of create a partnership. These are really kind of, again, forward thinking concept that you need to figure out with your investors before kind of you know, for they signed a trek

along the way. You mentioned that some of these have been with you for a couple of rounds. He also mentioned a couple of accelerators. There on the list. One of them was our lab, which I think is in partnership with NYU. And or embark is involved in that. And we know already from AWB. Yeah, and other past experiences. But you participated in our lab. And then you'd also mentioned TechStars, how did these accelerators fit into your continued growth, evolution understanding of who you are and where you're going as a company?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, for you, as a startup, again, that tries to de risk you're trying to get a lot of support throughout the way and for us, that process was perfect. We started off with the accelerator at our lab, there was really focused on the industry right for us as a startup in the XR world. And that was really highly industry specific on 3d AR VR and bring those connections together. After that, we went through TechStars that was a more kind of general program. It really focused from you as a company as a startup as opposed to like an AR startup. We had companies in our Tech Stars class that you know, did FinTech or SAS or even legal tech. They're really really an amazing kind of variety. Startups in the amazing thing that you learn in Tech Stars, that kind of how strong the network can be and how valuable you can make your startup. I mean, no wonder that Texas company or IPO in like mad at this point, I think there was like three and just in the last month or something, it's it's really amazing program that kind of trains you to be an entrepreneur for me again, if we go back to our my personal background, I was an engineer, I know how to write code, it's really different. To run a company, it's really different to hire to fundraise like all these things that no one taught me in college. So now, when you're, you have these kind of support system it's in, you're sitting with founders that can kind of, you know, they're everyone is in the same boat, and you have mentors, like Orien bar, for example, that can really, really kind of help you out and kind of brainstorm ideas, I think it's really, really valuable. But also do that bottom up approach, start with a industry specific program, then move to kind of wider company level Pro, yep. And then continue on again, angels, and we see and, and so on, and so forth.

So that process kind of built for you from being very industry product focused to being more company building focus to each, each round is a little bit broader, in its perspective, the perspective that the investors or partners or accelerators, whoever is involved, is able to contribute to the company. Exactly, exactly.

Again, I'm a big believer that process of going bottom up and kind of scaling upwards, no one would be surprised like you don't start the IPO. Right? There's a lot greater.

So in this spirit of building from the bottom up, now that you've closed this round of financing, what does the next stage of growth look like? Where are you building next?

So now we're hiring like mad. I mean, if I focused on fundraising for a few months, now, my sole focus is on hiring, expanding the team and get more and more supporters on board to make sure that we can kind of bring our, you know, cloud platform for more and more developers out there. We're hiring VP of sales and head of developer relations, and people are in marketing and engineers, obviously. Yeah, I mean, I think that's even for us. You kind of grow as a team. I think it's it's kind of a big challenge. But it's also super exciting. Because again, that's the reason I wake up in the morning.

Fantastic. As reflect back on the fundraising process, what were some of your key takeaways, as you kind of put it all together? What advice would you share with another founder who's setting out on on their own path,

I would definitely say Be patient, be responsive. And look for those kind of key metrics for a founder investor fit. There are also maybe even invest for market fit. Now, when I think about it, like there are investors that I've talked to that was clear from the first conversation, that's not a fit. These are perfectly nice people, but they don't know about 3d or gaming, or ARV, or content, or I'm the first to ever show them AR. So yeah, they're probably not going to be an expert, or they're probably not going to have the kind of you know, industry connections to take our company to the next level. And from your end to see a founder kind of can understand the rules like understand what's going on with the VC firms. I think that's something that, again, as a founder you're not really aware of, but they're raising from LPs, they have their internal process, they have their metrics that they want to hit, they want to, they want your company to be aligned with their kind of ROI strategy. Ask about that, kind of make sure that you're aligned, if you're a company that you are building something that you believe can create a specific return, but they're looking to 10x that return, maybe that's not a fit. So I think it's definitely kind of to align yourself and again, de risk your startup and their eyes and make sure that you're, again, super aligned on the vision of the company.

And talk about this notion of de risking kind of getting leading to this point. But now, there's still risk right in front of you, as you look ahead and work towards this next phase, the next milestone major milestones in the company. What do you see? What are you most concerned about? I guess, inside the company, what are you trying to de risk over the next 1218 months,

so So now it ties back to hiring, we want to get more and more amazing people, amazing supporters in our company to help kind of accelerate the processes that already have this, obviously, de risked it, because then you have more hands on deck and more people to kind of expose the company to new ideas. So that definitely the risk that it takes. It gives more opportunity and more people to contribute. So that definitely helps de risking it. But also, I think the fact that we were able to kind of really automate a lot of the current processes like we still get between 102 100 developers registered every week, through online ads, and online marketing. It's like that, then developer evangelism. So these things need to continue right like, and that is kind of the double edged sword of being a startup. Every time you succeed, it's always Okay, what's next and kind of the goalpost always moves back in the finish line, kind of, it's always in the horizon. So as long as you can accept that reality, and that doesn't depress you, but rather kind of makes you optimistic, like oh my God, there's so much to do. And every time you level up, there's all these new things to learn. Perfect. I mean, personally, before this, I've never been in a company, never fundraise, never built a kind of a fully autonomous product. But these are again, that bottom of approach that you Get to one milestone let's get to the other in the previous one helps you get there. I think I personally see it as something super, super exciting.

As you look outside of the company, yeah. What is your biggest concern across the market more generally?

I think like everyone, like everyone's kind of waiting for for Apple to release their air glasses like everyone's gonna looking to see what the big players would do. The way I looked at it is I'm super optimistic. Like it's obviously it's going to kind of happen real soon, like that kind of spike in the world of AR and the spike in VR. We're looking at Facebook, the companies that in front of our eyes is transforming itself to Metaverse company to a hardware company. When it comes to VR. We're seeing every hardware manufacturer adds more and more cameras to the to their devices. Hiring ARV are engineers like mad. I think it was I remember the name of from but they basically show the AR VR rules grew like 1,000%, or something like that. And last year, and another thing that kind of gives me a real hope is, again, in younger generations, they're using camera first applications like Matt, people who are you with me are fully immersed in camera first applications like tick tock and Snapchat. I don't see them graduating back to 2d interfaces, I don't see them swiping a 2d feed in that what gives me hope, because I think well, we're going to use more like even more 3d content, we will have even more spatial aware apps. So that's, that's my kind of, you know, reason to be to be optimistic.

Fair enough. I love all the underlying signals that indicate the what we see now is just the beginning of an even larger embracing of 3d types of content 100, but I will provide a counterpoint that we don't we have never abandoned 2d. And I don't imagine that we will abandon 2d Because there are some things were 2d is the right type of interface. The people we have, you know, that we print on that we're reading books, I

would say that we abandoned it, things are changing, it's always depends on them. But think about phones, right? So we can say that at some point, we have banded voice for text. And after text, we have been to text for kind of images and kind of sending even memes or just like using cameras and stuff like that. And now we're bending that for FaceTime and video, and Snapchat and Tiktok. So it's still there. It's not like those features kind of disappeared. But we're how the majority of people interact. And I think the distinction is definitely clear. I think the next thing would be 3d content at some capacity. After that, who knows, again, let your imagination run wild. But I definitely think there's kind of an evolution of content. And yeah, maybe we don't again, I mean, nothing kind of dies, but it definitely dies down.

It seems that we're in a constant march in our efforts through electronic communication, to recreate the physical communication experience, right, that start with the telegraph, it falls to the telephone, that sticks around for a very long time before we can evolve that to some other sort of electronic means, which is really going back to the Telegraph and sending text messages. We're bringing back the you know, the voice, and then we add the video, it's all kind of this march towards how do we recreate the personal physical interaction in 3d, of course, is an important part of that journey. How do we recreate that even with higher fidelity, but there is, in my opinion, this other deeper underlying motivation, what is the underlying intention behind the communication, it is for my human brain, to be able to transmit into your human brain what it is that I'm thinking or feeling in this moment. And so who knows how that actually ends up playing out over the longer term, in terms of you know, how and where that communication takes place between our different minds. But today, there's lots of intermediary steps in that process. Anyway,

100% I love it also, I mean, there's kind of a rabbit hole here that we're gonna dive into in the world of kind of human computer interaction, or maybe even Brain Computer Interaction at some point. But 100, you're 100% True, like people are trying to find a way to interact others and engage. And that the like, the kind of technological March that we're going through is really finding what is the best way to interact, what is the best way for human computer interaction or human to human interaction through computers. Think about how big was the kind of jump in iPhone moment, there's only there's touchscreens, and that kind of became the standard that is better than they keyboard. And I think a lot of people just gonna see what we have today, like using a mouse or like a keyboard before that you had and these are something that you can see in kind of human computer interaction, like in Professor Stevens lab, first human Finance Lab at Columbia that does research on human computer interaction dials that will use instead of a mouse, but then a mouse became a better solution for computer interaction. Same thing were going on right now you see the Oculus quest. What was it last year, we had controllers, a few software of these laters we have hand recognition instead. Still both work but we're constantly kind of trying to find what's the best way to interact with content in 3d. There's a bunch of questions again, that I love to kind of confront. But how do you search something in 3d? How do you select something? Again, going back to my work The computer graphics lab in Colombia with Professor Steven finer, these are questions are going to literally answer through research, like what is the best interaction to rotate something. When we did that kind of thesis project with the surgeries, we allowed physicians to have two types of interaction one is what kind of hand gestures like moving, moving on, but also voice to tell the hearts to rotate to tell the aorta to spin? And what is better? I don't know, we need to figure out that that was kind of our research, find out what is the best interaction. But these are so again, exciting, like, we are so used to 2d screens, the exit kind of buttons here, they have large buttons there. But what we have in 3d, how do you select something? How do you how do you grab something? Should it be one to one like we have in the world? Like I need to physically grab something? Or can I use against some kind of brain kind of telekinesis almost, or something that we see in Marvel movies, I'm definitely a proponent of the ladder, the more sci fi becomes reality, the better.

It's a really fun, exciting time definitely to be to be involved in this area of technology, because it does feel like this next wave is going to be the most personal the most human, of all the technology waves

we've had so far. I couldn't agree more.

Let's wrap up with a few lightning round questions here. What commonly held belief about spatial computing about AR and VR and 3d? Do you disagree with?

Again, I think a lot of I disagree with kind of a lot of people's notion about kind of the rate of adoption, I think a lot of people will look at AR and VR, like, Oh, why didn't it happen? Or that was like, a face filters are all over the place, and no one calls it AR But let's face tracking with AR, I think a lot of people are really missing kind of small markers and what's going on with the kind of society and what's going on with like younger generations, how they interact with content, and kind of heavy, not the rate estimation about the market. I'm super kind of bullish about

saying that even though on the surface may seem like AR is emerging slowly under the surface, there's all sorts of great indicators that the underlying technologies are making tremendous strides.

I mean, open your Amazon app, and literally have a button to almost every product to kind of see an AR and try before you buy. That's already there.

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

So one story, one story I always tell is that during TechStars, there's this kind of mentor madness session, they basically talk a lot of mentors, and we kind of try to figure out how they can help us how we can kind of great value from the program. And one of those mentors with a banker. And I was okay, this conversation is not gonna be fruitful. He's a banker, I'm doing a rvr. How does that even relate? But we I was like optimist, I would try to find a kind of way to kind of extract value. And then I asked them, What is the biggest issue that you have in the banking world? And he said, Well, we have all these banking apps, they're all exactly the same. I can convince the younger generations to use my bank and our mobile experience as opposed to others. While all these kind of branches, physical branches are closing down. And then I was like, What do you think if you can swipe left on your banking app uncovered? uncover a camera in suddenly, a virtual ATM pops up and you can do all these transactions in a virtual AR ATM? Will that be something that you think younger generations will love kind of gamify the banking experience? And he said yes. So when I think of like, I think there are missing art. So not obvious this talk to anyone in any industry that doesn't have AR today, and figure out how AR can improve them. And I think in baking, which is again, such a non obvious example, suddenly, when you think about it, like five minutes, and it's like oh my god, this could really revolutionize this industry. So I'm, again, I'm a big proponent of like, talk to as many people as you can find a person who is like in a non obvious industry. Think for five minutes how AR could be integrated into that industry. And you'll find literally match.

What book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

There's a book called The Five temptations of a CEO super, super short book that basically kind of gives you a quick rundown on like do's and don'ts that I would really recommend kind of co founders. Awesome. Didn't remember who the author is on that. I have it right here and definitely check. Patrick Lencioni. Yeah, Patrick Lencioni. Exactly. Do that guys. And it's such a short book kind of easy dive. It was recommended to me by easy vidro board member and managing director at reimagined ventures, which is again, another value that you can extract from your investors good book recommendations. So definitely, definitely check it

out. Last one here, if you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old alone?

What advice I would say, again, talk to as many people as you can, like you're on the right track, your way to kind of to kind of find that fulfillment is through others is to kind of create a startup to create a product that helps others. I think that's the most amazing part of being an entrepreneur that at the end you're kind of on this kind of never ending grace to solve someone else's problem. So So yeah, so kind of going to look at that with embrace that basically, ties into what we said earlier, like as an entrepreneur you need to embrace The fact that kind of the finish line never finished it and that like the goalpost is always moving away from you. And that's, in a sense, a good thing.

And you have to in order to get there, you have to talk with others that have to really engage and understand exactly, yeah. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

In general? I mean, I love this. I mean, thank you so much for the invite and kind of disparate location that we see if podcasts or just like these conversation, long form conversation that we can kind of brainstorm ideas into the future, and kind of see, you know, bounce back ideas, I think they're amazing, I really, really appreciate that you kind of gave me the opportunity to just kind of run through all these general thoughts that I had about the market and like the, you know, the space that we you and I both really, really love. And hopefully that people you know, will find this interesting.

Yeah, appreciate it. Where can people go to learn more about you and all the work you're doing there at Eco 3d.

So definitely check out www dot eco 3d dot co that a CH o 3d dot CO. CO you can find us on social media on YouTube even we have a developer workshops that we post every weekend. And also I'm going to be physically at AWS as the first kind of in person conference in the long time. So if you're there, definitely find me say hello, I'm giving a talk on November 11th.

This will air right after right after ewe

so hope you had an amazing either way, everyone. Awesome.

Thanks so much for the conversation. I really did enjoy it.

Thank you so much. It was such a such a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Before you go, I'm gonna tell you about the next episode. In it I speak with Brian Vogelsang. Brian is the Senior Director of Product at Qualcomm focused on Snapdragon Spaces, an XR developer platform for headworn augmented reality. This AR development kit is built on open standards and meant to complement the efforts by Niantic's Lightship, and others. Brian has a long history of Qualcomm, where he had a front row seat to the development of the mobile app ecosystem in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the smartphone ecosystem a decade later. He pulled some lessons forward the AR ecosystem that Qualcomm is helping to build today. I think you really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time....