The AR Show: Matt Miesnieks on a 6D.ai Postmortem and Startup CEO Masterclass

8:07PM Dec 8, 2020

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Matt Miesnieks

Keywords:

market

people

company

ar

build

big

approach

real

technology

investors

conversations

case

thinking

started

product managers

world

airbnb

app

customer

startup

Welcome to the AR show right dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology and uses of smart glasses and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall. today's conversation is with Matt Miesnieks. Many of you know Matt is a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on augmented reality that was most recently CEO and co founder of 6D.ai, a company building tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences. Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles, before shifting his focus to augmented reality more than 10 years ago, Matt was head of customer development at Layer, an early consumer AR company he founded Dekko, the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS. Matt worked at Samsung as a director of product development in AR and VR. And he was a founding partner at Super Ventures, an early stage investor in AR and VR. Most recently, he was the founder and CEO of 6D.ai, which gained a lot of recognition among AR developers and enthusiasts for the demos they published, showcasing their advanced software API's, enabling more useful and exciting AR experiences. Earlier in 2020, Niantic acquired the company.

I caught up with Matt earlier this summer to talk about his entrepreneurial journey at 6D.ai he shares an honest and insightful perspective across a number of topics, including mapping the world for AR, what 6D got wrong about their target customer and how they addressed it, the worst mistake they made and what they learned from it, how companies are bought and valued responsibilities of a startup CEO and creating optionality, the emotional roller coaster, the role of self care, and more. Matt shares a lot of hard earned wisdom. I think you'll love this one. As reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website var show calm. Let's dive in.

Matt, we're going to talk about 6D.ai's recent sale to Niantic but let's start a little earlier in the story. What was happening couple years back as you were starting 6D.ai, what was happening in the AR market? And what compelled you to start the company?

So was 2017 2018 I'd left olufsen software has been working on, you know AR experiments and product ideas there. And I really was thinking then I look at starting a new company in the space, really building on your things. I'd like to attempt some things I've learned that my startup prior to Samsung deco that failed. And what I kind of realized was that there were the ideas that I thought were interesting, and that needed to be built just the technology wasn't there science fiction. And so ended up joining you know, friends already Inbar and Tom Emmerich and Mark Billinghurst helped get super ventures off the ground because a small precede AR fund. And that really just gave me this great abilities to survey you know, what was going on in AR talking to so many different companies. And during that, I met the I met Victor, my co founder, Professor Victor, Cairo at Oxford. And Victor was showing me some new research that had come out of his lab that allowed sort of real time on device 3d reconstruction using a monocular RGB camera. And that was one of the sci fi pieces that Yeah, hadn't existed before. Because one thing that I'd learned at deco and is that, you know, for for sort of AR is up to its potential, the content needs to be believably part of the real world. And it's to interact with the real world as if it's really there. And it can only do that if it understands the physical world. And so you needed to be able to capture this digital model of the physical world. And for that, to kind of work out a sort of consumer just works type of product that has to be captured on your phone in real time. It just was too much hassle to do it, you know, in advance. So that was kind of the you know, the market not much was going on Victor consoles problem. And then around the same time AR kit and a our core had just been, you know, they've been announced at WWE and just kind of launched with the new phones, iPhone 10 or something back then. So there's a lot of sort of hype, because Apple was finally entering the market. And I'd written some blog posts that were really sort of well received kind of explaining how that worked. And so everything sort of coming together. Just just made it you know, sort of a no brainer to sort of start a company to solve something that we knew needed to be solved, but most people didn't understand that quite a unique technical capability and definitely the first wave of the market was kicking off

and what was the piece of the overall problem you're attempting to solve at 60 day where you try and tackle the bigger problem, or how will you kind of think about structuring Where to start? Yeah. So

in, you know, I spent about almost a year with it just sort of pushing around ideas with the technology and talking to different customers and thinking about use cases and what you know, what would work and what wouldn't. And what we realized was that, you know, to deliver on the promise of AI, you needed this digital model of your, of your living room. But we also knew that, well, if I was going to work everywhere, you actually needed a 3d digital model of everywhere. And that was a huge, huge problem. And you're talking more with Victor about, you know, the research pipeline was coming we, we also knew that you needed more than just a geometry, you needed more than just a mesh, you actually needed the ability to relocalized in any spot. So that means get your your position in like a visual positioning service very, very accurately. And then on top of that, you started to then need some sort of semantic understanding things in the same needed to know that this part of the mesh was a different object to that part of the mesh niche know what those objects were. And we had a sense of that rapid development of on device real time 3d neural networks was sort of where the next wave of research was going to come in. And Victor was going to leading a lot of that. And so we we served, you know, that the, that was the technical direction that we felt the world was headed, what needed to be built. And we also knew that a lot of this stuff needed to run at least partially in the cloud. And these were sort of core functions for every AR type of use case, not just a particular app, it wasn't about content, it wasn't about the user experience, this is just to enable it. And so that, that started to feel like to us to look more like an operating system, in that. If you define an operating system, as you know, the API's that the application calls, if you look at, say windows, you know, the operating system isn't the GUI. It isn't the you know, the menus and the buttons and everything. It's actually the wind 32 API stack. That's what all the applications call. And that was kind of the wind 32 stack was kind of superseded by Amazon AWS API's. And that sort of enabled the cloud for all your web and mobile applications to come live in the cloud. And we felt that similar set of API's was going to have to exist for spatial computing. All these applications, whether it was a robot trying to do its job, or a drone, or an AR app, or self driving autonomous vehicle, needed to be able to call API's to say, what's that thing in front of me, you know, is there a, you know, am I on the road is that a person standing there, and these API's to, you know, understand the real world, when under them all together, it starts to look like an operating system for accessing the real world. And that was the, I think, the vision, you know, that was the vision you have for 60. And still is the vision for my antique and I think we call that the IR cloud at the time, and that name kind of stuck. But the, you know, this idea of a an operating system for the real world, and those API's was underpinning everything, we felt that opportunity was going to be as big as Windows as big as AWS, you know, someone was gonna, someone's gonna build a very, very big business on the back end API's we have to us.

Yeah, speaking of the businesses, you had announced a number of partnerships yet with, you know, big companies and small companies, and they're all taking the core technology that you started with. And they were, you know, trying to explore different use cases that benefited from this technology. What did you learn about building 3d maps of the real world, from all these partners, and all these experiments,

a whole bunch of things, there's probably three, three things that we'd love to, to kind of write about, and one we were wrong about. So one of the things we'll write about was that private spaces are the spaces that matter whether that's something that's inside a business and office, a factory, something like that, or inside your home. And, you know, that was, you know, that sort of hypothesis was built on just looking at where we use our mobile phones, thinking that if AR is going to become a phone like usage pattern that we eventually do, we'll probably use our glasses in the same places we use our phones and 90% of the time use our phones, it's in our home or in our place of work. It's rarely out in public. They're just driving the car, which is always. So the ability to capture and make available private spaces was always a party for everything we did and all that technology was uniquely built to be completely private. And that was something that was kind of at odds, to what The rest of the story was like, oh, we're gonna send drones, we will map the whole world build out Apple Maps, or Google Maps and all of those mapping competitors will based around public spaces, mapping public areas. So that's one thing we're right about. The other thing I believe a lot about, particularly for a startup was, the go to market strategy was, you know, the common wisdom is that if you want to go to platform, you build a product, and then you make the product successful, when you open it up to be a platform, you don't start with the platform and hope people figure out what to do. And that works. You know, that's, that's definitely great advice. However, for AR, we're entering a new medium, and there's an entire, like horizontal technology stack that needs to be built, it's incredibly expensive. And a single use case application, probably even the risk in that use case working, makes it very economical to go with that and build a product and then do all the tech pilot. So what I learned was that the way to go about this is sort of take a inbetween approach in that, we knew that building the technology stack was incredibly difficult problem. And we knew that we had a bunch of hypotheses around particular use cases. And so what we did is we we sort of kind of selected it was a bit of a, obviously a mutual selection. But we looked for companies that were really good fit for AR with their use case. But that really understood their use case and how to build the application for the use case. And so we partnered with them very closely and said that we will build the technology to enable your app if you build the app on top of technology. And Airbnb was a perfect example of that, and that they have the ability to build the app, they had a really clear use case of capturing the space. But they didn't have the ability to build the technology behind it. And so that was that was one way that just, we didn't go into how you were going to be a metaphor competitor, and build the entire stack to do that. So that when we build the technology partner,

and there were, you know, smaller companies and some larger ones that were, you know, we didn't get across all we sort of got down the road that we never got to the finish line yet. That you know, based on that same go to market approach, and that was definitely the right the right way to go. The the thing we're wrong about in 16 was, we believe that developers were the right customer to target. And what we learned there is that developers were the ones that understood the problem, they understood what we'd solved. But they had, they didn't have any money. And they didn't have like an existing budget that was building AR apps that they could push on to 60 the budgets were controlled by product managers, and product managers didn't really understand the technology that well, they need to see something and try it. And so that's what we struggled to get, you know, a lot of repeatable, you know, rapid growth in, in our in our go to market strategy. So it ended up taking like six to nine months, you know, to get a big customer landing on board. And that was, you know, that was that was something we just wrong on. And I think what affected, you know, it was one of the factors that ultimately affected our decision to sell. You know, it's just the growth rate that, you know, we saw in our investment with the large platforms and making into the app cloud, you've done a great job, we've been telling the world that they are important. And they're investing rapidly, we saw that just hardware and things are taking longer, so that, you know, the distribution, and the ability to distribute an app very rapidly was still way off. And, you know, with a whole bunch of high profile failures, you know, investors weren't just going to drop, you know, $50 million into a, you know, into a hope. So, we knew that we needed to have that rapid growth over the next 12 to 18 months. And it was kind of difficult to see from the market, how we're going to achieve that.

Yeah, I'd love to dig into each of those three things. You talked about the importance of privacy, both privately but for private citizens, as well as businesses, this notion of the importance of the use case and partnering really carefully in kind of this symbiotic approach to building out both the underlying technology as well as the underlying full stack use case, in this last part about targeting developers versus the alternative but maybe starting a bit on the privacy stuff.

Yeah.

What do you think about privacy right now? Now 16 is part of a larger company, but Niantic even itself is still tiny compared to the mega companies out there. Right? Apple and Google, as you noted, both released their, their SDKs, Microsoft has announced their version of cloud anchors, how does the risk of the challenges of mapping these private places fit with the approach to the perspective of these giants, we'll have all announced some attempt to build directionally something similar.

Yeah.

So there might be a lesson, another lesson, but the thing that's kind of aware of is going in, but the privacy is one of these religious topics for a lot of people kind of standards bodies, or open source or something. And you've got to kind of get rid of that religion in, people sort of get all worked up about abstract privacy concepts, that when it comes to how is that idea actually implemented inside a particular product, there's no connection. And it's just, I just want idealism, or I want something that, so how we sort of approached it was, there's no ability for the general public to accept subtlety or shades of gray, when it comes to privacy. You know, we could try and educate people as to how things work. And you know, what the data really is, and which bits of data and matter which bits don't know, I guess, they just cannot get the head around, you know, anything beyond black and white. So what we what we kind of accepted, and this is sort of right at the end of, you know, just just sort of in that they were even negotiating with magic, as we're kind of figuring this out. So just accepting that you need to just completely give complete control of the data. The capital, if you capture data, somewhere, you believe, rightly or wrongly, that that's your data, and you should own it, and no one else should be allowed to have it or see it or do anything with it. That's just people's perception, right now. And companies even 100 x more so, you know, so, yeah, you just need to roll with that and say, okay, anything you can, we were sort of going to move down the path that 60 of anything you capture is going to be owned or controlled by you. And you can choose which applications have access to that data, you know, not third party application. So, so that was kind of the big, big lesson there. And, and for for a long time, we, you know, we try to educate people about, Hey, this is how we do it, as is different to this, no one cared, you know, they just couldn't understand it, those trying to articulate two different highly technical approaches to, to a problem that was purely abstract to the customer. So, yeah, that was so now. And whenever anyone wants to talk about privacy, or gets sort of, you know, that panel on privacy for AR, I just, I just have very little interest in getting involved, because nearly all of those conversations are so abstract, and then not actually talking about an actual product that people know people use, and then get afraid or comfortable.

The bottom line here is that private spaces are private. That is the mindset of the customer, whether it's a home or a business, and they don't want to stand with me, they don't understand the need. But this perception that I don't want anybody else to see inside of my space. So it's my space. That's basically

what there's a perception that people can see inside my private space. What I know my space that I perceive as private, and you sort of, you're like a tenant, the landlord has access to it. Nope, doesn't have my space, you know? Yeah. So that's, that's the sort of reality of where, where the market is at. And I think that, you know, my, I don't know how this will play out, but but definitely companies that are, you know, bringing image data up to the cloud. I mean, the other I guess the other thing that's tied in with this is that, interestingly, I think small companies have a big advantage, you know, big first mover advantage here, because of the legislative risk that Apple Facebook, Google, like, I mean, imagine Niantic and Facebook came up with exactly the same technology, exactly the same use case. And, you know, magic your play, you play Pokemon, and it captures and hosts them, puts it on their cloud, a nice map of your home, and how would you feel about that versus Facebook doing exactly the same thing. And the minute Facebook announced that they'd be like lawsuits over the whole world, you know, like, absolutely going nuts over over their, you know, their reputation, where your small companies kind of indefinitely with 16 new words were too small to sue. So we could we could sort of go into these gray areas and kind of knew we had an opportunity to figure this stuff out without really caring the ledger. insulation or legal risk of being sued out of existence? Where were the big platforms? Definitely have that problem?

Yeah. Do you think the antic is still small enough that they get that benefit of the doubt?

Um, I don't think 90 I mean, I don't speak on behalf of the product managers, they're 90, but I think 90 of us wouldn't take that risk anyway, they are very, very cognizant of, you know, the fact that their user base is, you know, often largely younger, younger people, kids, and they wouldn't even take the, you know, take the risk on that basis, that trust is too important to them. But I think they could take the risk. And it could be a risk that they could take the Facebook couldn't take. Yeah.

Yeah. And this is talking about this notion of privacy and the utility of a map, because fundamentally, you're trying to, you know, that understand the physical world, in order to overlay this digital information, most effectively, on top of that, at some basic level is just understanding the geometry. And then it's the distinctness between each piece of geometry and then having some understanding of what each of those pieces geometry is or does, right, there's these various levels to this, but it's a map at one level thinking. And the challenge of building a map is you have to build a map before you can use the map. And one of the things that I loved about the 60 approach, and the technology was that you allowed people with the phone, they had already in their pocket to take that device and, you know, leverage the mobile camera on it to create some sort of map. But whenever I think about a mapping problem, there's always this cold start problem, like how do you build a relevantly sized big enough map? In order to be useful? How did you kind of think about that at 60?

Well, exactly like you said, we just said, you shouldn't need a map to start, you should just, it should just build as you go. And, you know, that approach, Apple's taking that approach with their LIDAR sensors and things and no one, no one is going to list not, you know, in the first decade, I guess he's going to think hard one day, you know, all want to play Pokemon in this in my living room. So I'm going to go and build and you know, spend, you know, quite some time building like a really good map of my living room, then I'm going to put it somewhere where it's saved. And it's always going to be ready and available for some future app that may come along. It's just yeah, it's just nonsense. No one's gonna do that. At the same time, no, app builder is going to go, Oh, I'm going to build like a really good app for people's living rooms, all they need is the map of their living room, and then my app, my game is going to be fantastic. That's never going to happen either. So both have to happen. At the same time, you have to be able to the application developer have to have the confidence that they can build an app for your living room and know that as you play that app, as you play the game, the map is going to get built in the background invisibly to the user. And that was kind of a, you know, that was back in 2017 18. That was one of those science fiction, things that I knew needed to be there. But it just was impossible to that technology didn't exist. And it was when I met victories and monado runs in real time, you can still have headroom on the device to run other applications. As like this is, you know, this is the solution to this problem, chicken, chicken and egg cold start Pro,

build an app map as you need the map. How does Apple's incorporation of LIDAR affect the work that you were doing, given that your

energy just makes it better, I mean, again, we know we knew all along 60 was built on you know, an algorithm called infinity out of Oxford, infinity M was originally built for depth cameras know that any any type of depth camera, and basically, you basically had a module that was like, This module would provide an a depth frame to the pipeline. And that module could be a depth camera, a piece of hardware, or, you know, the one we wanted was a piece of software that got a depth frame out of my camera. And so we're completely independent. And what we benefited from was the quality of that depth frame, the more than each pixel on a depth frame perfectly matched the ground truth of the the actual physical space, the better everything else. And so, Apple or whoever, you know, making a depth sensor available that serves up a nice high quality depth frame, just improve improve the input to the pipeline and so everything in the pipeline gets better. And so you know, we knew that since it was coming for that eight months before for sure. And you know, we knew that we could fuse, you know, the module giving an algae bigger frame, you know, combine it with the lighter frame and get some even better again, and you could still do it all in real time. infinitely large areas. aggregate those And stitch them all together automatically in the cloud, all that stuff the pipeline delivers. After you get that frame from the center, so we were sort of bush was just going to make 3d, far more, you know, just just common and understood and apples in a market fell out of it. So it wasn't definitely wasn't anything that worried us, it was just the answers to a plus, like, a CPU or better been a neural net engines.

Yeah. He noted that developers weren't maybe the right initial target customer, especially if you're selling into an enterprise entity, or it's not the same person who is evaluating understanding the problem and making the decision to buy it and actually has the money to fund it and all those sorts of things. As you think back through what you did, versus maybe what you should have done, what what would have been a better approach to get the sort of momentum that you were hoping to get?

Yeah, well, there are two approaches that could have could have paid off. One was just to just recognize that developers are, you know, just don't have the budget. And, and we provide more support for them. So we've seen that with Facebook, funding developers to build stuff. Yeah, we could have taken that approach, or invested a ton of money more into just developer education, developer evangelism, that tools pushed harder into integration with Unity and Unreal is of the world and just gone all in on, you know, just just helping lift the entire developer, you know, industry, risk of that approach was that we were still dependent on some third parties, like unity, you know, they needed something with their mouse, too. Unreal, was definitely an interested in in mobile AR, back then. And so that approach, we sort of got, that's going to mean pretty much us lifting the entire market, where there's no, you know, why would a VC would have to run a very big chair, just in belief that that some application would emerge. And so that, that was, that was that was, again, a risky path for an investor to go down. The other approach was to realize this, product managers have got budget, they just need to understand this. And they're not going to pay their pay agency to build a prototype to, to the product manager consulting to them way to get a real app. So for us, the path we were heading down was to actually build some prototype apps around more than prototyping lightweight products, and put them in the market and really use them as a way for product managers to get budget to roll this out. So the first one we're doing is basically replicating whatever can be built in house and make that available to everyone who has a use of scanning properties, you know, insurance estimation, and floor plan and sizing estimates, you know, inventories of places, all sorts of those, like 10 or 15, specific use cases for that vertical. That if we have started that approach, from the beginning, I think we would have been, I don't know, it would have been that that approach is exactly long and skinny, once there was actual real revenue from from enterprise,

real revenue there, in what regard in terms of building out kind of a more generic set of capabilities based on your technology,

yeah, we would then sell that application, you could have been done as either they just use it as is and just pay us you know, like, like slack or something like that type of enterprise go to market model, we push it out and people use it, and they pay you for some sort of usage fee, we could have done it as a white label, where we just go, Okay, now it's only like 30 grand, and we'll customize this completely and integrate it with your back end systems and branded the way you want for could have just been used as a straight up prototype, to, for them to then build their own custom application around it that could unlock their entire business case. We never got far enough to sort of explore those sort of fine tuning details. But as we started showing the app to customers, it was just immediately. Yeah, the entire all the conversations we're having it's completely changed quickly it went from I don't quite understand what this is going to do for me, too. Oh, can you add this feature in this feature in this feature? And then it's Yeah, we can we can really see how it goes.

So based on that sort of response you got as you began to experiment with building more vertically beyond just the core based technology, but to include kind of an application. Do you think that that initial unit of value was the right one to start with? I guess it's kind of a, an extension. Did you go to market too early, right or was there should you have the early No. Kind of waited and actually built that full vertical stack within a certain area or a couple of different areas. What was the initial unit value that you think the market really needed to see?

Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question. If we hadn't have gone to market early, we wouldn't have liked what we learned. We were very committed, you know, in values point of view, to be very public and open with what we're doing. We, you know, one thing I learned about AR is, I probably know as much as anyone on Earth, about the technology, the use cases in the market, not stuff. But I didn't know, like, and I thought, if I don't know, who does, so we need to actually not just believe we've got the answers and bunker down and sort of build based on our own, you know, self belief that we need to actually get out there and really learn from from the market, and that you're that commitment, just do not do concept videos, and not do, you know, like, hype things up, really, really was was smart in terms of going to market and just getting real feedback from what people were trying to do. I think we could have, you know, abandoned developers, much sooner than we did. And we probably spent a year just really trying to figure this out around. How do we target developers, but help them get the use case to market? You know, which verticals are the right ones to go after? You know, how do we stay, you know, horizontal, that that project is long, you know, that that was really, really burn through runway and time things, figuring that out? But I don't think we would have figured it out.

If we just stayed. We hadn't released if we hadn't been public about what we do. See, he needed that insight that the market was giving the feedback the market was giving you Oh, yeah. Was there was there a particular piece of information that you were just missing the in that feedback that would have, you know, if you played it back again, you would have changed course, sooner,

you're the worst thing that happened to us, ironically, was Airbnb, you know, we thought they actually turned out to be a false positive, we sort of had a great man, that was a perfect customer, so many, so many aspects. And we thought, awesome, we've we've won this, this, you know, landed this potential whale here, and let's go get more of those. And one or more of those, they were actually very unique in their, you know, basically, in their understanding of the problem and in their capability of building apps in house. Everyone else we spoke to didn't have the ability to build an app in house didn't really understand or have the pain point. Or at least, you know, there's like a long education process around that. So yeah, ironically, that that success we hadn't even be was, you know, was something that hurt us over time?

Hmm. that's a that's a dangerous trap. I guess it doesn't it didn't feel like a trap at all. I guess it's a honey trap.

We didn't feel like we thought we were succeeding, that it was actually led us down a path that they were there a one off? Not? Not a, not a first of many.

Yeah. How, if you were to give advice to another entrepreneur, or to give you as you, you know, embark on whatever's next. How do you better judge whether the signal is representative of real interest that applies more broadly across the market, versus something that only makes sense for that one, that one customer it's in a truly a not an anomaly?

I mean, what I'm looking for next time is the second sale should happen pretty quickly after the first one, it should be pretty much the same thing. And if you don't get that second sale quickly, like within a month or something, you've you've probably got your false positive. Yeah,

yeah, that's a that's a difficult one, you can't

go out and sell it again to someone similar to their competitor or similar type of company, then you see something. Yeah.

You'd know that you can touch a bit on the use case here, which is to to map and understand all these private places right there. They're in the business of marketing, private places. And the better the perspective acquired about a prospective customer understands that space, the more comfortable they will be in making that decision and committing, right whatever it happens to be. This is my interpretation of what might be going through the minds. But what was the pain that Airbnb specifically was feeling that they wanted to use 60 to solve

it, especially onboarding their properties. They, they needed to they had entered two similar problems. One was when a host signs up to put their property on Airbnb. They have to like fill out a checklist and get some photos and things and lots and lots of the time that is either incomplete or misrepresentation of the property and even be just how do they know that the high end homes they are sending people out a contract tractors out to do manually do that. And it ended up you know, they they could do like 10s of 1000s of homes a year, but they needed to get to millions. And so the only way they could do that was for the hosts to do it themselves. And they had, you know, there again, they come to understanding that the only really foolproof for fraud proof, why was that it's a 3d scam. And it's done inside the Airbnb app, not using third party apps. So ABB can control a timestamp at whatever watermarking as well as get completeness. If you take photos of your house, maybe you left off the dodgy bedroom, or maybe you you know, missed a bit, and you said a three bedroom, but there's only photos of two bedrooms. So, you know, where's the where's the mistake, there were a 3d scan, you can just look at and go Yep, that's there's nothing missing here, you've got all the walls that were in the inside. So that was that was a big problem. And the problems got bigger, you know, when Airbnb went through some fraud, things are now skip scamming up to do the Japanese Olympics and provide all the housing for that. So that was a use case, you know, everyone assumed that the use case was matterport style, give me a nice 3d model. And I can use that to give virtual walkthroughs of the property. And so people can preview the property before like, it's a marketing asset, that it can be tested all that stuff, you know, and said that giving people a 3d walkthrough reduces conversions, like less people will rent your property if you put that up there because you need to sell the dream too close to reality

that people are seeing too much of the reality. Yeah,

yeah, you're better off getting your house like staged nicely and take some professional, well lit photos and people will, you know,

that'll work.

Yeah, but they want to make sure that wasn't being misrepresented fundamentally.

And just onboard at scale. That's great. Why don't you get me hands on? Yeah, that was that was it.

Other other other use cases amongst these early partners that you really loved, he thought were really just great representations of what

that was, like, you can't, you couldn't really, you know, pick it, what secure app AR there is, there is not going to be the same things we do already on our phones, communicating and sanitizing. And so it's getting information about things, it's being a bit more productive, or a bit more efficient in our lives. And these are the use cases that people like and try and say which one of those is the one that matters more than the others? Is? There's no answer to that. So you really, you know, we just needed to, instead of, you know, probably have a set of ones that were pretty obvious, you know, like scanning a property. But then it was a case of finding the customer who really had that insight as to Okay. And then for instance, with Airbnb, what we learned was that it's it's not a matter of a nice photorealistic model, it's a matter of what, what information can we extract from this 3d understanding of the space, for instance, completeness of the scan is one that or, you know, scale metrics scale, you know, for the accurate side, just understanding from them that what we thought mattered about the use case wasn't actually what mattered to the customer. And I think, I believe if we have gone and landed a big gaming customer, for instance, we had a landed, I don't know, someone building World of Warcraft in the real world, or epic and doing fortnight in the real world, we would have learned a lot about gaming of what 3d scans mean, for gaming, it's probably different to what we would have a shin. Sure,

yeah. So as you were entering 2020, you're faced with this choice of raising more money, or pursuing an acquisition. What was going through your mind at the time? How did you think through that decision?

Yeah, there's a third option as well, which was just a messy pivot into just revenue entirely focused on revenue. And that was largely, you know, large enterprise government military type contracts, which were out there those, you know, could have it we could have, it's never easy, but we could have definitely got to profitability within a within a few months if we went all in on that approach. So we have these three, three options in front of us. One was, you know, tweak or go to market and build some sort of app, enterprise or consumer cell, or we'll just, you know, basically bootstrap by by going after revenue. And you there's a lot of debate here inside the company board meetings, as to which was the right approach and that comes down to what's the market telling you what is the team want to do? You know, what is? What is the reality of some of these options out there? what's realistic? And then like, personally, you know, what, what matters? What What, what do I want to do with my life? What is it don't want to do it is not. And the approach that I took, which, in hindsight, I think is the right approach, even though it wasn't clear at the time, and there's a lot of a lot of very, you know, strong opinions view that you should just focus on. One was, was I tried to do all of them at the same time. And I did everything I could to find, you know, big revenue opportunities, like what material, but there's nothing like finding a few 100 grand in revenue was going to make no difference to our situations,

are there

2 million, 5 million projects that are even close? No, and we didn't found some of those are there really other investors who are willing to back the vision we want to build out and that meant, you know, a large a RAM chip, and getting, we could have easily raised enough to stay alive for going forward, you raise another 345 million dollars, but that Niko, the natus, board member, he just said it's like, that's especially like flipping another card playing poker, like all you're doing is staying in the game, you're not really winning or losing. And if all that meant was it would have we would have been 18 months down the road and see where things are, you know, it wasn't a real, yeah, it wasn't a real decisive play on my own. So we needed to get a decisive way out of an investment. Or we need to look at an exit. And, you know, that was that was challenging been a lot of everyone was interested in us. The terms were all over the place, you know, in terms of the type of interest? And there Yeah, you know, it was a case of Look, do we want to take an exit just for the sake of taking an exit? Or do we actually, you know, would we rather bootstrap or we just take an aqua hire that normally getting out of it? And those type of debates were, you know, always ongoing. So, so yeah, you know, in all of that, my takeaway was, I kind of kind of notices that you really have to have more than one option, whatever that is. And so we didn't have like three, everything out the gate have like three competitive bidders, you know, for what we're doing for an exit, we had, you know, we had a bootstrap option that was realistic, you know, we had some funding that was realistic, wasn't, wasn't awesome. And then we had, you know, some interest around m&a. And I spent six months really just trying to not not quite play them off against each other, but to try and just come lift each of those to become more and more real, to what was clear that this was the best of the realistic options, the path of acquisition

being there,

which turned out an acquisition option. Yeah, if natives offer how to be different. And if one of these revenue opportunities have been, you know, better, we've probably gone up that path. Or if VC has stepped up and said, Yep, I believe in this, I want to commit in a real way, we probably gone that path. So that it was more a matter of being able to look, you know, an acquirer in Dubai? and saying, No, we've got we've got another alternative to this, this deal you're putting in front of us because we are in front of us. Nothing really unit for us. And so, so no, thank

you, in terms of being the CEO of a company that is faced with these sorts of questions, when is the right time to really begin to recognize that you have to pick a path, right? And that and the path that you have to pick is going to be a little bit different than the one you're currently on? How much before you run out of money.

So in deco, I believed in my vision too much. And we eventually, you know, gradually just petered out No, and ran out of money. And that was, I said, I'm never gonna go through that again. I'm never gonna, you know, struggle like that to stay alive. And we should have pulled the pin before. So, the other thing I think that was great was having Nico on our board, basically having a VC from a billion dollar T one fund his Yeah, his perspective or what he you know, what, what GC considers a success is very different to what a couple of angel investors might might consider So, so he was able to very clearly go, look, you guys need to be on this trajectory. If you're not on that trajectory, you're going to be like, yeah, you're gonna be like The Walking Dead, and you don't want to be the walking dead. And I've been that in the past. So I can't Have, I kind of didn't want to be the walking dead and just just having sort of an objective person being able to say, you know, be aware that if you do go down this path 18 months from now, you could have just diluted yourself 20% given 18 months for all the m&a options to catch up to you, and you don't really know, you know, you're not, you're not so confident that you're gonna have the growth. So when we looked at sort of all the different scenarios of where the, you know, where 18 months down the road could lead to, you sort of go or nine out of 10 of those scenarios lead us to being in probably worse place than we are now. It makes sense to take the deal on the table, because at least that you can you take when you reset the clock, you can go and start anew. And that was that was kind of the process we went through. And it was, I think it was only able to do that, because I've not done it and made the mistake of not doing it in the past.

Yeah, so that message resonated with you. In those conversations, starting six months out, nine months out, you're gonna think about, you

know, I'm not like that always, like I was never, that would never not happen, and that it really got serious, you know, thanksgiving last year, that was when that's when Facebook sort of had a conversation with with one of their one of their leaders there. And they were like, yeah, we'd be, we'd be shooting, you know, you join Facebook. And, you know, I for the first time I came back and said, Yeah, we'd be we'd be seriously interested in taking it off. And that kind of prompted sort of kicked off. Everyone's like, it's all real. Now. It's not just like optionality, it's actually now going to work to an outcome.

Because you had these conversations with potential acquirers. What was the narrative that you were presenting to them? And kind of how did you work through the story you were selling? What is it they were selling to them? I guess, in their minds?

Yeah, this is something I didn't really appreciate. You know, until after the we got into the deal, which was, by the time you get to sell the company, you you did that your narrative was set in place like 12 months ago, and you pretty much got to sell what you've always been representing yourself, as we had done an exceptional job of, of two things. No one was building like, Oh, my God, technology that, that like the smartest people in the industry could not understand how we did this. So we're blown away, like the researchers, the engineers, all those sort of people that deeply understood how difficult this was. And we've done a really good job of articulating why this is going to be important, you know, in terms of this AR cloud idea, and I cloud be the future of everything. So what we what we didn't do a good job of similar to their customers, is connecting with the product managers, and the potential acquirers. And they didn't understand exactly why our technology, you know, connected to this AI cloud, they got the concept of the AI cloud, they looked at some weird little technology with some balls, bouncing off desk, chairs and things, but they couldn't really connect those two things together. So So when it came time to, you know, try and sell, so you're not really selling, you never sell a company, you basically ask to be bought. That's not always, you know, someone was drafted by you. And what, what had happened, you know, the last year or so is that a lot of the been enough time for the exact same product managers to go, yes, we need in our cloud strategy, you need a 3d map of the world, that it sort of churn through and turn it into product roadmaps, and, you know, all of them had their own reason as to what, why they needed it, but they knew they needed it. And then it sort of fallen on the engineering teams to build it. And they were like, Oh, hang on, we don't have we can't hire the engineers, we don't really know how to build this IP. All these people are busy doing different things. So we you know, 60 was really a means for them to accelerate that their roadmap, or even deliver on their roadmap. And so we were being bought for for that, that value,

which is your accelerating product roadmap with there's a set of things we decided we need to do and if we buy these guys will get a little bit faster.

Yep. Or we get I don't know, throw on the stones didn't have the in house ability. So then they went well, what's that worth to us? And they're like, well, that's worth like X dollars to our, you know, our engineering efforts. And that was great because we've done a really good job at those other two things. It meant that we're able to get a sale or ever get a getting a win out of that. But one thing I did learn was that the way engines like, if you are able to have the product managers inspired, their maths is very different. Because they're saying, oh, wow, we found a market opportunity here that's worth a billion dollars in the next 12 months, somehow, how do we capture, you know, 30% of that? And then if they can say, Oh, well, we need this company, because they are already on track to capture some section of that market. And we can we can accelerate that. They can justify paying like 345 X, but the engineering guys pay for the same thing, the same same startup. So yeah, definitely. That was that was a big lesson that, and I'm not not upset in any way. But I sort of, wow, we could have, we could have, like 12 months ago, positioned ourselves differently and sort of told a different narrative around what 60 does. That was aimed at product managers. We may have, you may have got a multiple.

Yeah, this is a second bucket, which is your unlocking market opportunity. It's a sales opportunity. It's not simply getting faster to some piece of product, is connecting the dots for them and saying, okay, with this, we now have unlocked this massive new market opportunity. Yes. And we're going to trade a portion of that anticipated value of that startup in exchange for having this ability. And so that, yeah, yeah, and I imagine that there might be a third bucket, which is that you have unlocked, and you've demonstrated validated at some, to some level, that this market opportunity is real. Yeah. And if there's real growth behind what you're doing, you kind of have enough of that market side validation, that there may be willing to share a larger percentage of what they imagined they could get. Totally, I mean, that's,

that's the difference. Like, if you're a startup, you know how to look at it, like a 15 person company. And if you sell it to the engineering teams, you know, your, your, geez, you might get 100 million, you it'll be anything from like $1 to 10s of millions, in mid high 10s of millions. If a product manager or even a, you know, like a VP of product, believes that you have unlocked a new market, and you're actually on track to win that market, not just you have to sort of prove it exists, but you're actually winning it. That's how Oculus, Instagram, you know, those WhatsApp type of type of multibillion dollar acquisitions or quite small companies happen. And, yeah, I mean, most of them obviously happened in the 100 200 million range. But it's certainly a sort of multiple of what you get for my engineering manager.

Sure. But even on this notion of without any difference in the amount of traction that you've had at 60, that AI or another equivalent sort of startup, just the narrative difference, just how you communicate, the value of what you've created, can have a big impact on the overall

outcome. But that narrative, it's got to be more than just like me talking chef doing some got actually being reflected in the product, reflected in like, customer feedback or Museum, you know, not necessarily revenue. But so the whole company needs to back that narrative. But it's really same team, same results, same technology, same everything, just a different position. And and yeah, it's a much better option.

You noted that the time to to have this conversation to present this sort of narrative is way before you get into the nitty gritty of whether or not it makes sense to do the acquisition.

Oh, yeah. When before anyone even approaches you for furniture?

Yeah. So you start presenting that narrative. When's the right time to start having these sorts of conversations with potential acquirers?

We had our first conversation with my auntie before we incorporated the company in 2000, just named Victor. We said, yeah, we should probably do a company around this. And I met a friend who knew john Hankey, and was just telling you my thoughts around what we what we intend to do. And he's like, you should talk to us. And so that first conversation, we literally hadn't even incorporated the company. It was just me, intending to incorporate it. So you can't start building more.

Yeah. That's as early as it gets. Is that is that the right time? Like you basically always as the startup CEO, you always kind of have this in the back of your mind that you need to have these relationships with potential partners. Yeah, definitely something about

like lucky here, founders or investors say, yeah, you shouldn't burn the boats don't sell, you know, just focus on growing this big company. And that's, that's the Right, as a company approach, but as the founder and CEO, I need to be talking to everybody all the time. And I may not tell the rest of the company, you know about those conversations or stay at the board level. But it's it's always having that optionality in that. If an investor comes along and says, or whatever you go out to raise around, and you get three or four bids that are all valuing you index, and you can sit down and go, Hey, but what apples to stop at the two x? So screw you guys, I'm gonna take this revelation, you know that having that fallback, the same time, like you might be having these acquires and apples interested? And they're like saying, oh, we'll offer you offer you why you go. But look, you know, we're doing a fundraising process and have now got your term sheets in a threeway. So, you know, having those conversations with all the time always means you've got a good read on your market value, and how you've been valued. And why you mean? Yeah, yeah. And then obviously, when the time comes, and you do want to pull a pin and raise money or sell, you know, you've got a lot of the ground has already been prepared.

Yeah. And in here, you noted that there's so much power in having one one seriously committed option? Yeah. What did you do after you got your first offer? quarter?

Like, of course, you know, you'll see done, you know, sharing any specifics, but you Yeah, immediately, you tell everyone else that we're in play. And I've talked to the board on the boards, and the absence of any other offers, we intend to accept this. And, yeah, there's always sort of uncertainty around that, like, you're still negotiating, and the board may accept or may not, but you know, you've got to be sincere in that. If this conversation continues, as it started, Nintendo didn't accept the offer and fear of missing out is the biggest motivator for all these guys.

Yeah, see, leverage that that fear of missing out? Oh, yeah, you're shamelessly. And did that. Based on that fear? Did it really change the conversations or the pace of the conversations with the other players? You didn't take the first offer? I guess?

Yeah. And it was, you know, it was also because we've been having this conversation, like, so like, we've had multiple conversations over the years. And with a run out, you know, all the major platforms knew me. And you knew what Victor and Jeff and the engineering team accomplish? You know, we're always kind of surprised that how high profile, you know, we were as a small company, so, yeah, it was very quick. Like, again, it's like, Hey, you know, if you're gonna pay whoever it was, you know, yeah, big company. Look, I know, we've been talking, but it's real, actually, you know, we've got an offer from, you know, from a big social network, and we're gonna type it. And, you know, we've talked about this on and off, but I'm telling that now's the time. So let me know if you're still not. And that was that was basically. Yeah, literally, our power.

Bi was Niantic, specifically a good fit

a bunch of reasons. We, you know, I had a bit to do with with john, like Mike said, and the team and they're taking so we obviously knew that those kind of hours probably was culture and values, how there was just belief in, you know, what they were doing and how they're going about it. And they're the opportunity there. And, you know, last year was kind of a deal and the terms, I think that, you know, definitely the deals weren't, you know, offers too good to refuse. So I think if it's quite what would have been quite easy for someone to come in over the top of Niantic, like in a material way, and we would have dropped my antique and long gone with them. However, yeah, just a small that may have been depending on who it was. But, you know, everyone was kind of roughly, you know, Madison was clearly the best offer, but the others were sort of in the ballpark, then it was a case of,

we knew that we could have the

biggest impact, but Niantic as a as a 60 team, which was appealing to the whole, the whole team, we knew that Atlantic had been have always been very values driven, you know, apart from maybe Apple, you know, they'll kind of two companies that were very clear on the values that they stand for, and that that mattered a lot to us. Obviously, a lot of value that we're bringing to these acquirers within the team. And so, you know, everyone we wanted everyone to be as happy and committed as possible. We felt that certainly, semantic is anything from 10 to 100 times smaller than than the other major players. So there's a lot of upside potential in 90, you know, the whole team got got started as part of cash and stock as part of the cashless experience, he stopped returning at Atlantic, so we want to, we want to feel good about that. And we like the fact that Matic was a pure player, you know, yeah. And that was something that kind of a belief that we had was going to be a real advantage going forward, that we knew there's use cases around AR where, when not really, you don't really take Twitter on your phone and drop it in front of your glasses. And now you've got an AR app, and you need a whole new way of thinking medium. Magic was the least encumbered, you know, baggage, and being able to do that. So all those things, they had enough scale, that the type of scale that they brought was, you know, see, Google, for instance, would have plugged 3d mapping into their Google Maps and navigation was the use case, Facebook and snap who like Instagram and snap stories, and about, you know, capturing social, you know, social media sharing. mantic was about people out moving around the real world. And we had loved that if you want to build a map of the world. You don't want like Instagram, everyone going to the same vantage point at some tourist spot and taking the same photo 10 million times? What one is random people wandering around everywhere capturing the world from all different points of view and all sorts of places. And so we thought that was a bit of a, something we understood that the rest of the world didn't really understand and had. And we thought that was, you know, again, someone who would help me fix it, see? Yeah, so yeah, all that plus, just liking the people knows was a good thing as well.

Yeah. So one of the challenges, one of the peculiarities maybe surprises, maybe that's right way to say it. One of the surprises that I've experienced as both an entrepreneur, as an investor in these early stage companies is when there is an exit. Sometimes there's a surprise about how much you actually end up with, you know, after all of the different priorities, different agreements, everybody who has a piece of the company, yeah, you know, they were there any surprises for you, as you kind of actually went through all of the, you know, waterfall out, kind of pick out exactly how much everything's paid, but then he surprises their lessons from there.

I don't know how surprised I was, but definitely, it played out the way everyone tells you. And that, you know, there won't be much as much left over as you think it's not a matter of going, Oh, I'm a founder of the 20% we sold 400 million, so therefore, I get $20 million to spend on, you know, on yachts and champagne. Yeah, it's something that I think you need to really, as a founder, really be conscious of your cap table. And it's not just a matter of, I'm resisting the illusion? No, which is kind of easy. I don't want to I don't want to take their money because the valuations too low, and I'll be diluted too much. I think that's that some the false false way to think about it. But you need to always be thinking as to how do I maximize the value of my equity in this company. And sometimes that means I bring on a particular investor, because they're going to be able to increase the overall value and conditions more than worth it. Other times, it's, no, we're going to just get revenue. And we're going to have to put aside and working on all this fun stuff, because we're gonna build this really boring crappy stuff because we didn't get paid. You know, one, one lesson that a lot of investors real estate investors talk about is just be wary of safes and convertible notes. And the reason for that, you know, yes, there is my sales are because you can't really do the conversion, maths. You don't know what if you've got some percentage of your round and safes, you don't actually know how much equity you've got. Because it depends on some future valuation. And when you get that exit, if you get that exit, or you get that around, or whatever it is, then all the math gets done, and you're like, Oh, is that Oh, is that all how it works? You know? And I mean, one thing for us, that goes into the details of the deal, because every every safe or every note might have just one line or one little clause that affects the order in which the maths is done. And, for instance, our safes, I mean, most of

them are,

you know, the treated is dead. And so if you sell for $50 million, you've got 5 million in sales. They don't just convert and get split like everyone else does. They get their money back first. And so You've actually sold the company for 45 million, not 50. And that type of maths is, you can't really do it in advance. And so the only way to avoid getting stands to try and be as clean as possible and stick to price equity whenever you can. And just always know, you know, what, how much equity you've got, and how much it's worth in the company. That was that was sort of a big lesson. The other one is raise as little as possible early on that first, you know, 500 k that you raise is, yeah, is really, really expensive in terms of equity. So anything you can do to bootstrap for the first year, not saying bootstrap all the way through, but the bootstrap until you are actually raising a real seed round. So you've got some evidence that here's a prototype and his evidence customers want to it should be possible, you know, in most cases to bootstrap your way to that point.

Is the downside of the the money you raised early on really just the the equity hit that comes along with it, or are there other implications in how much you raise how early?

I think in terms of the mass, the equity mass, it's just the hip of dilution early on? I think what really matters early on is your investors like we? And again, I think this was something that I did, right was I looked at investors, as a recruiting exercise as much as a fundraising concerns like if I was recruiting a manager to my, my team, you know, I'd go through a different process than you normally go through to choose an investor, university level, how much money you're offering, what times when, when can you wire it, but in the really early days, particularly if it's if it's one of the bigger checks in the round? that's a that's a person that you're bringing onto your team. And you should treat it that way. And so I would definitely over index I mean, obviously, you need to make if you need the money, get the money. You know, that's that's job number one. But once you're competent, that the money's there from, from whoever really think through like, do I want to work with this person? Because you will be and, again, we worked out great for us with with Nico, for instance, in Oxford, we're fantastic with another small check their PC titles, great. Books, a great castle, really good, floodgate, fantastic, these sort of patterns, you see, these are all very small checks. And, but there are people that are really, you know, really worked with us on everything we did. So that's the, that's how I am thinking about raising money early on now is it's, it's recruiting not not just getting dollars,

right? As you kind of went through this decision point, that over the last six months or so, prior to starting the company, and you were kind of weighing these different options, right? Whether it was to be revenue funded bootstrapping approach, or raising additional funds and the return of the card, or finding an investor who really believed in the big vision gonna give you maybe different terms on that sort of VC investment or finding the right acquire? What did you learn about the implications of how much money you had raised? How does that affect your optionality? As you kind of go through those those points?

Yeah, that's Yeah, that's a good question. Because it really did. And it was something that I kind of knew, like going in, like I knew intellectually, but not not necessarily in, in reality. And so the rule that I've read is that you to get it to get a clear like, win that everyone will celebrate as you really need to sell for that to next, what you raise the amount of money that you're raised, or the other similar masses is an interest for about three x about itself, or three x the valuation of the last round. So those rules of thumb really guided how we thought about an exit or fundraising or whatever, because we knew that if we're not going to hit those benchmarks, then we're going to be viewed as a below, you know, below average company, and then you kind of get left behind. So, for instance, we raised about 7 million in total over the life of the company at 60. And, you know, our valuation now, you know, last round before the required was around 20 million. And so that meant for us getting a clear, you know, clear homerun type of outcome meant a sale in the US 60 70 million range. So we're always thinking, Okay, is the market as a whole? Is it possible to sell a company for 60 70 million in in the market, like, this year or beginning of this year, end of last year, versus if we had a raised, you know, bigger, we could have raised a lot more money another probably seven or 8 million early on, and probably pushed our valuation up to, say, 40 4050 in terms of money raised, then, to get an exit that everyone's really celebrating. You're looking at having to sell for, you know, 300 million, you look and you look at a market and go, yeah, or any or any AR companies getting bought for 300 million these days? Or is anyone even doing metrics that would get you that sort of valuation? And, you know, the answer was no. So it was going backwards, it was kind of like, okay, we, if we raise more money, we're kind of pushing ourselves to now, to get a win is almost impossible, we need to sort of be a complete outlier in the rest of market. So always approached, you know, fundraising as thinking about 12 months from now, 18 months from now, could the market support an exit of a company, you know, valued against those sort of maths. And so yeah, we stayed, raised less than we could have. So that we sort of felt that if we didn't need to get an exit based on who we are today, it was it was going to be possible with or at least it was going to be within the within the standard models as an acquirer. And, yeah, that worked out for us. So certainly other other startups in our space that raise money, and either they can't sell themselves or any sale resulting zero for the common stockholders.

Zero for the common stockholders is never the know the outcome, the team is looking forward to what you want. And sometimes the investors themselves, while they might get a little something, they are not only not enthused, sometimes they make decisions that are against the interest of the common shareholders.

So ironically, that was, um, that was another real benefit of having a big fund on our cap table. And not just a big fan, but also someone who we got on really well, personally, is, um, the general colors point of view, like the exit that we were getting, they didn't care, you know, as, as a fund, you know, they didn't care, we could have sold for five x what we did, and it wouldn't have been a blip on their, on their fund returns. So they're able to say, we're gonna support you as common stockholders. And to get the best outcome for you guys, you know, because we've seen everything done, let's just make sure you get out of this. And then you can, you can do whatever you want to next. So that was very, very valuable, you know, to me, personally, to Victor. And then in addition, kind of because they didn't care. When, when I added sort of started to push back on terms, there are a couple of times that the GC said, No, we're out, we'll just walk away and shut the whole thing down. We Okay, we're not gonna we're not gonna expose the overall farms to this, this legal clause over a deal of the size. And, you know, sorry, man, sorry, Victor. Nothing personal to you guys. You know, but, you know, the deal's off. And that, although those, you know, never like that, but but it definitely helped us in terms of negotiating with, you know, mantic and then the other plans as well, in that they couldn't quite push as hard because, because generally Colossus didn't care, you know, from as a as a font. Breton definitely did everything he could to help us out and care personally about everyone. But yeah, the numbers just didn't really matter. Did you see? Yeah,

so they were truly a hard stop. They were the the backstop. And sort of times they

were a couple of times, it was it was like there was no one down. You didn't want to be an officer.

So much, ultimately, of the success of a startup has to do with the timing. Is it the right idea at the right time in the market being too early, being too late? Never Merino not as good as being just right. It's always hard to know in advance, especially with sorts of emerging technologies that we're talking about here in AR, it's really time that right, kind of in your assessment today. Do you think that 60 was, what was the timing there too early, too late just right.

I definitely think though, there was a needle that we could have threaded timing wise. And so for instance, if I had ignored my advice and right A lot more money back when we could have in, you know, early 2019. So a, you know, go against, you know, basically burn the boats from an exit point of view and say, Look, we were sort of setting ourselves up that there's no good exit option available for us. And then, you know, pick the correct go to market strategy, you know, we only get the building for the vertical or going all in on developers, I think that path might have played out in Yon we'd be today 60 would be, you know, I don't know 100 $200 million company with 5060 employees and doing, you know, 10 million in revenue. That, that it was a, you know, I have to sort of go back and sort of pick three or 415 unintuitive things that would have had to go exactly right, you know, just to end up there. So I think we were pretty close on the timing, where like, deco was a complete missed, I think, if I did another company, you know, sort of starting, you know, now next six months, which which I am thinking about, I'd probably be even a bit more conservative. In terms of betting on the future, I'd look much more closely at use cases that are now not use cases that need something to happen. Like, if I've got to invent a bit of technology for the use case to be possible. Unless I'm pugilistic about that type of company, then something that says, Yeah, this use case today, people will pay for just gotta, you just gotta deliver based on sort of technology that's already there.

Yeah, yeah. There was all these these points in the market, especially when this Yeah, this one is so hardware dependent.

Yeah, well, that's why wouldn't I just go completely do something completely foam base. Now the stuff I wouldn't even consider, I had where I where we can go completely the other direction on there's a lot of people out there that are just like, all we're doing is slapping, landing pages up and analyzing metrics and buying Facebook ads and testing distribution channels. And they don't even have an idea. They're just like, throwing mud up there. And it's watching the watching the metrics, and then just going, Oh, this one's working. So let's just kind of lean into that. That's a that's sort of the other extreme versus like building some future technology that you believe in to change the world. And I think, ultimately comes down to who you are, as to which of those approaches you're most comfortable with the most enjoy? Yeah.

As it's been of enjoyment, right? There's so much about being an entrepreneur, conceptually in advance, you can also be amazing, because everything is going to be going up into the right. It'll be just, you know, yeah, amazing growth opportunities for everybody involved. But the reality is, it's much more of an emotional roller coaster. Yeah. For you throughout this experience. Can you describe some of those, some of those extremes on this ride?

Yeah, I mean, I've had a number of people that have asked me, like, why would you do that, again, you know, this is more than I expected. But um, for me, it's a combination. So there's the, there's the roller coaster of the company itself, like the company's prospects not going any point in time. And then there's your own personal, your hopes and dreams and life, and everything gets in the way. So, you know, for me, I've had a failed startup I've had basically your whole last 10 years and been challenging personally, so that I was personally going into 60 thinking, I need a win here. Like I, I can't just take a billionaire or bust, you know, approach to this, this company. And, you know, while still having this big vision, not wanting just to start a, an email marketing company, or something that was pretty low risk way to revenue. So the hard part is detaching your own emotional journey from the company's journey. And ironically, as a founder, it's that attachment that brings the drive to push through that first couple of years. And so if you're completely detached, and this is the job, I'm just a professional CEO, managing this thing, it'll it'll never it'll never succeed. So you somehow need to be attached and personally like irrational driving it because it's who you are, while at the same time going, I don't care what happens to this company. I'm going to be okay, I'm not gonna let this affect me or give me sleepless nights or I'm not going to one night lay there thinking about you know what color Ferrari or buy and then the next night wondering if I'll ever be able to, you know, buy from Whole Foods again, you know, I'm going to Costco the rest of my life. So that sort of whiplash is is kind of the struggle to detach yourself from whiplash while still having the, the connection, and yes, a 60 win, yeah. Just, I loved it, like, I love the job of being an early stage founder, irrespective of the success of the company. But when we did have the good times, they were just amazing and working with some credible people of all different backgrounds and getting attention, like from people in the space. And same time, having failed plenty of times in the past, like I always knew, like, yeah, this is this is going well, right now. And I'm very grateful. And I pray I recognize it, appreciate it. But I'm not special, because i'm, i'm i'm doing i'm working just as hard, just as committed as I was to this other company that failed. And I'm doing the same thing now, but it's working. So, you know, you you sort of know that there's something I was pleased not to sort of let it confuse what was kind of market success and material success was me in a special way. That helped a lot with the detachment definitely the pressure at the end, you know, of deciding which way to go was,

you know,

a lot of that was just driven by personal need and, and wishes. My wife and I said, separated, you know, in the last year or so, and that was like, as fantastic as it could be, and really, you know, amicable and friendly was still like, and you know, getting a getting a small win from a sale of the company would certainly make my personal life a lot, lot smoother. And so things like that kind of factor into the decision. In some, yeah, I don't know how to describe it more than that, but

but their daily or weekly practices, that you had to kind of help keep that perspective to help you have the right sort of mindset going into each day.

Yeah, seems like part of that detachment, you, you realize that, you know, it's not all about you. And if you want other people to, you know, work for you, or sort of follow the vision and follow your leadership, you really need to be in a good place, you know, emotionally, physically, spiritually, so, I used to work on self care as

kind of a

perk, you know, something, whereas, you know, I definitely look at it now as like, no, it's actually the foundation of everything. So that's, yeah, I mean, diet, exercise, sleep, you know, your personal relationships, you know, if they're, if they're all kind of, you know, there's no real stress in any of those areas, that lets you operate from a confident creative space, when you go into work each day, which is, you know, I saw somewhere that it's, you know, each day, there's only about two or three decisions you make in a day that really matter, you know, the rest of this is kind of busy work. And you need to be sharp, you know, if you're, if you're tired from working too late, or not going out drinking to, you know, just to have fun, or you're, you're just been eating crap food for extended period of time, when it comes time to make those decisions, your ability to think well is in some impeded and used to race the race cars years ago in Australia. And, you know, there's this huge drive around fitness, you know, physical fitness for car racing, guys, these people, what do they need to fit and just sit there and like, turn on wheel, everyone can do that there's no need for, for being like the super fit, you know, like World Class triathlete level of fitness. And the reason is that during that race, you know, an overtaking, move between like first and second, or live and die, is a decision that we make, almost completely subconsciously in a fraction of a second. And all of your fitness is so that at the end of the race, is that your thinking sharp, you know, in that all the forces, all the effort, whatever it is, you want to be able to get to that, you know, last lap and still be able to make the same split second correct decision that you'd make if you were fresh at the beginning of the race. It's sort of a similar, you know, so it's a similar thing in a startup you need to take care of yourself physically and emotionally so that as you make these decisions, you don't want to be making them based on Oh my God, I'm freaking out because, you know, this is gonna fail and oh my god, I don't know how I'm going to, you know, pay my kids school bill or, or vice versa, you know, the company's going well, and we're going to launch some new product and this year just because I'm feeling you know, overly, you know, irrational and confident. So, so yeah, it's, that's it The mentality I think that I'm getting slowly, slowly figuring this out a little bit more and more each time. Yeah.

Have you incorporated an executive coach into the self care side of it?

I did it with 16. I did with Jocko for a while, definitely worth it once you've got, like, when when would I said valuable? Like, to me, it would be valuable once we close in Iraq, not not just because of the funding, but just generally, when a company gets to that point, you need to be more of a CEO, you know, and more and less of a, you know, hands on founder, and, you know, generally at a random when you've got your management team with partly in place. And so, at that point, you're even more sensitive to, man, if I come into work in a bad mood, and just my tone of voice in a in a particular meeting, just because I'm distracted thinking about something else. And then that executive, you know, freaks out and starts, you know, worrying about their job performance and things. And, you know, so a coach is incredibly helpful when you're, when you're in that point,

yet, highly recommend it. Excellent. And as you think about this notion of making good decisions, and these two to three, kind of key decision points every day, that the job you have today, which is 60, is now safely part of Niantic, and your role is as an advisor, at least as the time of this recording your role as an advisor to Niantic what are the sorts of what's the advice you're giving? lantic? What are the decisions you're helping them make at this point as an advisor?

No, that's, I mean, that's a bit of a ongoing process, we're working through that magic, my my party's which developer supportive oversight, I need a couple months, just a break, you know, and last couple months, I've just been focusing on few things, my personal life, getting them, you know, put away and, and, you know, put to bed and had just a few like ad hoc conversations with magic. And there's, you know, the pursuing me putting aside the whole games, business of 90, which is they're hugely successful. But they've got this whole platform side of magic. And that's certainly the area where I've, I think I've got the potential to have some impact there. And, you know, they're figuring it out. And at the moment, I'm just helping them understand the problem, young opportunity, and try and get a consistent mental model across their team as to what an operating system for reality means for what they are cloud means for which technologies are, you know, we found useful, which use cases we found useful. So it's been, it's been just very hands off high level stuff, as well as talking to the press and the static your writing, you know, why we believed that narrative was a great place to end up. And I think that after the end of summer, we'll have some more, you know, in depth, you know, I may end up having some work to do. I don't know, at the moment, I'm trying to avoid as much work as I can. And yet find some ways, I think it can take at least the mistakes I've made in the past to help mantic avoid making sense. Awesome.

Let's wrap up with just one in lightning round question. What commonly held belief about spatial computing? Do you disagree with

all my favorite standards? I tweeted something the other day, the way the standards are for losers. There's a certainly a perception that we need standards so that all these things can talk to each other. So it's easy to build, like where they are and stuff, but I definitely think that mobile is around standards in general is that taking you idea, new technology and new use case in the market something and someone figures it out, you know, with a with a completely proprietary solution, and they or whatever they build on some open source, they solve the problem for this, this use case. And it becomes really successful. And, you know, assuming it's an interesting market, there's probably multiple competitors in that market, but someone wins. And they win just with their own product. And then all the other guys are kind of with what they do. They just shut up shop and go home. Do they try and be the number two player in the market? You know, do they fight with each other for the scraps? And so what ends up happening is they realize, man, I'm well the markets lost. I can't really win on my own now. But if we all get together, then we can you know We'll all give up their own personal hopes and dreams, but we'll all standardize. And together, you know, we can fight the big guy and make him, you know, make him the greeter. And then it's all a commodity again, and it's a level playing field. And, you know, that's obviously good for consumers in theory. So, you know, that idea that it's the losers that, you know, by necessity come together and create standards in order to commoditize market, you know, I think that, you know, our, there's a lot of people thinking that you do the standard, in order to win the market, where now you gotta, you gotta just be completely proprietary, completely closed, so that you can iterate fast. So you can get a rapid iterations without depending on anybody else, and respond to the customer's needs as you as you want about them. And then hopefully, when the mark, and so that, I think to be a big misconception in the spatial computing space right now, and yeah, it's always it's always a good, good sort of bomb to throw out a panel or something, because someone is always going to get really ticked off about that, that that phrasing and it starts start to become session.

Yeah. People that are most excited about the standards are usually the ones that are showing up to these sorts of panels. Right, there's the heights that are that are represented by a broad coalition of smaller companies, who are the ones that really active in the in the ecosystem.

But I got heaps, heaps of those unpopular opinions. Yeah.

Any others? You want to log out? They're not the first time?

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's kind of futile to compete against the big platforms. I think, yeah, 10 years ago, you could kind of, you know, have a shot. But if you look now, like, Niantic is a big company. And they're tiny compared to snap, you know, 4 billion versus 40 billion or something. And snap is a nobody, when you compare it to Amazon and apple and $1.6 trillion companies. So I think just the whole plant space over the tech industry, especially in specialties, is you've got to somehow exist in the cracks. And the thing is that those cracks is so much bigger than than one fully appreciate. Yeah, I mean, I've always been pessimistic on how long things will take. But I think I don't think that a lot of people are realizing that now than a couple years ago. Or here's one that I like, I think, even after Apple launches their glasses, it's going to be three to five years before there is a big enough market of those devices to build a startup on top

of it has to be a slow burn slow, rise,

not be slow. It'll be just like the iPhone. Yeah, the first iPhone, everyone was like the iPhone, it started didn't even have an app store. Then there was the iPhone 3g, again sold like 5 million or something 10 million units, then the 3g s sold another 10 million or so. And it wasn't till the iPhone four, which was like, three years, four years after that, it really sort of took off and got to that 100 million in volume. The watch is the same as like, version five or something. And it's only selling in volume. Now. Classes are going to be exactly the same. It's going to be I saw a couple of million of the first ones that might sell 5 million 10 million next ones. And it'll be like version three, or version four of the glasses. That as a as a startup, you can go on and target these glasses. And I can expect to now get like 5 million users. So yeah, I think I think people think once Apple announces massive, it's all the startups succeed.

But even then, it's still a slow burn.

Yeah, a good time to raise money. Just don't spend it.

Right. If you think back to the iPhone era, and the gigantic companies are built on the back of that the Instagram Ubers, that sort of thing. They all started after iPhone.

Yeah totally....

Yeah. But before I think we got to that 100 million mark.

Yeah, they weren't really

they weren't. They weren't doing much to tell us. Yeah.

Yeah, it wasn't. I mean, the best thing you could do as a founder when the iPhone was launched, was go to the beach for three years, then come back and start. So I think Apple classes would be the same. Yeah.

Good one, no one wants to hear that. My appreciation for how slow the hardware really evolves and how quickly people are taking this based on the actual use cases that are being addressed and solved the hardware. Yeah, I'm with you. It's a long road in front of us.

Yes.

Any closing thoughts you'd like to share? No, I

could just keep talking about stuff on my head.

When are we going to learn what's next for you?

I don't even know what's next. Obviously. I mean, magic is there's a lot of interesting things there and it's a good you know what I'm what I've done a lot of sense to mesh pretty well with what they need. So I think it's Some great opportunities to have some conversations there. Obviously, they, you know, the investors in 60, were happy with the outcome. And they're quite happy to support me. And if I want to do something new, we got a bunch of, we did a bunch of work at 60. Figuring out what use cases you build on top of phones that can understand 3d. And I think Apple's iPhones this year, and next year, we're going to see phones that understand 3d is kind of a commodity feature now. So I think there's lots of ideas there. I'm just, like, I'm consciously avoiding thinking about it. Because I, I know I can talk myself into stuff and get myself excited. And I really don't want to do them. Try to say no, just get back, you know, do that self care, you know, be mesocycle I guess this is like a 10 years of work now have a several months of the self care and then sort of watching the next next 10 years. Yeah. So yeah, by the end of the year, I kind of know. I don't wanna I don't want to think about it until Sunday.

Yeah, very nice. Matt. Thanks so much was compensation.

Yeah, always fun, always enjoy it.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. in it. I speak with Cory Grenier. Corey is the CEO of Geenee, a company on a mission to make the physical world around us easily recognizable to computers using mobile browser based technology. They combine image and video recognition, where they are in Creative Services to deliver unique value to brands. Prior to Geenee, Cory spent many years at Snap as the first director of sales and marketing, having joined the company as part of the acquisition of vergence Labs, which formed the basis of snap spectacles. Do you remember that launch campaign around spectacles Cory led that. In this conversation, we chat about vergence the acquisition marketing at Snap and how genie is pushing the boundaries for brands. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time.