Speaker 1: 0:10

Hello and welcome on yet another episode of the Accelerometer. Today we have James, who is a YC alumni, and I'm really excited to have James on. I'd love to hear a little bit about what you're currently working on.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Okay, maybe I should ask what is this? Where are we so are we going over what startup we're working on? Just startup stuff in general, just life. Life Okay, because I've done a lot of startups. I've also done YC twice, so we just talk about random shit.

Speaker 1: 0:42

It is like open source robotics, right.

Speaker 2: 0:44

That's what I'm currently doing. That's also what you're doing as well, right?

Speaker 1: 0:47

Yeah, not robots though.

Speaker 2: 0:48

I'm a kind of robot, but they're purely digital robots. Yeah, so the benefit of open source robots is people need to pay for robots, so even if it's off the shelf parts, they can't do it their own. So you can make the software really cheap or free and it's still no one's going to copy you because they still need to get the robots.

Speaker 1: 1:07

Like the robot.

Speaker 2: 1:07

Linux. Yeah, so it's. I think it's a pretty good way of making money. Because no matter what you have to pay for a robot. Do you have community members?

Speaker 1: 1:17

working with your open source software.

Speaker 2: 1:19

No, I mean, our company is like eight months old. So, it's like me and half of another employee.

Speaker 1: 1:25

Do you have community members?

Speaker 2: 1:26

At some point. Yeah, Because what happens is we have a bunch of people who want slightly different things and we don't have the time to modify for what they want. So, basically it's like a sorting machine for kind of general purpose sorting, but it's mostly for contact lenses and optometry stores. And then some people are like I want to turn into a vending machine or I want to turn into this other thing, and so that is the part where it's interesting if they either Like a contact lens vending machine.

Speaker 2: 1:55

Yeah, which, like, depending on the country, is legal or has to work a certain way to be legal. So like yeah. Rather than us having to do it for each specific one. It's much easier if they either band together and hire someone or, like they're the ones modifying it. In which countries is it legal? South Korea?

Speaker 1: 2:15

That was the one we.

Speaker 2: 2:17

I think oh, germany too, there's like a few. It's basically almost all the ones outside the US.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Can you get like so, like assuming, like it checks if you have a prescription? Can you just like get it to say like, whatever contact lens you want, you get a prescription for?

Speaker 2: 2:34

So yeah, basically in the US at least, the doctor needs to be in a loop all the way to the like, you receiving it in your hand. So like you could make it work, but like you would have to go up to a vending machine and then it like calls a doctor, and then the doctor like on the spot approves it or like pre-approves it, and then when like oh, that's for sure, my patient, and then you can receive whatever prescriptions in there, okay, yeah, but again this isn't like done so like there's a lot of questions when someone does this type of thing.

Speaker 1: 2:59

I could get those laser contact lenses that you know change colors in the sunlight, shoot lasers at night.

Speaker 2: 3:06

So, like in South Korea, they really like the colored lenses, like make your eyes blue or like a cat or red or whatever you wear contacts, I don't even need them now.

Speaker 1: 3:14

Have you ever worn contacts no.

Speaker 2: 3:17

I have one eye that needs stuff, so I was debating a monocle, but that's the close.

Speaker 1: 3:21

A monocle contact lens.

Speaker 2: 3:23

Yeah. Or just, I think a monocle would look cooler.

Speaker 1: 3:25

Then you got to like dog food though your product.

Speaker 2: 3:28

Yeah, I mean it's more fun to play with the robot part than the. Again you have to be a doctor to do contacts, so it's not like I could personally do that.

Speaker 1: 3:38

Have you thought about going to medical school?

Speaker 2: 3:40

No, never, I mean like you got a dog with the products. I enjoy the sorting the robot part of it. So that's fun to me, but there are people on our team who are involved Like. One of the people on our team is like runs an optometry store, so that's where it's interesting for him.

Speaker 1: 3:59

So you hired, well, he's not a doctor Is he?

Speaker 2: 4:02

He was actually our first customer and now he's like slightly involved in the company.

Speaker 1: 4:05

Oh, that's really wonderful.

Speaker 2: 4:06

Yeah, so that helps a lot. Had that conversation go. We installed it in his store and then, like a few days after, while fixing it in his store, we were like do you want to be more involved? Okay, he was like yeah, so it's very easy actually, does that?

Speaker 1: 4:22

happen with most of the customers.

Speaker 2: 4:24

I mean, again, we're super early so there's very few like trial customers at this point, but potentially I guess we'll see Like, obviously, the ones willing to let a very small company install a robot in your store Busy Manhattan store, like there's a very small number of those type of people.

Speaker 1: 4:42

What's the most challenging part about running a hardware company?

Speaker 2: 4:47

It's the supply chain is the most like. Honestly, you look at every robot company around New York you see all these like robot arms and everyone's just buying them from the some random Chinese company and they're getting gouged like. Their price is so extremely high. Usually it's like 40k or higher. If you can get the supply chain down like and build everything from scratch, you can get really, really low.

Speaker 2: 5:08

Yeah like we're selling the robot for 12,000, so it's already like a quarter of what these like arms are. The arms look pretty cool. There's one over here that does a. It's called Robert fried chicken. They're like deep fried chicken for you, so that's pretty fun.

Speaker 1: 5:22

And where's Robert involved? I?

Speaker 2: 5:24

guess it's the name of the arm. The arms name is Robert. Yeah, I guess, because robot fried chickens like a adult swim show, so maybe they couldn't Call that.

Speaker 1: 5:34

Okay, yeah, yeah, there's also coffee and robot feels about that.

Speaker 2: 5:40

I don't think it has feelings. That's why it's really good at frying chicken, because because it can get into really hot oil. I think it would be unhappy about frying chicken if it had feelings if it had googly eyes, I think people would empathize with it more than they probably should.

Speaker 1: 5:52

Yeah more than they should. Yeah, you think people would go there and stop it from frying chicken.

Speaker 2: 5:58

I think they would feel bad that it's frying like 120 per hour or something without a break.

Speaker 1: 6:04

Have you ever put googly eyes on any of your robots?

Speaker 2: 6:09

No, honestly, it's so easy to anthropomorphize a robot that, no, we have not. But when you're at an optometry conference, there's eyeballs everywhere like that's what they really like for swag. So it's sort of you might accidentally but my replaceable eyeballs there's stress eyeballs, yo-yo eyeballs, mouse pad eyeballs mouse pad, eyeballs, yeah there's eyes.

Speaker 1: 6:31

I mean a mouse pad in the shape of an eyeball, not like an eyeball that doubles as a mouse pad.

Speaker 2: 6:36

I think mouse it's the bunch of eyes on top of a printed on my spare.

Speaker 1: 6:41

Okay print it on the mouse pad, not like surrounding it like no some creepy middle school art project.

Speaker 2: 6:48

There was a really creepy balloon made of eyeballs. It's like six feet high.

Speaker 1: 6:52

At the conference I don't know what they were selling but I just took photos with yeah caught my eye, so there you go. Well, that was a wonderful pun, thank you, congratulations. There's a lot of them at the show. Yeah, what?

Speaker 2: 7:06

would you say?

Speaker 1: 7:06

is the most rewarding aspect of building in the open source.

Speaker 2: 7:11

Yeah, I mean it's cool because people, people want to help you when they see that you know Whatever they put in for because it'll be unpaid or free or helping their own business, that it stays free and open for them. So there's a benefit to that and they're also they feel closer to building alongside with you.

Speaker 1: 7:28

So I think it's similar to like.

Speaker 2: 7:29

You know, kickstarter is probably not really popular anymore, but the idea of like building with people I think people really like that because they don't know how to do it. Like is someone gonna help them, yeah.

Speaker 1: 7:38

Yeah, are you going to help them?

Speaker 2: 7:40

Yeah, we're trying. It's wonderful Talking with them every day. I'll walk to their places very close to my apartment, so I'll just walk there every day.

Speaker 1: 7:49

Yeah, your clients are close to your apartment. Yeah, two of them, yeah.

Speaker 2: 7:56

Both within a 20-minute walk.

Speaker 1: 7:57

So this is like your niche. Your niche is optometry clinics within walking distance of your apartment.

Speaker 2: 8:03

Yeah, which, even if you do a 30-minute walk, that's actually more optometry stores than you would think in Manhattan. I can imagine that's not on purpose, though Obviously we're willing to help anyone. We're coming to people in every major city.

Speaker 1: 8:17

Have you considered expanding along the L?

Speaker 2: 8:22

Funny enough, the first one is on the L, so that would work out if so, but right now it's a very specific type of optometrist who would want to use this.

Speaker 1: 8:33

What type of optometrist is that?

Speaker 2: 8:35

It's typically someone who's run it for less than two to four years because they're willing to be open to something weird and new, like a robot. Also, if they're about to expand or have expanded, that's another big part.

Speaker 1: 8:50

How did you fall on this niche?

Speaker 2: 8:54

Yeah, I mean it could go back to my first startup. Really, it's just piling.

Speaker 1: 8:59

But basically I mean, this is super long.

Speaker 2: 9:03

But I'll say, at least for this optometry thing, I basically at one point met up with my co-founder, who's like a genius at robotics and I'm pretty decent at software stuff and building companies, and we met up in Shanghai during COVID and we kept getting dinner and we both got this idea for a sorting machine. And so my previous company was in logistics, where you have to sort stuff on racks and warehouses. He was coming at it from a 3D printer automating lab company. That was his last one, and so he had this idea of could you sort any kind of general purpose thing? And then we started talking to different industries around Manhattan.

Speaker 2: 9:42

So we went to a jewelry store and we're like valuable items, maybe they get worried if they get lost and they were not that interested, to be honest. Then we went to. I thought warehouses would be a great one because that was my background, but they don't really have money, so unless this is helping them get revenue, they don't really care. And then my co-founder hit upon the optometry store and he was showing us his back room, which we'd never seen before either of us, and it had thousands of these contact trials they call them.

Speaker 2: 10:14

And they're like yeah, these are expensive. We have high-paid people who have to deal with them, so if a rollout just did that for us, that would actually be much cheaper and just save a lot of time.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Oh wow, so you're a Syspa that worked. What's a Syspa? A solution in search of a problem.

Speaker 2: 10:33

I mean, we didn't do anything yet. This was an idea.

Speaker 1: 10:36

So as long as you don't build it, yeah, yeah, because that could take, you know. It's a solution to an idea in search of a problem Idea.

Speaker 2: 10:45

Yeah, we definitely sold it. Basically, this guy agreed to buy it if we built it. And then we started building. We definitely didn't do any building until that point.

Speaker 1: 10:53

So you have a prototype right now.

Speaker 2: 10:55

We have like five of them.

Speaker 1: 10:57

Where do you keep them?

Speaker 2: 10:58

There's a warehouse in Newark, there's a store which has the prototype. There's one in transit from the. We were just in a Las Vegas conference, so it's somewhere on a truck on the way back to New Jersey.

Speaker 1: 11:10

OK, yeah, so you took it to the conference, or, like you, built it at the conference and funneled people in the open.

Speaker 2: 11:16

Yeah, the most interesting thing to do. We did build it the first day of the conference, which, honestly, we probably cost us a few people who could have been interested. But we didn't have enough time, we didn't have enough new robots, so we had a frame of a robot, we shipped it and then we brought all the things that go inside and then we spent the next basically the first six, eight hours of that conference building it and making sure it didn't work. So that just really took a lot of work. Yeah, I don't think it was the best solution, but we just had limited robots at the time.

Speaker 1: 11:46

Yeah, yeah. Ok, let's go back a little bit to why Comediver Sure, how was your experience?

Speaker 2: 11:52

You like that question?

Speaker 1: 11:54

No, I do.

Speaker 2: 11:54

Because I remember what it was like to want to be in Y Comediver and being like what was it like? Like did you meet everyone? Did you meet Paul Graham? Did you meet Jessica Limitz? And then you just know the names and stuff, yeah. And then you Google people who wrote about their time there and I wrote about it and every six months I get a spike in traffic from people of Google and finding my little blog about it. You wrote you have a blog, I do. Yeah, we'll see about the random starts.

Speaker 2: 12:19

You still write for your blog Every two weeks since 2018.

Speaker 1: 12:23

That's commitment yeah.

Speaker 2: 12:24

I'm going to end it in a year probably. I pre-wrote the last 20 or whatever.

Speaker 1: 12:31

Why is that?

Speaker 2: 12:32

Turns out, people don't read blogs. Yeah, it's like writing a book.

Speaker 1: 12:37

This is why we're doing a podcast.

Speaker 2: 12:38

Yeah, no one writes. If you yeah, you can get way. I didn't use social media until earlier this year and I've had like 100 times as many views and interaction from Twitter or TikTok than ever my entire four-year, five-year-old blogging.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Yeah, so yeah, but it's cathartic writing the blog.

Speaker 2: 12:59

It's a good way to get your thoughts together. Yeah, Also, when I started that blog, I was severely in debt, and so it kind of I think it's kind of rare to see someone who has negative lots of money to having a decent amount of money and has sold some companies To see that progression in writing, I think it's very interesting.

Speaker 1: 13:16

I don't see that often. How do you write change?

Speaker 2: 13:18

You're like.

Speaker 1: 13:19

I love seeing my own writing.

Speaker 2: 13:23

No, I mean, what's weird is a lot of it. Yeah, it didn't really change, but I think there's something to the thing is, if you listen to a wealthy, successful person write, you don't know if that's what they actually were like when they started or not, so you're skipping all the steps. So I think it's interesting to have to find people who are honest and like what is it they were actually thinking when they had no money? Did that? Help them somehow Like write a creative company or do whatever.

Speaker 1: 13:50

Yeah, yeah, do you think it helped you?

Speaker 2: 13:53

It helped point what it is you want in life. It makes you more sure of certain things and formulate your thoughts, which can be helpful in different ways.

Speaker 1: 14:04

What did you want out of life?

Speaker 2: 14:07

Just random ideas, just to build them. Hacking on stuff.

Speaker 1: 14:11

Yeah, yeah, you just wanted to be a hacker.

Speaker 2: 14:13

There's like a specific list of random ideas.

Speaker 2: 14:16

And so it's not like I really don't like people who try to be. I don't like titles in general. I want to be a hacker, I want to be a writer. I just think it's what is it you're actually putting effort into? Yeah, so just making those things makes me happy, and so just writing them all out was cathartic, because it seemed like when I was like 20, that there was like a million things I wanted to do. It's much easier to write everything out and realize there's only 100 things I want to do. Even that's like less than you would think.

Speaker 1: 14:44

Yeah, which ideas do you still want to do that? You haven't had a chance yet.

Speaker 2: 14:50

I think of. I mean it's all over the place. I would love to make a new. I mean it can get really weird or not. There's like a. I wanted to make this. I had this idea for like a 28 hour day, so you like. Remove a day from the week, so you have like six days, and then you add four hours to the other six days of the week and then you basically every day is four hours longer. So, like your work days, four days of 10 hours instead of five days of eight hours.

Speaker 1: 15:18

Yeah, yeah. This is when you're just really sleepy one day.

Speaker 2: 15:21

Well, now, then you fall asleep quicker, right, because you're really tired.

Speaker 1: 15:23

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:24

And then your weekend is two 20 hour days, so it's 56 hours. That's pretty nice. It just seems out of. I don't know if this is a startup or just sort of a vague idea.

Speaker 1: 15:34

Yeah, how would you turn this into a startup?

Speaker 2: 15:36

I would just make a clock and go from there.

Speaker 1: 15:39

Not everything should turn into a startup. Some things should, some things shouldn't.

Speaker 2: 15:42

But the point is, you put the idea out and see what the reaction is.

Speaker 1: 15:45

Yeah, yeah, is this one of the blog posts?

Speaker 2: 15:48

No. Ok, what is the blog about? Blog was it was just random thoughts of like here's a pattern of what I've seen, like I'm trying to think of a good. It was just random things, like for a while I was living out of my car for a bit I thought it was just fun to write about and like.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I had like 200 items. I saw there was like a subreddit like 100 items or less, and I didn't want to throw out half my stuff. So I was just like here's all the things I own. It happens to be 200 by coincidence, so like I just thought it was interesting to write about.

Speaker 1: 16:21

You happen to have 200 things.

Speaker 2: 16:23

I think it was 199, something like that, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:26

OK, I feel like some of these things like could have been like broken down into more things. What do you mean? Oh, like like two socks.

Speaker 2: 16:33

Is that one item or?

Speaker 1: 16:34

two yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:35

I forget how I counted it.

Speaker 1: 16:36

But you might be right. Yeah, yeah, like the MacBook with the charger, like did the charger? Was that included, I think?

Speaker 2: 16:43

it was one item, yeah.

Speaker 1: 16:44

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 16:45

And I think the pair of socks was also one item.

Speaker 1: 16:47

So let's say 500 tops. Yeah, if you have a bowl of popcorn, is each kernel an item?

Speaker 2: 16:54

If the socks rip in half, is that more items?

Speaker 1: 16:58

I think this is one of the most fundamental questions of life.

Speaker 2: 17:01

Yeah, yeah, I don't know how many items do you have? Too many items, yeah, I mean even.

Speaker 1: 17:09

Some days I feel like a hoarder too. I've got items on multiple continents. It's gotten to the point where just getting rid of things is actually a challenge. You need to be in one location to get rid of something.

Speaker 2: 17:20

How many continents is your stuff on?

Speaker 1: 17:25

It's in Europe and it's in America.

Speaker 2: 17:27

OK, so it's two.

Speaker 1: 17:29

The two continents, three cities, two continents.

Speaker 2: 17:31

Actually, at one point I did buy a lot of things and I left it some in an apartment in China, and then half of my apartment at Hong Kong, and then a storage unit here in New York, and then in China a construction crew stole it all. And then in Hong Kong I got robbed. Someone broke into the apartment. I actually lost two. It was actually much easier because it was taken rather than having to throw it out. It's much more convenient than having to throw it out yourself.

Speaker 1: 17:56

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:57

So in some ways I was therapeutic, in some ways very annoying, because I didn't want that stolen, some of that stuff.

Speaker 1: 18:03

Yeah, but now do you miss it the stuff.

Speaker 2: 18:06

No, I did film some stuff that I kind of wanted to backup. That was a nine.

Speaker 1: 18:12

Yeah, I think the moral of the story is don't have stuff. Yeah, thank you for coming on the podcast Sure man. Yeah, it was really lovely yeah.