Mehul Nariyawala - From selling a $40M startup to Google to building the future of smart home robots!

We took sort of YC's motto, make something people want, to the next level and say, okay, let's build and make something people need. And what advice I generally give is instead of building a solution deck, build a problem deck. Just write down the problem, write down all the things, which is the best way to do it is you say, I have this problem. Well, why do you have this problem? Well, I have this problem because of, or, you know, I hate, I have this problem, which is my dog sheds a lot of hair. I have a dog, so what— how can I solve it? Well, I can solve it using robot vacuum. Well, great, uh, but why do you need robot vacuum? Well, I don't want to spend time doing it. And you have to keep asking this why to get to the essence of the problem. And when you get to it, then you can build it back up and create a great solution.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate stories And maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with their chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, and creators who've got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about the sponsor of this podcast, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this whole process of selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get through the end zone. This is where Acquire shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest. And you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is that you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone, do the sales, marketing, and in 6 months you've tripled your revenue. Well, the reality isn't as simple as that. Situations may be different for every founder. Facing this crossroads. But too many times the story ends up being one of inaction or stagnation until the business becomes less valuable or worse, worthless. If you find yourself here or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquired.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquired.com/shirath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. All right. This episode is sponsored by Sunset. If you heard this podcast, you know, we, we not only cover success stories, but also unpack the failed ones. And building a startup is hard. Most startups fail. If you're a founder winding down your business, then you need to look into Sunset. These guys handle all the legal, tax, operational burdens when shutting down, making sure founders and investors avoid penalties, reduce liabilities, and immediately move on to what's next. Their team has spent hundreds of VC-backed tech startups sell their assets, redistribute over $100 million in funds to top-tier investors. If you're interested in learning more, visit sunsethq.com to meet with a representative from their team and make sure to mention Undefeated Underdogs Podcast to get $2,000 off of your dissolution. Okay, enough ads. Let's get back to today's episode. My next guest is not a normal founder. I've had different sets of founders, VCs, creators, but this guy's different. He's going to change the way you clean your houses. Let me tell you that. Mehul Nariawala is an immigrant. He's a dad. He was a YC alumni who hates cleaning but loves robots. So previously he found Flutter, which he sold to Google for $40 million. Again, $40 million. That's, that's not a small amount. He took pivotal roles at Nest, Like.com. They changed the course of their businesses. Now he's the co-founder of Matic Robots, which I'm so excited and pumped to dive deeper into this conversation. To put it in simple words, if Tesla had focused on building clean cleaning robots, then it would be like Matic. These guys are insane. They're building the world's most advanced floor cleaners. It's like your vacuum cleaner is powered by FSD, where it knows where the mess is in the house and cleans by itself. I saw the demo, I saw a couple of videos in my research, and it's insane. It's so futuristic. Mehul, welcome to the show, and I can't wait to unpack all things robots. So how are you feeling today?

I'm feeling great. Thank you for having me and such a kind intro. Appreciate it.

No, you've done a lot. Like I said, I was the first time I'm kind of diving deeper into your portfolio and the, you know, what you did in the past. It's very different. You know, I generally have founders who are like, they're SaaS founders, they're like very much into software or either like creators. But I think for the first time, if I'm not wrong, again, I've done many episodes, I don't remember, but I think you're the first one who's more into hardware, like robots.

Yeah.

And I have a sense that 2024 is a comeback year for hardware companies. Like, we see a lot of, you know, interesting products coming around. It's not— hardware still exists, right? It's not like, you know, we don't live without hardware. Everything is, you know, we touch, we do. But anyway, I'm so excited, actually. So my first question is, why do you hate cleaning and why do you love robots?

I think, I think if I'm not mistaken, you have 2 kids as well. Yes. So My general joke is that when you get kids and when you have pets, your cleaning needs don't double. They exponentially grow you to just 10x order of magnitude higher. They're sort of a walking tornado of entropy mess generator. Right. And that's— it wasn't that I hate cleaning, it's that I got a golden retriever as a dog in 2014. And our joke is that he sheds twice a year, 6 months each.

Oh my God. That's a lot of mess.

That's a lot of mess. So that's when we started getting— I started dabbling into just floor cleaning robots and robot vacuums. They've been around for a while. And it just— and to be entirely honest, they suck, pun intended.

I

like that. And it was really, really interesting when I started digging into this space that, wait a minute, You know, first robot vacuums and Roombas came out in 2002. That's when we were using BlackBerrys. Now it's 2024. We are on iPhone 15, and Roombas are pretty much exactly the same. Yeah. That doesn't make sense. Why? You know, AI has changed so many things. AI is everywhere in our lives, yet robot vacuums remain this really, really bad. So it wasn't necessarily the cleaning itself. It's just that we felt like robotics itself was stuck in sort of a bygone era, and it was time for— 2.0, and the floor cleaning robot is the first product on our way to go solve indoor robotics, general indoor robotics with many, many other products. And this particular thing also resonated because ultimately we're all busy. We all have busy lives.

Yeah.

Time is of a critical essence. So, if you can build a product in a world, most of the products in the world these days take our time away. Instead, if we can build a product that actually saves our time, saves our energy, gives it back to us, then hopefully we can spend more of that time with our kids, maybe painting, hiking, whatever we prefer. And that was really the motivation that why can't we actually save time from this mundane and repetitive and boring task that we haven't actually automated in a long, long time?

And it's of— it's no— now when you say that, It feels so relevant because we have a Roomba in our house and it really works. It works. But I think when you say that, when you compare it to like a BlackBerry, that hits different. Like, because we are in no way or shape are aligned to use a Nokia. What is that? 1100, the famous. Brick phones or even like even the BlackBerrys that you mentioned, but we've moved so fast that we're like, no, right? But we're still kind of marrying to this old way of vacuuming, old way of using the same robots in our house. And that, to put it that way, the narrative changes. And I think we both met— a couple months ago, and I was very fascinated by the fact that you've touched such a traditional space that— Yeah,

I'm happy to dig into it. So, so, uh, 2 things that are really interesting is that, um, one of my favorite— or prior to this company, when we did Flutter, which we can go into a bit— at Flutter, we were part of Y Combinator.

Yep.

We had 75 companies in our batch. This is winter 2012. And we used to do gesture detection over webcam. To give you a little bit of a color, it was essentially Microsoft Kinect, but just using this camera. And our entire idea was that, hey, instead of turning your finger or hand into a mouse, if you want to mute your TV, why can't you just shush it?

Yes.

As computers get smarter, they should understand us. So we built this app that allowed users to control iTunes, Spotify, Netflix using hand gestures. And they were just play, pause. previous song, next song, thumbs up to like, gestures to mute. So very simple gestures.

Right.

And it became very popular in Mac App Store, and that ultimately resulted in our acquisition. But along the way, we learned that what we built was a really, really cool UX and a cool technology.

Right.

But no one wakes up in the morning and says, today I want to buy gestures. Today I need gestures. And this was a critical learning lesson because— and reinforced by Ram, who was still there, and PG would come and talk to us all the time. And he would say, oh, I know you guys. You guys are technology looking for a problem to solve. Have you found one yet? And he would repeat that over and over again. And it made us realize that there are really, really interesting— like, we as hackers, we love technology and we love future, but that doesn't sometimes solve the problem. And this particular point he further emphasized in one of my favorite essays he ever wrote called Schlep Blindness. And a schlep is a Yiddish word for boring, unsexy, very mundane type things that are not there. And this particular thing really resonated because, you know, I remember walking into Stripe's office when there were 5 people on Ramona Street in 2011 and thinking, wait, infrastructure and payments, that sounds so boring and isn't it done? Turns out that's a company worth $100 billion today, right? In a similar way, out of all of our batch, we had 75 companies. Everything that was futuristic, cool, sexy, very, including Flutter, is no longer alive today. I mean, we got acquired, good for us, but it's not necessarily a product that is out there in the market today. On the flip side, what survived and thrived in our big companies and went public in one of them is Amplitude Analytics. And that was just mobile phone analytics. It wasn't rocket science.

Hmm.

Like the other company is a company called Gusto. Which just does payroll.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

To be horrible. And I remember they didn't even launch till year and a half after our batch. PlanGrid was another company. Rescale is another one that was part of our batch. So everything that have survived and thrived were the problems, were companies that were solving real problems, that weren't building something futuristic that may or may not see light of the day. So as an entrepreneur, you have a choice. which is you can invent a future, which a lot of companies like Humane or Rabbit or now Friend are trying to do. And amazing, good for them. We just decided to choose to go solve a problem that already existed because it was such an important problem and it was a problem that we had. And that's really, isn't the— isn't as an entrepreneur, isn't the most important thing to solve your own problems? So that's how we started

out. Man, what a What a pivot. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect you dropping some of the gems there. Like, you have to build for yourself. You have to find a boring problem. Yep. And you should be okay for not being sexy or futuristic and just hands down focus on really like, what are the real problems I can solve? Not go after the technology, but go after the problem. Love it.

That's right.

I do have, I do have, I do want to like kind of unpack your YC experience, but now that we're talking about it, yeah, just 2012, 2012. It's like what, 12 years?

Yes.

It's not like yesterday. So a lot, a lot of things change and you're humble enough to accept the fact that not everyone came out of, you know, as a success and you're kind of like, you know, You got acquired by Google. If you can, can you double down on that line, what PG said to you? You're like, hey, you're the technology guys trying to find a problem. Have you found it yet? Can you talk about interacting with PG, expand that conversation, or like what is your rapport with him?

So, at least back then, we were very, very lucky to have PG still part of the YC and he's Honestly, one of the most entrepreneurial friendly as well as entrepreneurial caring person that I've ever met. He genuinely cares about every single company in the batch and genuinely wants to help you, and really has an ability to give you direct advice, direct criticism without really trying to sound critical or making you feel bad about it. And it's really just comes from this deep. passion, deep desire to help you build an amazing company. That's really just the motivation. So, working with him was great because he was just very direct. And that was an interesting— it didn't— and to be entirely honest, first couple of times he said it, it didn't register. We thought, hey, this app is the product. What are you talking about? We are sort of solving this problem and bringing gestures to the world. And we realized that, no, ultimately, if it's a problem worth solving, people would pay for it. So, unless you have someone paying for what you're building, it doesn't work. And this was a really critical lesson because our background is in computer vision. I joined Light.com, which was in 2006, which was the first computer vision startup in the Valley.

Right.

If you go back to 2006, computer vision is a super esoteric field. Not many people knew really anything about

it.

So, I was very lucky to join, but then everything we worked on at that time was very technology-driven and futuristic. And that's really, that was one of the reasons why in the later part of our career, we ended up at Nest. And that was because I wanted to finally work on a product that people actually paid for. And that's a very subtle differentiation. And it's critical because we also helped actually, we were also part of the team that launched Google Cardboard. And for a while, Google Cardboard was huge and AR/VR was a huge thing. And I remember we had an opportunity to move to Nest. or join Google's Daydream team, which was building AR/VR. And it was very obvious in that day immediately that no, AR/VR is another technology looking for a problem to solve.

Right.

It still hasn't found one, right? There might be a problem that it's amazing for, but it still hasn't found one. So instead, we actually wanted to go work on a problem. And if you take a step back and think long-term, which is we tend to evaluate companies a lot more on their fundraising initially or on their exits. But if you evaluate a company from their ability to go public, ability to survive and thrive over the long period, so survive the test of time, then, you know, AI companies aren't public yet. Robotics companies aren't public yet. Usually technology companies don't go public. What goes public, or even app companies aren't. What goes public is companies like Uber or Lyft, which— Mm-hmm. Real problems, right? Or that's why SaaS companies thrive as well, because they turn to solve a real problem. So almost always you'll see that companies that solve real problems, generate revenue, grow, are the ones that survive the test of time, not necessarily the futuristic stuff.

And if you can give us some pointers, you have— you've seen tons of things in your experience, you know, worked at gigantic companies like Google to, you know, being a scrappy founder at Flutter and now again, shooting a moonshot, right? How do you advise founders, entrepreneurs who are just starting or who haven't cracked that code of finding a real problem and being okay with going after a boring, unsexy space? Can you talk to me about it?

Yeah, I think That's a great way of doing it. I think one advice I generally give to everyone, we took sort of YC's motto, make something people want, to the next level and say, okay, let's build and make something people need. And what advice I generally give is instead of building a solution deck, build a problem deck. Just write down the problem, write down all the things, which is the best way to do it is you say, I have this problem. Well, why do you have this problem? Well, I have this problem because, or, you know, I hate— I have this problem, which is my dog sheds a lot of hair. I have a dog. So, what— how can I solve it? Well, I can solve it using a robot vacuum. Well, great. But why do you need a robot vacuum? Well, I don't want to spend time doing it. And you have to keep asking this why to get to the essence of the problem. Mm-hmm. And when you get to it, then you can build it back up and create a great solution. But a lot of time what happens is we just think of a problem and we immediately jump on a solution. Or we just think of a technology as like, what if it could do this? Instead, the question you should ask is, what if it could solve this? And what is that this? What can you solve? What is the pain point, right? Another framework that I can give, which is really useful, is that if you think of a problem, then think of it in a 3-dimensional way, which is what is the intensity of a problem? What is the frequency of a problem? And how many people in the world have that? So, typically, if you're trying to build the initial deck for your startup, people ask you, hey, think about TAM. But total available market is a bit of a crapshoot because it's a function of whether there's a good solution or not. So, the better way to measure it is go to first principle and say how intense the problem is, how frequent the problem is, and how many people we have. Hmm. A good example is what I worked on eventually at Nest in Nest Security Camera. Now, if you think about it, when your home gets burglarized or even maybe your neighbor's home gets burglarized, The intensity of a problem is through the roof,

right?

You really want to make sure you protect your home, right? But then how many times actually happens? What is the frequency? Well, at least in the United States, if you go through your entire life and get burglarized once, you're already in probably one standard deviation away from the norm, right? If you get it twice or thrice, you're way ahead. So the frequency of the problem is actually not that, not that frequent. Which by definition means the number of people in the world who actually have this problem is also lower. And then we know this because I remember buying, you know, buying a home in a cul-de-sac in Bay Area, and the previous owner hadn't locked the home for 30 years. So he didn't even have the problem. We're thinking that good luck to me trying to sell this guy security cameras because he doesn't even. And That's really where it is. Or if you think about getting hungry, well, why do you— why do all these restaurants keep popping up? The reason is because when we are hungry, we are hungry. Problem is intense. It happens multiple times a day and everyone in the world has it. So the market remains evergreen. And that's why there is always another restaurant, another business popping up to solve that problem. So really just measure those things, which is how intense the problem is, how frequent the problem is, and how many people in the world have it. And, and cleaning or home chores, which is what we're really going after, trying to build a full-blown Rosie the Robot, quote unquote. We realized that that's a— when your home is dirty, when your floors are dirty, it's a pretty intense problem. It happens all the time, especially if you have kids and dogs, and everyone in the world has that problem. And so that's where it just felt like a really good opportunity to go and apply technology to something that genuinely helps people.

You know, your answer, first of all, Ridiculous frameworks, both of them. I absolutely love, you know, build a solution instead of building a solution deck, focus on the problem deck. Ask why, why, why. I think I have to be like a toddler or any founder who come across toddler, they ask like, why, why, why this? Why that? Why this? Why that? So we have to constantly ask about the same thing. Love that intensity, frequency. large scale. I think those 3 would be like an incredible filter or measurement. When you said about like going after those real problems, it reminded me about James Dyson. I was recently reading about him, and I think if I'm not wrong, after he quit his day job, he wanted to go build his own company, and he sold like 40,000+ wheelbarrows And he failed. He got ousted by his own company and he decided to find a real problem. And just like how you're defining Matic, he was like, let me go after the things we use on a day-to-day basis and change it. That's it. And I think the first thing he picked is vacuum cleaner. Of course, you know, he built Cyclone, the technology, you know, that it's so fascinating that You're not reinventing the wheel. You're kind of coating a paint and adding a fresh flavor from your end through using technology. That is, I think that's to me, that's like the right way to approach. And I think you're doing in an inspirational way. So I just want to put it there. Yeah. You want to add something?

James Dyson is absolutely— Sir James Dyson is absolutely an inspiration. He's built some amazing products. And I think ultimately, it really just boils down to this point of view we've always had, that technology actually has changed our lives. But first, it created manual tools for us. So, there is a manual vacuum, there is a manual washer and dryer where we drop things, right? Then, we are sort of The disk robots and even the cars in 2000s had the cruise control, which doesn't necessarily take your entire job away, but it helps you relax a little bit. It does a few tasks for you. So, it's not end-to-end automation. Now, the technology is advanced enough where you can say, okay, can I just do end-to-end automation? Can I just press a button to have my floor clean? And that sort of— or can I just press a button and my car will drive itself? And that's really the era we're part of. So as you alluded early on, like, if we can— if a car can drive on its own, that's a far more complex environment than our floor homes with the dirt on the floor. So why can't vacuum or robot just clean for us? And that's really the way we think about it. So it's really 3 different eras, from manual to somewhat automated to completely automated.

I love that. I also want to wrap up the YC episode because, you know, We can move on to the next one.

Sure.

What do you think changed from your batch in 2012 to 2024, 12 years, the evolution of startups or your observations in general, being, you know, being on the— or having like a bird's eye view. Now you're being like a founder, but I think after Flutter, you were kind of working at Google. these different companies and now you're back building, right?

Sure.

So, 2012 to now as a founder, what are your points that you observed?

I'll even go back a little bit more. I think, okay, it's never easy to be an entrepreneur. It's never easy to start a company. It's never easy to raise funding. At the same time, I would say that it's relatively easier than it was back in early 2000s or mid-2000s or even before YC. What YC did and what Paul Graham did is give very, very young students an amazing ability and young people to go into something and start following their dream because it's really the initial spark, the starting that gets harder, right? If you launch the rocket, the initial thrust is the hardest part. Once it takes off, it moves quickly. kind of fast. And what Y Combinator really codified is what it needs to— what do you need to do in that first 3 to 6 months? And that's a knowledge that doesn't exist. And I always tell that being an entrepreneur is a little bit like swimming or skiing in the sense that no matter how many videos you watch and no matter how many training sessions you watch someone else doing it, Until you are yourself on the slope or in the swimming pool, you just don't know. And that's when you learn. And entrepreneurship, really jumping into the deep end. But now all of a sudden with YC, you have a coach who would at least tell you what to do in that first 15 minutes, first 30 minutes. You don't panic and you stabilize and then you go from there. So in that scenario, YC has honestly changed the world for the better and given a lot of people an opportunity to start companies. And that subsequently, in my opinion, has also resulted in many, many, many seed and pre-seed funds that invest in— Right. At the early stage. Used to be the case, you know, back in 2010. I think there was no such thing as a pre-seed or seed fund, or maybe they were just pre back in those days, right? You just had this few big VC firms. So just proliferation of accelerators, the proliferation of the startup programs, the proliferation of, of just funds are all great for early entrepreneurs. So, in that sense, things are way, way better today than they were back in the day. So, that's just a sort of a relative, relatively better, I would always say. And then, in terms of YC, I don't think YC has changed. It has obviously grown bigger. They have a different style, but the fundamentals remain the same. Um, if, you know, someone came to me and say, hey, I'm starting company for the first time, what should I do? My first advice generally is still to say, hey, go apply to YC.

Hmm.

Because we just have acquired so much knowledge, so much insight over the years, and they may not have been able to codify exactly what company— what will result in company being super successful, but they at least have a very good understanding on what will result in failure for sure.

Right.

And then, and that understanding on what not to do and just being able to guide you in the right direction itself is a huge value proposition. And there's just so much knowledge and so much insight there because having seen, I guess now 5,000+ companies go through YC, they just have so much more data and that's incredible. And then, and really with Gary Tan as the president, I feel like YC is back to its roots and back to its old days. Gary's the OG when it comes to YC, was part of, I think, the first batch. And he's just an incredible, incredible thinker, investor, just a genuinely helpful person. He helped us significantly during Flutter days when he was a partner at YC.

Oh, nice.

So it's amazing to see him invest in, I think, more unicorns than many other popular VCs out there. Yeah. while, and then going back to his roots and just bringing YC along the way.

I love that. Yeah, I think they've— I think you know better than me, you were like, you're a veteran there. But I heard like similar take from other founders, the ethics and the ethos, the way they approach startups, that's the same. It's just that the flavor is different, like, you know, new set of founders, new technology, set of problems and new ways to communicate what YC is through the content, the podcast they're doing.

That

is all new, but like, you know, the approach is the same. Do you have a fun story that you want to share from YC, like working with PG, Garry Tan, that I think probably you never shared, or like now that you want to talk about anything that's like Like, you know, it can be a fun story or it can be like, wow, that's such a great experience.

Well, um, yeah, I don't think we've talked publicly a lot about this, but we actually got rejected by YC in the— when we first sent our application.

Oh, wow.

And

okay,

uh, we— and we did it very last minute. We didn't do a good job writing our application. In hindsight, I think we wrote a really crappy application, to be honest. I'm surprised that we got rejected. But I had heard this rule. So someone told me a long time ago that sales begins when someone says no.

Hmm. It's—

if you go, right, if you haven't— if they haven't said no, then they bought. You didn't really sell. If you say no and then you try to convince them or change their mind, that's when you really sold. So I have sort of this rule of thumb where I say, okay, I'm not going to accept no for an answer the first time. Like, let's try.

Hmm.

So then back then, I'm sure PG still has his email out there, but at least back then it was very easily available. And I just sent him an email saying that, hey PG, you at least got to see our demo. I think you're making a mistake. We have an amazing product. We should— we deserve to be part of YC. And he immediately responded saying exact same thing that, no, no, no, I love what you guys are doing. It's just that your technology looking for a problem to solve. And I knew I couldn't argue against it. So I just threw randomly through this name that, yeah, but, you know, John Collison loves our technology. It's such a great technology that he loves it. And this is purely a random name throwing I did because John and Patrick were still running a small startup named Stripe. I didn't even know if PG knew them well, but I had just happened to walk into their office a few days before. Wow. showed John a demo. So, I just randomly threw the name in case PG knew me. And then PG responded saying that, oh, John loves it. Let me talk to him. So, he ended up calling John Collison, who raved about our technology and really recommended us. And that's how we got into YC. So, you know, that's a little fun nugget. And the part that's even funnier, at least to me, is I think 2 or 3 weeks after we got in, We met PG for office hours for the first time, and we told him what we're doing, showed him the demo. He was really excited about it. And then we told him that, hey, you rejected us, and then this is what happened, and you got in, and we got in. And he had no recollection of the entire experience. He's just like, really? And you guys got in? And I let you in? Wow. And that was just his reaction. Wow. But yeah, that's how we got in.

Oh man, that's a fun story right there. Yeah, I see like, you know, PG came back to Office Hours these days. I saw a couple of founders tweeting about it, and even PG himself shared some of the experiences. And one of the founders said, you guys don't believe the personality PG has. That's what the tweet is. He's like so friendly, so human, so normal. He's like, he's not like, you know, he has a big— He's not a big person when it comes to like talking to you, you know, he's just being him, but he's so passionate, like you said. That's a fun story. We should definitely, you know, share that. Now let's just switch gears a little bit. I think Flutter got acquired, $40 million, you got into Google. Right. Now you're in this bigger corporation, you know, you had opportunities, like you worked at Nest. And it's all, I think, software, software until Nest. It's more of like machine learning. And even then it's blend of hardware and software. So how the hell you ended up building Matic? Like, where did you kind of got the courage and the confidence? Like, okay, we can build like a groundbreaking technological company, which is hardware, not only like software. So Talk to me about that transition from Flutter, Google, then where you are right now.

That's a great question. Thank you for asking, actually. So obviously, we did a few things right at Flutter, which resulted in our acquisition in terms of just building a good technology. But the lessons learned was it wasn't a product number one, but there was a second lesson from Flutter as well, that while we built gestures to work on these cameras, webcams, we didn't have access to webcam at all in terms of just the API. So very simple things like frame rates per second, we couldn't control that. Auto exposure, we couldn't control that. Just the focus of the camera, how far it can see, how near it can see, we couldn't control that. So at that time, while we built a really, really good app, we knew that we were building algorithms for eyes. It's like building a brain, having a brain for eye that couldn't be controlled. The eyes wavered. So at some point, we realized that we had built a half solution. We didn't really take full advantage because if you had tightly integrated hardware and software, we could have pushed the needle quite a bit. And that also made next realization that, look, we can't arbitrarily say that I'm going to solve a problem, but I'll just do software or I'll just do hardware. You have to think of a problem and then think of a product. And if it requires you to solve hardware and software, you should go and solve it along the way. So that was the thing. So we knew that we had this blind spot. If we go into another startup, there is this blind spot that we don't actually know how to do hardware at all. And that's why perhaps we shied away from it during Flutter days anyway. So going to Nest was a very deliberate decision, or transitioning inside Google, because we got acquired, then Nest got acquired. And luckily for us, Tony Fadell was an investor in Flutter. So we had a relationship with him. So we had an opportunity to move to— transition to Nest. And going there was a few reasons. One is for the first time we would work on hardware and learn how to do hardware. For the first time, we would work on a product that people actually paid for in Nest cameras. And also the opportunity to work for one of the greatest product minds in Tony— product and marketing minds in Tony Hsieh was amazing as well. Yeah. All 3 of the reasons why we dabbled in it and we learned how to do hardware. Along the way, we also, if you actually go watch original iPhone keynote by Steve Jobs, I believe the 3rd or 4th slide has a quote by Alan Kay.

Yes.

That said that those curious about software should do their own hardware.

Yes.

And we always felt that machine learning and AI, at least at that time, was bottlenecked based on computes and hardware capabilities. Not necessarily the algorithms itself. So that's where we thought that if we're going to go to another startup and push AI, maybe we should do hardware too. So that was one part of it. There is a second thesis which I will also kind of dabble into, and this is a bit controversial but really true in the sense that still today, and maybe things will change with AI, but still today, there is not really a consumer software business model anymore. Okay, what I mean by that is back in '90s, and I graduated in '99, so back in late '90s, like, first, most people don't know that Netscape Navigator was a paid browser, not free. Microsoft Explorer became free, so then they had to match and make it free. We used to pay for Maps, we used to pay for emails, we used to pay for calendars, we used to pay for all consumer software.

You

bought Microsoft Office. I remember paying, uh, $30 for each Mac OS X upgrade as well.

Right.

Even operating system upgrade was free. Now, what happened in the '90s is that Google started releasing a lot of this software from Calendar to Maps to Gmail for free for consumers. Now, in some ways, it's a great thing that consumers got all this amazing software for free that made technology really ubiquitous. Chrome is free. Everyone is using it. But on the flip side, we also felt that consumer software also hasn't seen innovation because of that too. So, you know, right, Gmail was great for 20 years ago. 20 years later, still hasn't changed, right? Calendar was amazing for 20 years ago, but it still hasn't really changed. So once you take the incentive or ability to create value away, then innovation stagnates. And we weren't sure how that would play out on the AI consumer side as well. So will there be AI consumer app? Will they make money? Will they do a good business? That's an open question. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. We don't know the answer, but at least we thought that it would be harder versus if you're really pushing for AI on the hardware and if you're solving a problem, then product almost always has a thing. So that's where really we spent time that, look, in consumer space, if you really want to push the needle on hardware and on the AI side, some sort of hardware-software combination is probably a better way to go about doing it than just software alone.

I love that. I think again, you're going back to the same first principle, focus on the problem. Problem's more important than solution, right? It's whether you're hardware, software, doesn't matter. You want to do both, doesn't matter. If the problem demands, you have to do it. I kind of like the that mindset. I feel nowadays everybody's raving about, hey, this is a cool thing we're building, forgetting about what actually the problem is. A couple of things, it's kind of like a follow-up to that question about, you know, transition. You went to— you worked at Google in Nest is being kind of that sexy product in those days. And I think if I read it right, one of the reasons Google bought Flutter, at least through the internet, is to implement in Google Glass, which is kind of like— is that true? How much of it is true?

Yeah.

Because it's a failed product. Google Glass. And

yes,

what is like the story behind that?

Yeah, so, so we, we were— so we did meet with Sergey Brin and Google Glass team back in the days when we were doing Flutter and we showed it to them. But I think when we got acquired, we weren't acquired in Google X, we were actually acquired in Google Research. And the reason we were acquired is that at least at that point in time, Android team had some plans to release a Kinect-like product for gaming. And that's where they were looking to implement gestures. And that's where the acquisition became interesting. And I think Apple was trying to do something similar as well. So Apple was interested in us as well at that time. And we ended up going with Google for various reasons. But that was the reason why we did it. Now, As it happens, acquisitions take time, due diligence take time, paperwork take time. So by the time we actually closed the deal, closed the acquisition, and got to Google, that plan— his plans had already changed.

Oh, wow.

So then it was more— so then we were part of this team called Airbender, where we were just really exploring all these technologies from ultrasonic gestures to vision-based gestures to, as I said, Cardboard AR/VR. and kind of saying, okay, what does the future look like? What are the future products that would come out? And how can we apply that to various technologies inside Nest? So at some point when Google started— I mean, sorry, inside Google. So at some point when Google started thinking about Google Home, that's when we knew that if you ever add the thing, it will have gestures. So I believe Nest Home Hub Max, the flat rectangular version of it, has a pause to raise your hand to pause the music. music gesture, which was Flutter. So that's how, that's how it ended up there.

So do you think they're still using Flutter, the technology, today?

The underlying algorithms have completely changed, uh, which is when we were doing Flutter back in 2012, uh, deep learning was still very nascent. Uh, we were doing all the classical computer vision, uh, tricks. Now what they implemented in 2019, I believe, was based on the deep learning's underlying How has changed because deep learning just became far more accurate.

That's— man, technology is so fascinating, right? It always, I think, inspires people when you go back to those old days, nitty-gritty, and kind of talking about the groundbreaking technology. So majority of your life at Google, you were a product person. You said you worked with Tony Fadell very closely, in your words, and I agree too. He's one of the greatest minds in, you know, product space. He built like iPod and so many things at Apple and then many things at Nest. So talk to me about your product expertise, the things you learned from Tony that you're kind of implementing right now at Matic.

So, I'll even go back and freely admit that we wouldn't be able to do hardware or robots or build Matic had we not gone at Nest and learned how to do hardware, how to do product from Tony and the Nest team. Our entire Nest team was just phenomenal. The colleagues were phenomenal and we learned a lot. And one of the biggest things even Tony taught us is one, obviously, we've alluded to it, startup But start with a problem. But as a product, his entire point has always been that it's not just about what we think of a physical product. It starts all the way at the beginning when you start initially talking to customers. So, how do they discover your product? How do they actually learn about your product in terms of first 3 things that are interesting? So, how are you telling that story initially to get them interested in it? Now, once they, once they get interested, are you making it truly simple for them to onboard? Are you making it delightful? Are you? And then even after you're done, what is the experience on day 7, day 30, day 6, day, you know, 180, 6 months down the road? Are you telling, showing the right value proposition to them along the way and how your product is genuinely helping? So it's really the entire customer journey. And the story that you have to emphasize. And along the way, you constantly have to come up with things that delight people, that delight the users. And really, that's what the focus was across the board, that make sure you're thinking through product in a very, very customer-centric way and as a story and tell that story to customers. And your product is just one element of that entire story.

And do you think that approach applies for both hardware and software products?

Oh, absolutely.

Which is like talking to customers, identifying how they're feeling about a particular problem, reacting, taking note of their reactions and then simplifying it, simplifying the experience. Yeah. Talk to me about the things that apply for both hardware and software.

I think across the board, if you're solving a problem and if you're telling a story, stories. We humans love stories. That's true for our customers, that's true for our users. And stories is what we get enamored by. So, in that sense, even for software, it begins with, you know, how did they discover whether it's your website or whether it's your app and how are— what is the first interaction? What is the first thing? So, I'll give you an example. We did this maybe a little bit more intuitively at Flutter than what Tony taught us, but we at Flutter, we had this rule of thumb That, can you get customers from zero to smile in 60 seconds? What does that mean? That means that if customer decides to get Flutter app at 3:00 AM in the morning, within 60 seconds, they should be able to download it, install it, and understand what the first gesture is, perform the gesture, and have a smile on their face. So, and that alludes to having speed, that alludes to having simplicity, that alludes to having valuing the time of your customers. That alludes to also this point of view that, look, in general, we all are, and especially users are, in a very good way as a species, lazy, selfish. And they don't want to— at 3:00 AM in the morning especially, you don't have time to think. You just want to enjoy. So can you actually bring that delight to users? And if you do it, then people will continue using your product. That first impression will create a strong emotional connection. action. And I think that's across the board.

Wow, I like that. I think we should do a separate episode just talking about how to build a great product because there is so much to unpack. But I do want to cover a couple of things. One is, you know, we talked—

Yeah, one more thing. You mentioned how to build great products. Over the years I've learned, and maybe Maybe we learned through Tony. I don't remember exactly where this framework came from, but I continuously say now that there is no such thing as a great product. There is only simple product and complex product, and simplicity is extremely hard to achieve.

So

if you make a simple product, by definition, it's great. Okay? And and you know, entire worldwide people love Starbucks. I'm sure a lot of coffee aficionados have different opinions, but generally. Starbucks is universally loved, and this is because you can walk into any Starbucks in the world and order that drink, and it will taste exactly the same. The operational challenges and simplicity of of making that happen—it's amazing for customer. For you, you don't have to think; you don't have to worry about anything. You just walk in, and you're going to get a drink that you do it, and that simplicity is really really hard to achieve. And and having being in California, there is always bias for In-N-Out Burgers, but. ever go to In-N-Out Burger, that's the same simplicity you'll see across the board.

Oh man, now you're bringing a lot of other examples into the picture, which is, you know, fundamentals are the same. I love that first principles thinking. Whatever you're building doesn't matter, you know, if you come from first principles. I want to ask a couple of non-startup questions. One is, you're an immigrant, If I'm not wrong, you moved from India. You've spent majority of your life in the US, and you saw the struggles of, you know, the immigrants surviving, thriving, and kind of, you know, striving to the next level. Talk to me about your immigrant story. Like, what made you move to the US? What motivated you to get into the startups? And what was your entire journey? dream that pushed you from your comfort zone?

Thank you for asking that question as well. I actually moved here when I was 15, so very early on. And it was for whatever reason, I can't remember the exact details, but it was decided that I would go get education in the United States. And that's when I moved here in 11th grade and did my education here. But honestly, I think United States is one of the greatest countries in the world. in terms of the sheer capitalistic society as well as the opportunity it provides anyone. So, you know, I'm here today and it's a complete dream. I don't think I ever imagined in my wildest dream or craziest wildest dream, or my parents in their wildest dream that I'd be here. And it happened because US has a great public school system in terms of high school, then has a great community college system. the undergrad and the— if you're willing to work hard, opportunity is there for you. If you're willing to take risk, opportunity is there for you. And for me, you know, I always felt— luckily for me, I also graduated at the height of '99 where startups were pretty in vogue. So that initially gave me a flavor to go join a startup. My first job out of undergrad was a startup and it was a spectacular failure. Really? We burned through $30 million in 11 months. So, it was more like startup 101. Wow. But at the same time, the small team environment, the camaraderie, this desire to just go do something big was really intoxicating and just very addictive, if you will. And I didn't understand that right away, to be honest. When the startup failed, I actually ended up at Accenture for 2 and a half years. And that was really when I realized that both consulting as well as big companies are not necessarily my cup of tea. What I really enjoy is the small team environment. Right. And striving for something big. And again, in hindsight, now I feel like I didn't know this, but I always optimized for just learning more. I was just always hungry for learning. So that's another reason why startups always resonated because you just learn so fast. When things go wrong, you learn even faster when things go right. And across the board, it was just amazing to— the learning that I had for that first year was so much different and so much more than the 2.5 years spent at Accenture. So, it just made sense to go back to startups and start learning. And then, I just thought that there were a lot of really amazing, ambitious people across the board. And reason to move to Silicon Valley, and I was in Florida as an undergrad in my high school, then moved to DC area for undergrad at University of Maryland, Baltimore County, then made my way to Chicago for business school. And then I moved westward. And I also moved westward. The reason I moved to Valley, I give credit to this alum of University of Chicago Booth. She unfortunately passed away, but her name was Catherine Gould. And if I remember correctly, she said that she was the 14th employee at Oracle. And she built a huge Rolodex of contacts after her stint at Oracle and eventually started a venture capital firm in Foundation Capital. So really, really amazing career. And I remember still sitting in a room where she came and her point was that, hey, in the 1980s, I moved to Silicon Valley because I thought that was the next big thing. That was the rocket ship. And I just wanted to be on the rocket ship of an area. you guys should figure out what is the rocket ship of an area. And this is still 2005. So, it's not like internet and online was as ubiquitous that you could be anywhere in the world and do your thing. It was still a lot offline. So, her point was that you should figure out what's the next Silicon Valley and move there. And I thought quite hard about it and I just thought that next Silicon Valley was still Silicon Valley. So, I just ended up— I was pretty set on moving to Silicon Valley.

Yeah, I was about to ask. One of the things I want to ask is about the impact of Valley, you being in SF, everything happens there. Would have— it's a right question to ask now because you've done so much. Would you have done the same what you did in the past elsewhere?

I don't think so. I don't think so. The reason I say I don't think so is, okay, I'll caveat this by saying that I haven't lived outside of Silicon Valley for 20 years now, so I don't necessarily have a good understanding on how what it feels like to be outside of it. But at least back then, back then in 2005, when I moved from Chicago to Silicon Valley, San Francisco for the first time, it was a shock. And the reason it was a shock is because I felt like the entire Silicon Valley was 10 years ahead in terms of technology. In terms of just the future understanding on where the world is going. And I thought I knew technology, you know, having worked at a startup in Northern Virginia area and then Chicago. But when I got there, it was just absolutely stunning how advanced the world was. And there was no— one thing which is also kind of crazy here, and I still think it's true, is generally people do not believe anything is impossible from technological point of view. No one says that, hey, technology is impossible. No one here says that AGI is impossible. They just argue about when and how, but not necessarily if. That's very interesting and unique mindset, and that, but that really rubs off of everyone. And, and this place might be the only place that if you've been in Silicon Valley for 20 years and you've only worked at Google, there is a good chance someone may Look at you and say, "Wait, really? You've never done a startup? You've never taken a shot?" So it's only one place where being in a long, big company for twenty years is an anomaly versus versus doing a startup. So so that's that's the way I think about it. So I I don't think so. This this area is just incredibly incredibly incredibly ambitious, and I think it's because not the area. that there is— there are incredibly ambitious people all over the world who choose to move to Silicon Valley all the time, and that ends up making this place quite ambitious.

I think ambition is contagious. I think Valley proves that statement. You know, it's kind of like it spreads on everybody, and, you know, no matter how big of— how small, bigger your dreams are, that's what One of the dreams I have, I'm still chasing, is to move to Valley at some point and build a company there. It's always like fascinating from an outside standpoint, but also at the same time, the primary reason is how can I be part of a set of people who are thinking in just like you've defined it? You've defined Silicon Valley in the right way. It's not about if, it's about when and how.

That's correct.

So being in that conversation itself is, it's so fascinating to me. It's like, you know, imagining that is like, you know, so motivating because there is, there is not a chance that it won't be possible. It's just like, you know, when are you going to figure it out? And you take help, you seek help, you rely on people so that they show how. Right? This is how it can be done. And you basically have to be in the right set. And I think the right set is in Valley. So I really, really love the way you define, you know, I think that's something kind of very unconventional, right? They say that it's all, you know, the people believe that they have a mindset, but I think that's the right way. I want to talk about Now that we're talking about ambitions, I see Matic Robots as being more of like a moonshot, which is like a generational company. And, you know, it's not easy or simple. It's more complex. There are so many things. So talk to me about taking Matic Robots to 0 to 1. What was that first phase look like for you guys? You're a big team now. You're not like scrappy, you have a working product and yeah, talk to me about the struggles, the things that people generally don't hear about building a hardware company.

Yep, I think so. So I think that someone said it that if people knew how hard it was going to be, there's a good chance they would never start, right? And I think that remains true Across the board, the entrepreneurial journey, any startup. So naivete and ignorance is kind of cool in that way. But the way I always talk about also is that if you're trying to come up with a rationale, logical reasoning on why you should start a company or you should take entrepreneurial plunge, well, I hate to break it to anyone that there is no rational or logical reason. It's completely emotional.

Right.

So Absolutely. So, Matic was this itch, which is one of the itch that we always had, even when we were at Nest. So, I've worked at Nest Camera, and Nest Cameras are amazing product, but I don't think of Nest Cameras as iconic product. Nest Thermostat is an iconic product, and that's what Nest is remembered for. iPod is, iPhone is, Model S is. These are the products, ChatGPT is, these are the products that come to the market and change the perception of what's possible. And we had this desire that while we had been in AI and computer vision and on the forefront of technology for all of our career, we had yet to put everything together and build what we thought was an iconic product. And that's really why we started going after Matic. And that iconic product had to solve a real problem, and it had to be something that changes the perception of what's possible. And that's really how we started thinking about it. And we just thought that indoor robotics, home robotics is where field was stagnant, that no one was thinking this from first principles or algorithms first. And if we come and build a really good product, let's say Tesla FSD for the home robots, then that's a changing thing. So that was the desire. And I think, you know, second time around when we started Flutter, We just came up with the idea and started running. This time around, we sat down and we spent quite a bit of time thinking through everything we want to do. And the reason— and it was very much from day one, we knew that this was going to be a long-term thing. We wrote down on a piece of paper that whatever we do next, we don't want to get acquired. And that was part of the rule. That means let's take an idea that is so big and so hairy and so challenging that we can spend the rest of our careers on it and not not get bored and keep learning. And robotics is absolutely that way. Wow. And it had to take advantage of computer vision and AI, which was our strength. So those were the 3 things. And robotics was a space where we thought we could apply and keep building for a long, long time because we genuinely felt like robotics was on the cusp of breaking out. And it took 7 years, but it's starting to break out here. So we just felt that robotics was on the cusp of breaking out given advances in AI and And Navneet, my co-founder, helped design Google Coral TPU. So we knew this AI chips or higher computes are also coming, which would have a huge impact on the future. So we knew at that point in time, and that's why we started early. At the same time, we thought, our joke is that we are only off by one digit in terms of shipping because we thought we would ship in 2020. Now we're looking at 2024 and finally starting to ship. Hmm. way longer. And I think it's— I had heard this general rule of thumb that whatever you do as a startup, it will take 2x the money and 2x the time than you anticipate. So, it is 2x the time. And what kept us going is that it's really— it's that there's this deep conviction that this is a real problem for people and this is a real need. And we started in 2017 thinking space hasn't change and disk robots are exactly the same.

Right.

It's 2024, 7 years later, and it's still the same. Nothing has really changed. And what's interesting about floor cleaning category, which most people don't realize that because there's this perception that it's saturated or highly competitive, but actually it's not neither of those things. What's interesting about this category is that it's growing at 18% year over year for the last 7 years. Even though net promoter score for this category is negative one, which is I've never met anyone who says robotic vacuum saved my life. Or it's a product everyone keeps buying. Everyone complains about it. Everyone hates when it gets stuck or when it pulls.

It's a necessity, right? You have to you have to have it. Yeah,

that's correct. So it's a it's a market where net promoter score is negative one. No one loves it, yet it's. which means it's a real need. The intensity of a problem is really high and frequency is really high. And if in this market, if you can come and deliver a better product, there is clearly an opportunity. So that was there. Now, other interesting piece of the puzzle, by the way. So as I mentioned, it's grown 18% year over year for the last 7 years. Only other category in hardware space or consumer electronics space that has grown that fast for that long is smartphone category. And that also after introduction of iPhone. And this is one piece of the puzzle that most people don't understand. I think iRobot had sold— and iRobot, which is the name of the company that sells Roombas— that's altogether about 10 million robots by 2015. So from 2002 to 2015, in 13 years, they had sold 10 million robots. In the last 9 years since then, they have sold 40 million more, so cumulatively 50 million. So they've actually grown exponentially. Wow. ever innovating at all in some ways. And that shows the need and intensity of a problem. And if you can innovate, there's a huge opportunity.

I think that's why I describe you guys as the Tesla of vacuum cleaners, at least right now, because yeah, everything is traditional except like the Dyson. That's a separate category, but those are not robots. You have to do it manually by yourself. I don't know when they're going to come into the market. I have a very curious question. It took 7 years and I think you're selling now, right?

Yes.

Generally, again, I'm not a hardware person at least, but if you take that much long when you're in a software company or at least in the other side of the spectrum, Panic is anxiety, panic, fear is always at the heights because you're not doing much. There is no output, there is only input. And especially hardware being hardware, you have to spend so much time in R&D, manufacturing comes into place, distribution different. They're like, it's so fucking complex, period.

Yeah.

When it comes to hardware. How do you manage your anxiety levels as a founder? You know, runway, maintaining people, keeping the morale high, not losing hope, but still like, hey, we can do this. And I just am very curious about, because I think the only other person I feel who's still chasing is Elon Musk with the— Right. SpaceX, like pushing, you know, so I want to— I'm just curious, hardware people, how do you do it? Like, in your perspective, how do you do it?

So, so I'll answer this question in 2 parts. So first, I want to address saying that it's actually just not hardware. Hardware is absolutely hard, and I would say robotics within hardware is probably— if hardware is hard, then robotics is 10x harder. But actually, just building a great product is always hard. So, you know, if you go back and look at Figma, Figma, I think, believe, took 4 or 5 years to launch. And, and, you know, I think Dylan Field is very infamous for saying that it will take— I would try to do it faster, that I would launch earlier. Yeah. And there are lessons you would probably learn. But the reality is it's a great product, and that great product took time. Notion, uh, again, a product where I think the founder is infamous for talking about how they were in wilderness for a long, long time, and it took them years to really,

right,

get there. So anything worth building takes time. I believe Superhuman took a long time, uh, before they got, uh, good as well. Similarly, OpenAI was in wilderness for 6 years doing a lot of research stuff.

True, true. Yeah, let me— so I, I'll— you're kind of shutting me down here. So, you know, you're kind of shutting me down showing these examples, but okay, let me reframe the question. When you build a company, it takes time. How hard it is, I wanna, I wanna hear from a founder standpoint. No, I'm just joking. You go on.

I was, I wasn't trying to shut down. I was just wanted to kind of— I think there is this misperception or misconception that only hardware is hard. And I would like to say that any, any product, software, hardware, any great but simple product, as we sort of talked about, worth building is It takes time. It's hard. So, so, so you have to be in it for the long term. And the only way you get through, uh, through day to day is, is, you know, I, I don't have it in this office, but our prior office, I used to have a desk and there was a wall. And on that wall, I had a poster. And that poster said, just keep swimming, um, which is How Do You Find Nemo? You just— and that's really the answer to getting every day that That you have to think long term, you have to plan long term, but on a day-to-day basis, you have to kind of narrow your focus and just shift on making progress day to day in a very minute manner and just focus on taking action that day and kind of succeeding that day. And these are all things that became relevant because you hear this in sports. Right? In sports, you hear a lot of people saying one play at a time, one practice at a time, one game at a time, which is they're trying to win championship. And those all sounds like cliché, but really that's it. It's like, how do you climb Mount Everest? Well, one step at a time. So in the same exact way, the way the anxiety is real, you obviously have to pace yourselves and there's always Ups and downs. I don't believe anyone who says they don't have up and down. There are always challenges you face, but you just roll up the sleeve next day and start going again, and you keep doing it enough eventually and you get there. That is, I don't have anything except saying just keep swimming.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think, you know, it is so simple but yet so profound, and you have to just kind of Do it to know it, right? If you don't do it, you don't know it. So you have to kind of do that. I think just keep swimming is the same thing. You have to show up, do it, be better, and then it'll come. We don't know when, just have to go.

And there was a really good framework. I'll actually give credit to Scott Belsky for it, who's obviously doing all the amazing stuff at Aerobie and was a part of at Benchmark, a really brilliant product mind as well. Um, and he had this good framework, and he said that as an entrepreneur, once you start your journey, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years into it, do you have more conviction in your idea or less? If knowing what you know now after 3 years of on that journey, if you have more conviction, then you absolutely need to keep going. If your conviction has gone down, then you may think about pivoting or Or doing different things. So, that's sort of a difference between, you know, not falling for sunk cost fallacy, which is when do you persevere and when do you pivot and how do you think about it? And that was a really good framework that if the conviction in what you're doing is there, then you have to keep going. And I think for us, the conviction has only gotten stronger. The more feedback we get from our customers, the more we talk to our customers, the more we understand the usage across the board. We can see this hunger from people to get some better product that actually works, works in an intelligent way. And that desire is still there. That just allows us to keep going, that we know that if we ship this and it works as it's supposed to, then we know people will love it.

Awesome. I think that this brings me like a right segue to this question. Given the conviction has gone higher, what is something that you're excited about Matic in the next few years? You're right now, you're at the cleaning side, the robots that cleans by itself. I think I'm just going to the website and it's ridiculous. It's like it has real-time 3D mapping. What the fuck? It's not a you know, a NASA bot. It has— it auto-toggles between mopping and vacuum. It knows, and it has gestures. It can activate by voice. It has like— you don't need to be supervising it. It knows, you know, when the mess is here, when to clean. It has scheduling and stuff. The website is insane, guys. You just have to go through the level of thought and, you know, insight these guys put in. Yeah. Is this the beginning or are you guys going to double down? Like, take iPhone as a product, right? My question is more on like, do you see Matic being like an empire of robotic products just like Apple has an iPhone, iPod, like Apple Watch, the headphones and all that? Or what do you think? What is the future of Matic?

I think we wrote this down on day one as well, that our goal was to be Apple of home robotics or Tesla of home robotics, if you will. And that is really the way we are going after. I think home is where the need is significantly higher than many of the use cases. And that's where people are wasting time. I think I did the math at some point and there is, on average, people spend 6 trillion hours a day. I mean, hours a year. Sorry, 6 trillion hours a year spent by entire population in on Earth just doing home chores.

Wow.

That's crazy amount of time. It's insane. $6 trillion. Okay, now that's the time that you don't, which is we hate cleaning, we hate doing mundane and repetitive stuff. So that's the time we much rather spend with kids, much rather spend being creative, productive, learning music, learning things. So just sheer need for these robots is actually ginormous in our opinion. And we just think there is a huge opportunity. And while it took a long time for us to get here, the foundation we've built is actually quite strong. And on that, we can build many, many products. So in short term, I'm just super excited about getting Magic to all the preorder customers and having them experience it because there is no better feeling in the world than imagining a sort of a product that you think would be amazing and then customers feeling the same vein and kind of getting excited about it. So that's the short term. And in the long term, now the idea is, okay, so we've done clean floors, great. Now what's next? From clean floors to clean homes, what is the next product? How do we solve manipulation? How do we solve locomotion? How do we solve a problem of, you know, dishwashers and floor cleaning? And you'll understand this particular point, which is Every single appliance in our home is actually a batch process. So, we are taught to collect dishes until dishwasher can be full or collect clothes until washer dryer can be full. But, we want to live in a perpetually clean home with perpetually clean floors. And, this is what we had growing up in India even as a middle-class family. I remember if you have a domestic help, my clothes not only washed every day, they got ironed every day and dishes get cleaned 3 times a day and homes get broomed. Yeah. Twice a day. So entropy is always there. Our homes are constantly getting dirty, and we had this physical human being as a help matching that entropy and cleaning on our behalf all the time. Well, it's not— that's a perfect job for a robot. So can we enable a future where homes are always clean, where we are always living in a hygienic environment, and we're not doing it? So as a homeowner, as a family person, as a dad, I want to live in a perpetually clean home with perpetually clean floors and dishes and clothes, and I don't want to do it. I don't want anyone else to do it. I just want a robot to take care of it. So there's a huge opportunity to go after. That's what we're excited about.

Can't wait to kind of unpack when that time comes to talk to you about, like, you know, a few years ago we talked about it and you're doing it right now. I can't wait for the future to come in so that we can chat about this moment. Last question before we wrap up. I feel 2024 is the year for the hardware companies to come back. It's like a comeback year. It feels like, you know, Friend.com, Humane Pin, even though it's like a disaster, but there are a bunch of other things that are coming in. There is this tiny pod which turns your Apple Watch into a small size phone. It's like so many interesting hardware products are coming out. What is your take, or at least your prediction, that, okay, these are the, these are the areas or the problems people are going to solve next? Where is the future of even take robotics or generally in, generally in hardware? This is where the direction is heading towards. I'm just want— I just want to go into your mind. to bring those predictions out?

So all I can— a great question. And all I can kind of share is what we've learned over the years, because, you know, I might be one of the few ones who is still a founder in Silicon Valley who was around in first bubble as well as the second boom and third boom. And what I've seen is that each step change in some sort of a platform or technology allows new sort of hardware or new sort of products to emerge. So, you know, in late '90s, obviously the laptops and PDAs and all those things came out. And then eventually when the technology improved and the internet got faster, it enabled iPhone and smartphones. And now we're at a point where AI is another step change, which is actually enabling new devices. Yeah. So, all the renaissance of hardware is a function of sort of a step change in technology or a platform. And you always see this. And to be honest, I'm really excited about all these guys from Humane to Friend to all these guys taking shots at building really, really amazing products and trying to innovate. But we are still in a phase where people are still experimenting. And I remember this particularly, I quit this phase to sort of 2009, 2010 post-iPhone when apps were proliferating and everyone was building the photos app or messaging app or all kinds of interesting things. And, you know, Apple just released a feature where you can, you can, um, yeah, yeah, the money—

Bring 2 phones together.

Yeah. And I remember one of my good friends and actually investor David Lib, who is a partner at YC now, he built an app called Bump, where you bump your phones and it would transfer money and it would transfer contact information. And this was in 2009, 2010. There are 130 million app downloads. It just was way ahead of the curve. So, a lot of it is sort of new again in that scenario, but we are still in this experimental phase. And within that, someone will figure out some killer use case where people just say, okay, I absolutely really need this, that this is great. I think you have kids. I always felt that being with kids, there are times when I want to capture the moment. And if I had a camera built in and it could just turn on and turn off, it would be great. But can it be done in an unintrusive way? Can it be done in a way where other users' privacies are not jeopardized? So those are all things that we would have. It's just a matter of someone productizing it and making it And that's probably really the hard part. I want to emphasize that word. Productizing is really hard. You can have the same exact idea in multiple different flavors, but those who productize well work.

Wow. I would definitely buy that. Capture kicks, the moments we spend with kids, because now we have to stop them and we have to ask them to do it again, which spoils the moment and we are coming out of the moment.

Yeah, actually, Meta Raven. The Ray-Bans are a great example of AI getting implemented. They're not great as much yet as a personal assistant, but they have this feature and they're great. But the challenge is you still probably can't get them in prescription glasses, or maybe you'll have to wear lenses. Yeah. So they are there. Also, you know, there is a— it's unfortunate, but there is a— Meta has shipped some great hardware. It's just that there seems to be some concerns around privacy and people haven't taken it seriously. But I think Meta has shipped some great hardware and Meta Ravens are amazing and hopefully they'll keep adding amazing AI on top of it to make it really—

Mehul, you're kind of converting me or your evangelism is working. I want to be like a hardware founder. What advice would you give me?

No, I'm just—

that's a very serious question though. I'm just curious, if you were to suggest someone who wants to build a career, or not even career, like they want to be, they're very passionate, they want to be, they're entrepreneurs, but they want to try hardware, where should they start?

I think, okay, so first I'll repeat the advice that Tony Fadell gives, which is almost all problems can be solved using software. And if they can't be solved using software, don't do hardware. hardware. So even internally, even though we are a robotics and hardware company, we have this motto that solves problems using software willingly, hardware grudgingly. So I would advise to be very grudging about, which is you have to verify that there is no way this can be done without amazing hardware and then go and solve it, not without it. So that's one. So think hard. But if you really want to just start a hardware company, I think the best Hardware is hard enough where more than anything, unless you have a background where you prototype, let's say at Waterloo or some other universities as a mechanical or E engineer, I would recommend going and working at hardware company and seeing at least for a year and getting trained and then coming and doing. This is one place where I don't think you can just hack your way to figuring it out. I may be wrong. I'm sure there are people who have done it, but I feel like hardware is complex enough where you do need a little bit of an undergrounder from someplace which actually knows how.

Well, that's, that's, uh, uh, there is no shortcuts. You have to go through it, right? There you have to go through the, the ins and outs. But any, any closing thoughts before we wrap up? Yeah,

I'll, uh, add this one framework, which is, you know, I, I believe, uh, I forget the name of the person who was a venture partners, I think it was Joe something, but he said that, you know, when company fails, right, you learn how not to fail. But there are thousands of ways companies can fail, but there are very, very few ways it can succeed. So being part of the success teaches you how to succeed, right? And that's really a profound statement. So even though the startup that I had worked initially failed, I actually learned a lot more at Salesforce, a lot at like.com, a lot more startups that work, including at Nest. So in that scenario, you need to see how things work. So that's where— that's what I was trying to allude to in terms of when it comes to hardware, you're better off working in one good company which is doing really, really well from hardware perspective and just gaining enough insight to go do your—

Well, I think that's, that's the right point where we should stop. I feel that's a great, uh, that's That's great advice right there. You have to go, you know, test the waters and you have to get into the weeds and learn and then, you know, get out.

So, you did that a lot of times. So, similarly, I think that probably enabled you what you're doing today. So, you did that as well. So, that makes sense.

Yeah, it's kind of like an evolution, right? You go somewhere, you learn, and you implement that those lessons. And, you know, you try not to fail, you try to succeed. When you do that in this, it's all lessons and learning. And, uh, Mehul, I really, really, really appreciate— I didn't expect any of this, by the way. Honestly, guys, I was, I was, I was more into like, hey, how did you guys build like an FST type for Matic? That was my— that's literally one of my questions. Like, but I think it came out really great because You've dropped so many frameworks. I really love the problem, building a problem deck versus solution deck, intensity, frequency, the scale of the problem. Those are some frameworks I feel they apply for everything, not hardware, software. You basically apply for every founder. So I genuinely want to, you know, appreciate you for coming in and spending time sharing the experiences you had with us today. Thank you. But yeah, that's it, folks. You know, stay tuned. I'll put all the frameworks and everything in the show notes for people, like people mentioned and everybody, so that they can check the resources. The PG blog, I want to go read that blog right now. So appreciate you, Mehul, and stay tuned, guys. We have more guests, awesome people coming on the show, but appreciate you. Cheers. Thanks for listening.

All right.