🕶️ ai-enabled eyewear with bobak tavangar

Welcome to another CEO wisdom pod with Babak Tavangar. Babak is CEO at Brilliant Labs. Is be building a cool AI eyewear. We'll talk about Google Glass today. We'll talk about AI, we'll talk about humane, which I'm pretty sure that you checked out their demo, Bob, and yeah, that was super impressive and I think you guys are building some interesting stuff too. So without further ado, Baba, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit more about what you're up to nowadays?

Yeah, it's good to be here with you, Charles. So like I said, I'm CEO of Brilliant Labs. Started this company after Apple and we started with a really different sort of FE on what smart eyewear, what AR could be. We saw a lot of companies doing very bulky, more or less closed source sort of video game console type devices overpriced and none of it seemed to be sticking. And so we, we started the company with an idea that maybe it's not about trying to put a PlayStation in front of your eyes. You know, maybe, maybe that makes for a nice gimmicky YouTube videos, but that's not great for like daily use case stuff. Maybe it's about putting artificial intelligence in front of your eyes. A co mind that helps to amplify your biological powers onto the world. It helps you navigate life in a whole new way across different contexts to see and understand things in a way that you didn't before and augment how you behave and interact with the world. So when we started the company, we started initially with a focus on computer vision. And of course that's broadened now to include generative AI. And it's exciting. Of course we can get into this, but GPT4 is now multimodal, which means that it doesn't just take your text input, but it takes images, potentially streaming video, audio, data from what's called an imu, which can capture your acceleration, your movements, what direction you're pointing. So the, you know, the space is kind of blown up and it's getting very exciting.

How hard is it to explain with words what you do? Granted that you're in the visual space, like how would you describe what your device does with words in less than 30 seconds?

We make AI enabled eyewear.

Okay, and is that words that pop in front of my eyes or is it, is there a sound? Since GPT is visual, so there could be a camera in there, takes a photo and then it would explain in my ear what that bird is. So is there that feature as well?

If for an upcoming device that we're going to be announcing soon. We, we decided to forego speakers. They add a lot of bulk, they consume a lot of power. We think that they add a very marginal kind of thing to the experience. And a lot of people have Bluetooth headphones. So we're an open Bluetooth protocol and we can just pipe audio straight into your headphones, otherwise you see it as very discrete subtitles in front of your eyes. That's how we've chosen to deliver the output.

Okay, interesting. So it would tell me that this bird is a blue jay, textually right in front of my eyes. Now, as an ex Apple product person, the Monocle sort of looks like in early phase, like if you're hacking something together. The pod looks good though, like the charging pod, that is. How do you plan into making this a beautiful Apple like seamless device?

So there's something that we're about to announce and I can't talk about it just yet, but it's going to answer that question pretty definitively. But to the first part of your question, Monocle was really designed to be sort of an open source hacker's best friend, sort of your go to workbench tool for hacking AR and AI. We wanted to do something that was a bit of a half step as the first product out. We didn't want to be so presumptuous and say, hey, ditch whatever you wear on your face today and wear our device instead. We're new, we're brilliant lads. We felt there was a little bit of hubris doing that and we thought, let's do a little pocket sized trinket that developers can start hacking with and can dovetail with existing hardware that many of us wear, which is our glasses. So that's our little half step into the space. And off the backs of that, people learn about us, we learn about our addressable market. And then we're about to make an exciting announcement. So stay tuned.

Hopefully I'll be out while we release this podcast. Now, as I was in the taxi coming back from my Spartan Ultra the weekend before, I thought to myself, why isn't there an AR device showing me how much this business makes? You know, like with a little arrow saying, oh, here's the business owner linking the LinkedIn, why isn't there such a thing? Or just facts about the other routes that I am rolling on or the speed at which I'm going in, like fun facts so that I can be entertained and educated while I ride in this taxi. Why isn't there such a thing? Why Isn't there something in front of me that shows me at the airport who wants to socialize and who's that girl and what's her story, for example? Why isn't there such a thing?

Yeah, there's a couple reasons why I think chief among them is there's never been a compelling enough use case for the AR devices that have been launched by other companies to date. And so not enough people have purchased them. And so there's not enough of a threshold of these devices in the world or in a given geography like that airport when people have wanted to use them to have sort of a serendipitous, hey, who that stranger? And maybe there's a point of connection here, an unforeseen connection that we don't appreciate, but that can nudge us to get to know someone new. A really delightful serendipitous type of use case. There just aren't enough of these devices in the wild. So that's where kind of on a first principles basis, it requires someone going back to the beginning and saying what is the kind of reason for existence, the existential purpose underlying a device like this? Is it to show you whales flying through the clouds? Is it to show you a T. Rex dancing on the tabletop? You know, these are kind of references to different YouTube gimmicky videos that other companies have put out. We say no. We think that it's meant to be really focused sort of applications of intelligence into how you see the world to elevate unseen context to help you understand how you fit holistically into your environment and all the people around you off the backs of that. It becomes daily useful, it becomes an indispensable co mind. And when you have something that useful, think about our smartphones, right? Suddenly you have enough people purchasing and so you have a threshold of devices in the world and suddenly you can start to have use cases that take advantage of a network effect like the one you mentioned that help you do really cool stuff like that.

I think it would also be overwhelming to know a bunch of things of stuff happening around you. Like, see here I have a view of the city and if I would hear that there would be like 10 murders and rapes and I think it would be overwhelming for the brain to get that much information in what would be the first use cases. Would it be more consumer oriented? Why not take the B2B route? Not Microsoft Hololens way, but let's say for entrepreneurs and founders. Do you think that would be an interesting route to take,

you know, the cool thing about AI is that it's this horizontal and it touches every single context of our lives. So there's large companies that are applying generative AI to their own sort of contexts. You know, manufacturing, tourism, agriculture. This is sort of like big B2B stuff. But then you also have a lot of consumer use cases. Right. Generative AI does not discriminate between what is B2B, what is B2C. It touches all of this stuff and can be trained on rich data relevant to each context. So that. That's sort of on the. On the software side of things. And so we really don't see a distinction there in terms of hardware. Yeah, There traditionally has been this dichotomy drawn between what is B2B, what is B2C? And that's just because most of the hardware looked like crap. You know, you were wearing a helmet that cost you $3,000. And the only way these companies could show face and ask 3,000 bucks was by saying, oh, this is B2B. You know, hey, CIO, does this look cool to you? Sure. Drop, you know, a couple million bucks and build a POC with this, because consumers wouldn't bite. So that's very much been the story of AR today. And our whole thesis is. It's actually. It's a page out of Apple's book. The iPhone showed us that when you launch a device that human beings love, and they could be human beings who are using them for personal consumer use cases, they could be human beings who then wake up in the morning and go into an office, but they're the same human being. When you love your device, you eventually demand to bring your device into all contexts where you exist, whether that's at home, whether that's at work, whether that's at the gym, whether that's in transit, we believe that that's going to be the same thing with ar. You know, why would someone wear different glasses when they wake up in the morning and go to work and then come home, take off their work glasses and put on their home glasses instead? People don't do that. I wear these glasses. Many of us wear the same glasses no matter where we are. It shouldn't be any different with ar, and so we don't see so much of a dichotomy there. We think that's just been the excuse that companies have used to date because it's just looked like a helmet.

Yeah, maybe it's my bias to B2B. I see so much more money in B2B. I also think that ChatGPT users are B2B. The power users certainly are. And the B2C apps, I think they are a niche in themselves. Like PI for example, which is more B2C ish. For psychotherapy. I had various folks of Gen on the spot for these types of apps. Now I don't wear glasses. I used to for blue light blocking as a biohacker, why not contact lens? It seems that we would get into nanotechnology at that point. Right?

Sure. We're down. Yeah. I mean, as soon as. As soon as the physics work to do it at scale, we're down. I mean, yeah, there was a company called Mojo Vision. They were doing it for years. It was funny. Every time they would do a press release, we would get an email from our investors, from our community. Are you keeping track of them? Are they gonna kill your business? And then suddenly they laid off 80% or 75% of their people and pivoted to displays, which is a tragedy because we were actually big fans of what they were doing. So we're totally down. It's just the physics aren't quite there yet.

Yeah, and Google Glass and yada yada. But seems like, I mean, Apple Vision One Pro, I believe it's called. I had that on my buying list, actually. I forgot about it. But it seems that it's pretty fabulous the step that they made in that direction. It seems like the demand is there, but not that much. Like you said with Oculus. I had my Oculus at some point. I sold it because there's like headaches and it wasn't the best experience and so forth. I mean, you're not in ar, in VR necessarily, but it's somewhat getting there and people VR ar. But yeah, both are gonna emerge pretty soon anyway. The point is, yes, demand, but sometimes, historically we've seen products actually create demand, Right. The iPad, for example. I believe the AirPods people were going Bluetooth. But I mean, they look pretty silly and people were kind of hesitant. But Apple's a big brand. So you're trying to take the demand where it is, the specific use cases, and create a product from that. What is your philosophy on product market fit and how do you target your power users? Your Superfan?

Yeah, there's a couple different takes on this question. You know, I happen to give the perspective that products that sort of hook into the market in the right way, they speak to exhibit to a bit of existing behavior, a bit of existing sort of way of doing things, especially on the consumer side, but they elevate to a new place. That people could not have imagined and sort of bring you on a new journey. You know, Facebook is a great example of that. Were they solving a problem? Like, another school of thought is like, oh, technology must always solve a problem. What problem did Facebook solve? When the personal computer launched in the late 70s and then subsequent versions over the early 80s, people were saying, hey, the optimistic case for this thing is a couple hundred sold a year, maybe a thousand. Steve Jobs was the only crazy guy at conferences saying, hey, there might just be thousands in homes across America. Then people were like, what am I ever going to do with that? So, you know, these things always hook into a little bit of. In the case of the personal spreadsheets and crunchy numbers and doing budgeting. So they hook into a little bit of what people are already doing, but they sort of take you on a new journey to a new place. And for us, you know, that. That's how I see things as well, is we are already in the process of using our minds, using our eyes. I'm using language to perceive and understand and navigate life, to negotiate and navigate life. And an AI co mind to be a powerful assistant to amplify our ability to do that effectively hooks in, certainly to what we're already waking up and doing every day. But it just. It just gives us superpowers. And, you know, who wouldn't want to be on a super highway?

As a human being, I'm grateful for folks like you. And that's where, like, I want to spend more time in my life, building engineering stuff, you know, having my own labs and so forth. But that's one side of the middle. It's fun, you know, because we think or we build things with our hands, and then, oh, it works, and it's magic, you know. But the other side is that the financial part is very difficult to get funding. It may work, it may not work. How do you balance both? Because, I mean, the upside of it is you become the next Apple, you know, but what are the odds? Pretty low. Who knows? How do you juggle with these two things? Psychologically having a lot of fun, but also the business side of it is kind of cutthroat.

Yeah, there's a lot in there. So, I mean, the. Simply put, the way that we think about it at least, is we. We bring zero expectation into what we ought to be, who we ought to become. We certainly don't think of ourselves as, oh, hey, maybe we'll be the next Apple. You know, that's part of what makes Apple Apple, is that there is Only one Apple that's like, you know, there's all these people that try to imitate them and copy them. Part of Apple's genius is that they're just super original. They're originals and what they do and they always have been. So to copy them is actually the most un Apple thing you could do. But most people who copy them don't appreciate that. So we, you know, we're, we're very much on our own journey trying to define what the next leap in personal computing looks like. And you know, if you focus on the top line, great culture internally, good people, great products that are genuinely useful and move the needle in innovation and then of course serving customers really well, we try to have a really robust community with great hands on support. It's totally open source and hackable. So we're building sort of a really different relationship with our stakeholders. The bottom line stuff will follow. We are believers in that, that you do well on the top line. The bottom line always follows no matter what that looks like.

Your thoughts on the human humane presentation.

To finish this off, I, you know there's a lot of people who've written and spoken about humane, super talented team and I love how, you know, going back to what I was just saying about Apple, I love how much originality they've employed in what they've done. You know, people can have different takes on hey, would I use it when I buy it? Do I like the form factor? You know, this is all subjective opinion, you know, but if you kind of go back to the, to the first principles of it, there is a deep originality that runs through that company and you can tell in terms of their products and I just think we need more of that. So I, I would never want to go out and like crap on a company like Humane because regardless of what we think about what they've done, number one, it's the first product out in what I'm sure will be a long journey and we should celebrate that. It makes the whole ecosystem better. But number two, just like human innovation, human ingenuity is beautiful and they are originals. So I'm a humane fan in that regard.

I was a hater at first but now since I saw the presentation and analyzed the company a bit more, I'm a fan to super fan actually. I'm going to buy their stuff and yeah, I'm going to see if I can order one of your stem and early adopter which I think is your, your ICP here. Where can people find out more about you? Baba.

Yeah, so we're at www.brilliant XYZ. So brilliant spelled the usual way, XYZ. And then I'm on LinkedIn. So, you know, reach out. DM. We always love to connect with people, also building and, and find collaboration.