Turning Experience Into Action featuring Will Bright

Waymo and Tesla have amazing technology, but it's out of reach for most of the public. Today's guest is bringing it to you, and now.

Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. We bring you the founders, investors, and leaders building the future across life science, tech, climate, defense, AI, and more. This is where San Diego's next chapter takes shape.

Welcome to The Connect Current, the flow of innovation in San Diego. I'm your host, James Zanewicz, and this episode is being recorded at the UC San Diego Park and Market building. We want to thank them for their support. Today, I'm joined by Will Bright, founder and CEO of SafeRide AI, and one of my best friends of 24 hours.

Fantastic.

Yesterday, we had coffee. It was great. And then spent the reception together and drug you in here. Because you are focused on improving safety and decision-making in transportation through AI-driven technology, helping to reduce risk and create better outcomes for individuals and communities, with a great story behind that. Because your path into building a company is anything but traditional, which is exactly what makes this interesting and what San Diego and this conversation and podcast are all about. It's really a story about how real-world experience shapes perspective, And how perspective can turn into multiple things worth building. So welcome to the show, Will.

Oh, thanks, James. Glad to be here.

So sometimes we want to start a little differently than our usual route. So before we get into your company, can you walk us through, much like you told me yesterday, your journey and some of the defining experiences that shaped how you see the world today?

Glad to. Yeah, I had kind of a funny upbringing. We lived overseas in a few spots. I was born in Vermont, grew up in Indonesia for a few years, got to witness the economic collapse of Southeast Asia firsthand there. We showed up in a year later, the currency was devalued by 90%. So that was a wild thing to see. Hope to never see that again in person. But got back there and growing up, I always had a pretty easy time when it came to business and liberal arts type stuff. I did a lot of speech and debate and that all worked out really well and we got some lawyers in the family. So that was always kind of the thing, right? But I started digging into computers because I found them much more challenging and interesting to work with, right? I couldn't figure it out super intuitively. You had to do a little bit of research and that was fun. And when I was about So, let's say 13, 14, I got really interested in computer security, started spending a lot of time learning about phone phreaking, sort of started from the historical stuff, phone hacking, the Ma Bell system and all that. Totally irrelevant by the time I was around, but led me to learn assembly language. And then I kind of learned the network stack, graduated high school with a CCNA, that kind of thing. But up until that point, I cracked some fairly important systems, I guess, the Xbox Live Store, the Sony Play Store. There was this cool thing called Yellow Dog Linux that some guys at Purdue had worked out, and you could basically cluster PlayStation 3s together to make a computer that was more powerful than anything you could buy from Cray at the time, and posted that online. Then, you know, went to school at RIT for a year, got a DM on a forum called Underground Systems that hasn't existed for a long time, but back in the day it mattered. But it was from a company called Arxan Technologies offering me a job in San Francisco, and I thought, great, you know, hey, I'm at school for computer science, I've just been offered a computer science job, why don't I go take that instead of going back to school? And so I got to San Francisco and kind of June of 2012 and showed up at this office. They all looked at me really strangely because they thought I was going to be some 55-year-old computer security researcher. I looked at them really strangely because I thought they were all going to be— They were all— —20-something guys. Started working there for a couple of months and ended up ditching that after a couple of months because the hostel that I came to live at, which after getting rejected on 400 different Craigslist outreaches to try and find a place that summer, I found this sketchy website called Airbnb. And there was a place listed as being a hacker hostel, and I wrote them this really salty email, because I'd already been rejected from some 400 places, saying, come on, I'm literally what you're advertising for. I'm being paid to hack systems. Please, I need a place to stay. If you don't let me stay here, I don't know what you're looking for. And they did. And I met a couple of guys there, and we all started a company called Massdrop. After we met, we sent a cold email to Kleiner Perkins, info@kpcb, and it said, we have a new way of selling things on the internet. Would you like to talk to us? And they did. Chi-Hua Chen got back to us and we had a couple of meetings and started the process of closing the seed round. Very sort of Silicon Valley experience, about as far as it gets. I mean, this is June 2012 and yeah, we get a place down in Menlo Park. I mean, my first office was in Kleiner Perkins office space on Sand Hill Road. I worked out in their like 1-square-foot little baby gym they had, did most of my underage drinking at the Rosewood and that was a good time. We scaled that business to about $100 million a year over the next sort of decade. And while we were in the process of selling that company, one of my very good friends, Michael, my VP of business development, he was crossing the road outside his home in Danville, and unfortunately he was hit and killed by what was at the time a brand new 2022 F-150. And I, you know, people respond to loss in lots of different ways. I'm a very purpose-driven person. My family motto, as my mother will tell you if you ever have a chance to talk with her, is solve the problem. And so I looked at this and I was very confused because at the time I was driving a 2016 Tesla Model S, and that car had technology that would beep at me if somebody was in the road. And yet my friend was hit and killed by a 2022 brand new truck. And so I was puzzled, why doesn't this new car have technology which is better at detecting pedestrians than what my, you know, quote, old car has? And I start looking into it and it sort of leads me down this massive rabbit hole of like, yeah, well, you know, US road deaths are up 50% over the last It's about 50,000 people a year now. It used to be about 30,000 people a year. Hospitalizations are between 3 and 5 million people a year. It's like 15% of the entire medical system is dedicated to people recovering from and getting treated for being hit by cars. Start looking into the rate of inclusion of these types of sensors in new cars. It's only very high-end vehicles, like maybe 15% of new cars even today, with exception of a couple of brands like Honda and Subaru. They're very good at this. Start realizing, OK, well, wait a minute. What's the rate at which the national fleet cycles? There's 350 million cars on the road in the U.S., and all the automakers combined only make 15 million new cars a year. So, it takes about 30 years for the national fleet to cycle.

Crazy. You were telling me that yesterday. You start to look at those stats, and it's insane because you think about the pace of innovation, how often you see innovative things in cars, and yet, the fact that it takes 30 years for that to happen.

Yeah. It takes an enormously long time for things to become ubiquitous. I think that's really the key here. A given piece of innovation, you see a concept car at a car show or you see something brand new from Tesla roll off the line, very impressive things and credit to the engineers that make them. But the reality is that ubiquity is where kind of the rubber really hits the road, right? Tesla, very impressive company, total of about 2 million cars sold in America since their inception. 2 million versus 350 million, right? It's a rounding error. Waymo, very impressive company. About 2,000 cars on the road in total. And so I kind of start to realize, like, man, you know, you add 15 years until, you know, we start seeing this become more ubiquitous in new vehicles that are more affordable. You talk about 30 years after that for the national fleet to cycle. And I'm realizing, you know, I'm going to be an old man. I'm going to be like 80 years old by the time this problem is really solved. And in the meantime, more people are dying on the road every 4 years than died in all foreign conflicts since World War II combined for the US. And, you know, you realize there's got to be a solution to this problem that deals with the existing vehicles because we can't wait for that, you know. And that's kind of what led me to building Safe Ride.

Yeah, I think we understand why you're doing this, but obviously you got here through something people probably like to call earned insight, where something in your life gives you that unique lens on a problem. Obviously one of those moments was the tragic loss of your friend, but what are some of the other moments that have done these kinds of things for you that have transformed kind of how you perceive innovation or perceive entrepreneurship?

Yeah, I'd say the big thing really is looking at the reality of what's going on actually in the world, in the real economy, versus what's being discussed. I did not come from Silicon Valley. None of my family are technology people. I came from the woods of the Northeast and like the jungles of Southeast Asia, right? Like, I showed up in San Francisco because a job took me there, and I went to Silicon Valley because that was that. I had no like fetishism towards these things. Unlike seemingly so many people who I've come to know over the years. So when I would be spending a decade of my life in San Francisco hearing these things, it's like, yeah, that thing that you're talking about makes a lot of sense in the context of this place, but how does it actually play in the broader world, right? Like, this thing you're doing seems really cool. I can understand from a raw technological point of view why that would be significant, but how does it actually plug into the rest of the economy? How does it apply to the real world in which all of us live? And the kind of constant, I don't know, forcing function of hearing the very bleeding edge of thinking versus existing in the very real world of rural America and other places kind of gave me this constant reminder that, yeah, this stuff exists, but to the point that it doesn't impact the real world, then who really cares? What's the point? You can make an awful lot of money by producing some software that does something very important within a certain software vertical, and your company will get acquired and a few years and you'll make enough money to buy a few nice houses and you'll be sitting in those houses and realize that, well, okay, the thing that you built no longer matters and it only mattered for a very brief window and it didn't actually produce meaningful outcomes in the world. And I think that's just less fulfilling than doing things that actually matter in a broader sense. And so yeah, I think that's kind of the thing, right? It's happening for me all the time where I'm sort of hearing what this is and then comparing it to reality. And in the world of transportation, I mean, that's been a huge thing around mobility for the last 20 years. You hear companies, we're going to have full self-driving by this time. It's going to be here. We're going to have all of this done. We're going to have electric semis that are going to replace all the semis. And then you start to realize that to charge one electric semi uses the same amount of power as would a whole city for 6 hours. And if you have to charge 10 of them a day and—

Wait a minute. Does that make sense? Yeah.

There's actually a million of them you have to charge per day. And yes, exactly right. There's the realities of the situation versus what sounds like a really good thing in a room where a pitch is happening.

And you kind of built the ability for yourself and your past companies to to scrape and understand what the world is looking for.

100%.

And then to build the solution for actual problems instead of what you perceived as problems, which I think is really incredible.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, to touch on that a bit, right, the company that we started before was called Massdrop. Later we rebranded to Drop.com, and it was centered around software that I made that could scrape any text-based online community like forums and subreddits, things like that, determine what the value system, of those people are. And then based on the value system, I could discern what products they wish existed that didn't exist, what things about the existing products they would like to see improved. And then I would either design and manufacture soup to nuts what that product ought to be, or would work with the company that makes that product to produce the improved version of it. And the constant theme was the, the disassociation between the companies making and selling the products and the people in the community around the products, the things people in the community wanted versus what the company believed they wanted, or maybe in some cases what the designers who worked at those companies— Wanted to build, right? Personally wanted. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, I mean, we did over $500 million in lifetime sales of those products, shipped about 5 million units. Very proud of all of that, but the number of times that I would walk into a meeting room at a company overseas in Germany or Japan or wherever and say to them that, hey, your product has ABC characteristics that people really like, but what we really need to do is change the third-order harmonic distortion by 5 decibels at 50 Hz because the audiophile community really cares about the bass response. And they would look at me and say, no one cares about that. What are you talking about? And I'd look at them and say, well, some people do.

Would you like to see some data? Yeah.

But frankly, they usually wouldn't. And it got to a point where I had to say, well, maybe I'm a fool, maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but I'll buy 50,000 units of those if you make them the way that I'm describing them. And they would say, well, we only sell 5,000 of the base product in the entire country every year. What are you going to do with 50,000? And I'd explain that we're going to sell them in 2 weeks, and then we would. And then the second time around, usually the conversation would go a little differently. But yeah, really, I mean, my whole kind of existence has been about understanding what the community of people out there is actually looking for, empirically, in a very clear, data-driven way, and then sort of removing my own ego from the situation and saying, yeah, what I think would be cool is this, but no one cares. It doesn't matter.

Yeah.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times running Massdrop that I would talk to our product managers and they'd say, well, I think this. I would rudely cut them off and say, it doesn't matter what you think, okay? What does the community think? What do these people think?

What's going to get them to buy it? I mean, that's huge.

Yeah, it's— believe me, it makes sense to me, but there's a whole world of people out there in the creative space who are like, no, you really got to make what you care about. And I think that's admirable and great, but if you're trying to build something that a given group of people want, you should probably make what they want and not what you happen to think is cool. Thus why, I mean, you know, you look at the history of product design, right? We had like direct design, things like the Porsche 911 came out of that where a guy thought a thing was cool and made it. And that has about a 10% success rate. Then we got to human-centered design with IDEO in the '90s, and you achieved about a 50% success rate by looking at how one individual used a thing and then designing based on that. And then what I created was community-centered design, and we achieved about a 95% to 99% success rate with that, wherein we would see the product that people wanted, study the whole community, build it, and release it.

Right.

Proud to say that we, out of 300 products released, only had 3 that underperformed.

Wow. So impressive. And now you're taking that to safety, which is probably an easier sell in many ways because you're operating in a space that not only contains a lot of trust, but a lot of behavioral characteristics as well, as much as the technology we have in our cars. And so as you're approaching kind of this safety realm and your ability to kind of retroactively fix cars in a way ahead of the 30-year curve that would do that. What have you learned about implementing this particular idea that you're doing with the current company, with SafeRide.ai, and how are you putting that into practice?

Yeah, yeah. So the first step in creating our product was realizing, okay, like, what state is the underlying technology at? Because Startups are very unforgiving. You have a very limited window of time in which to do something.

And worse now than ever before.

Oh, sure, sure. It's moving fast. Well, worse and—

And better in some ways, yeah.

And better in some ways. But the point I guess that I'm making is that underlying technologies like computer vision, right, it's a 20-year cycle on which these things develop. Underlying technologies like embedded compute and embedded firmware and how mobile compute platforms, how powerful they are. If you think that these things are ready and they're If not, then you're off by a few years, generally speaking, and you're toast, right? So the first question was, is the underlying technology ready for this? Do we have vision models that are sufficiently good at detecting people? Are those vision models sufficiently efficient to run on the hardware that is available and affordable? Because it's great if you make something that works but costs $500,000, but really what we need is something that works and costs a few hundred dollars, right?

So that everyone can buy it, not just the elite.

Exactly, exactly. Ubiquity again, that's how you solve the problem. And so the first stage was, okay, validating that the different pieces of technology are ready for this, because lots of companies tried to do versions of driver assistance and autonomy at different times in the past, and there's a great big graveyard of them. And I feel for those guys, because at the end of the day, they just started a few years too early, and they had to solve a few unsolved problems. But anyway, so that was the first step, was just to make sure that I was doing it at the right time. Then after that, it became, all right, well, let's spin up the old community-centered design analysis here and look at what the people are actually discussing. Do people actually want fully autonomous vehicles?

Right.

Or do they want a vehicle that assists them? Assists them and makes them safer. And the answer is that the sentiment online around autonomy is generally hopeful, generally optimistic, but it's such a limited subset of people's experiences and it's such a small sort of aspect of what mobility is right now that the discussion, while positive generally, is pretty limited. What you see in mass, what you see in volume, is people discussing the desire for safer vehicles. People want the car to be safer in simple ways, like if a person's in front of They would like it to stop, right? If there's a car in front of you— Simple.

Simple.

Just don't hit me or someone else.

Yeah. Simple, right? I mean, everyone's either a driver, a passenger, or a pedestrian, right? Every day of your life. And regardless of the scenario that you're in, you don't want to be in a car that's hitting one of those other groups of people.

Yeah.

It's a terrible experience. And even when it doesn't involve massive personal injury, just the hassle of, you know, your foot slipped off the brake at the red light and you roll into the guy in front of you and now you're going to spend 6 months in small claims court dealing with It's just a mess, right?

Yeah.

So people don't want the hassle of that, very clearly. They want a safer vehicle. And the other thing that they want is improved convenience during the times in which they're driving and it's the least convenient, like long commutes or during long stretches of stop-and-go traffic. And so very clearly it was like, okay, if we want to build something that will make everyone safer, we need to couple that with a set of features that solve the most aggravating aspects of driving. Because if you can productize the improvement of the experience in the worst places with the avoidance of the most catastrophic outcomes, then you've got what the people want.

And you're doing it at a price point that is incredible from our conversation. You're able to do that through the dealers and not through the auto manufacturers. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, absolutely. So automakers are great, right? They make a lot of cars, 15 million a year across all of them, but it's an 8-year sales cycle. And by the time the product gets to consumers, it's— there's a lot of things that can happen along an 8-year sales cycle, let's put it that But while 15 million cars are manufactured new every year, 65 million of the 350 million on the road change hands through dealers every year. Those dealers have, on the whole, very thin margins, especially on those cars that are being traded in.

Mm-hmm.

And so when you think about go-to-market as a startup, in an ideal scenario, you would sell to a business for whom your product is a consumable. They're churning through them, right? They're not buying them, installing them, and then sitting on them. You want them to be consuming more and more of it, and ideally, the solution that you're selling them would have a very meaningful impact on the total profit that they can generate in the core cycle of their business. In our case, we sell our devices to dealers for a few hundred dollars, and they're able to equip it onto every car in their inventory, increase the selling price of those vehicles by maybe 10%.

Okay.

So your $23,000 car becomes a $25,000 car that now solves commuting traffic and And you're one of our cool companies this year, which we're very proud of, our 24 most innovative companies in San Diego ready for Series A or a round right around then. So obviously you're in a raise. What do you want folks to know about that and how can they get in touch with you?

Well—

Somebody wants to write you a check.

Yeah.

And what kind of checks are you looking for? What's your round like? Give us all the details.

Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of, it's kind of funny. We started raising around last fall. We raised the first sort of half of that, about $2.5 million. And then our units on order went from about 2,000 to about 9,000. And just earlier today, they went to about 10,000.

Oh, so it's changed since yesterday.

Yeah, it has literally changed since we spoke yesterday.

If that continues, your round's going to go up and up.

Well, yeah, that's kind of the thing, right? And so right now we're looking for about another $3 million. It's all SAFE rounds at this point, you know, pretty standard for this stage. We're starting to ship our first units to dealers this summer. So we've got about, like I said, about 10,000 on order now, but all that's bookings is important to note.

So digging a little deeper into your round right now, what's going on? What kind of people are you looking for?

Yeah, so we've been filtering very aggressively for people that have association with the auto retail industry. My previous experience in Silicon Valley, and we raised about $100 million from some of the best generalist VCs. But in general, as you scale, strategic value becomes more and more important. And people that understand the value that you're bringing to your customers being the same people that are your investors, that's the best combination.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, a little advice to those founders out there, if you can line those 2 things up, that'd be great. But yeah, that's the main type of investor that we're looking for is people with association in the auto retail space. who understand the kind of mechanics in that industry and what we can bring.

So cash is great, but network is key.

Exactly.

I love it.

And if you want to get in touch, my email is will@saferide.ai. Cool companies, folks, would be happy to connect you.

Yeah, excellent. I love that. And Will, we always like to close with a standard question on the Connect Current because everyone's innovation is driven by some sort of flow. So what drives your innovative flow? What is it that stirs your juices when you start thinking about things?

Unsolved problems. It's kind of a spiteful thing, honestly. I experience day-to-day life, I experience something, and I'm like, why is this not solved? What is limiting this from being done? Why do I have to deal with this? And then just digging into and figuring it out. And sometimes the answer is, well, it's a combination of factors outside of my control, and therefore can't really invest the 5, 10 years required to solve this. But sometimes, rarely, you can see all the factors.

Or you cause problems for Xbox and PlayStation, now you're solving all the problems. I love that.

Exactly.

Full circle. Exactly. Coming out of your rebellious teen years into a functional adult.

Into a rebellious 30-something who just wants to solve the problems. Oh man. Yeah. Lots of things people say you can't do, but if they're saying you can't solve a problem, then forget about them, man. You can do it.

There's always a solution and the solution may just be different than people thought it was. And I think it's putting on that different lens, which is, I think what San Diego and the companies here do best. It's interesting when you have the diversity of verticals like we have here and The diversity of, you know, types of companies, which you got to see firsthand last night meeting your cohorts and cool companies this year. It's special and magic happens.

Definitely.

Yeah. Well, I want to thank you so much for joining us. This was a really great conversation. I love the inspiration. I love the way you're tackling things. And I think it's a great reminder that the most meaningful advances in technology can also start with some of the most human experiences out there, your lived experience perspective. And honestly, what you've done is that deep understanding of the problem that people actually want solved versus the problem that we think people want solved. It's all about customer discovery, and really appreciate you joining us today.

Oh, my pleasure, James.

Thanks for listening to The Connect Current. As always, we'll have more information on Will, saferide.ai, and the UC San Diego Park and Market building in our show notes. If you want to learn more about Connect and explore resources across San Diego's innovation ecosystem, follow us on LinkedIn or visit connect.org.

We'll see you next time on The Connect Current.

Where San Diego's innovation story keeps moving forward.

Thanks for listening to The Connect Current. If you want to learn more about Connect and explore resources across San Diego's innovation ecosystem, follow us on LinkedIn or visit connect.org. We'll see you next time on The Connect Current, where San Diego's innovation story keeps moving forward.

This podcast was edited and produced by Resonate Recordings.