Kapil Kane on how innovation propelled Intel into new heights in China and beyond

Hello and welcome to the Rich Robinson Show. I'm your host, Rich Robinson. Over the past 25 years, I've been an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and professor here in Asia. After nearly a quarter of a century in China, I'm now based here in Bali, Indonesia, the island of the gods.

Asia is my home now.

60% of the world's population also lives here, but I would contend 80% of the world's dynamism and opportunity is right here in the region. On the show, you'll hear candid and fun conversations with some of my friends and colleagues, people I've met along my journey, entrepreneurs, operators, experts that will help you unlock actionable insights around the Asia region and the entrepreneurial agility that actually defines it. This first season, season 1 of The Rich Robinson Show, is titled At the Speed of China. Like, wait for it, at the speed of light. Things happen fast in China, and in this season 1, we're gonna take a deeper look at that— the rapid economic development over the past few decades, as well as the speed and cycles of innovation taking Place all day, every day, right now.

Let's go, Jio! Showtime! Welcome to the pod, my old friend Kapil Kane, joining us from Shanghai. Salaam alaikum. 欢迎关林，你好啊，你好。How have you been？老朋友，good to see you. I'm doing well. I'm once again broadcasting from Bali, and you are in the dynamic, amazing metropolis of Shanghai.

Couldn't be a starker contrast between where we are.

Hey, so we're going to talk about some stark contrasts as we dig deeper into the speed of China here, but I'd love to. Have the people in podcast land just get a little bit of a quick 1-minute rundown of who you are and what you're doing, and then we'll dive deep into your origin story.

Yeah, so right now I work for Intel as Director of Innovation for China, where among other things, I run a corporate startup accelerator where we both enable and empower employees to come with ideas and land them into the market. We also work with startups to see if they can help us build something on top of our core technologies to organically grow us in market segments and areas we don't do like through top-down planning. So that's been my jam for the last 5 to 6 years. And so as a result, I meet people like you, people in the ecosystem. I always learn different things in different verticals from people from all walks of life. So I think it's been a blessing for me. to be in this role and to be in China where things like it just, you can, are on, you can say on steroids. Everything happens so quickly and it's like drinking through a hose.

That's great. Excellent. Yeah, Intel's lucky to have you. You have excellent reputation and network in the industry. And I've always been this fanboy of Intel, even though it's this giant hardware behemoth that's decades old. I feel that it still has this mojo and always have, right? All the way from the Andy Grove and, his books and love all Intel guides and even Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz, right? He's such a huge fanboy. And I remember 25 years ago for the handover to Hong Kong, I had these giant fisheye lenses and I created pictures around Hong Kong. You take a picture this way and then you pivot it that way. And we created these immersive pictures you could navigate around in 360, which was spectacular 25 years ago. And they were called iPix and it was powered by Intel and Intel was doing all these cool Pentium things, really cutting edge stuff, even though they were not really a software company and really driving that. And that kind of brand equity sits with me today. But before we dig into a little bit of your role now, let's talk about your path to China and then your path to Intel. Let's take us back to your hometown and what took you to the Middle Kingdom.

Oh yeah, I have a long and winding story. I grew up in India in a little seaside province called Goa. It's very much like Bali. I used to visit Bali a lot and All my memories from my home would come back, and so I grew up there. We have this word for Goa called "sushigad." It comes from the Portuguese word means laid back and chilled. So that's how Goans are known. And so our goal is just do your thing during the day. As the sun sets, hang out on the beach, have some beers, have fun with your friends.

But you say small village. Like what was actually the population?

Wow!

When I was living there. I think it was less than half a million for, I think, an area the size of Shanghai. Wow. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. So for India, that is a small village. Other places, that's like the city of Boston almost, but for India.

Yeah. And it was like a part of India that was never a British colony. We were a Portuguese colony. So it's like Macau of India. And so we were slightly different than the rest of India. Even now, And I think even when India got independence from British, Goa was still a Portuguese colony. So people needed a visa to get out of Goa and into the rest of India.

Portuguese influence is fascinating. I went to the handover for Macau in 1999. And also like arigato is a derivative of obrigado in Portuguese as well too. So that kind of influence runs deep, but it doesn't maybe get as much juice modern day because it was kind of superseded by the Brits and the Dutch and others. But interesting. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. So from Goa, I used to always joke that if I get into one of these top engineering schools, I'll go there, or else I'm just going to stay in Goa. And I was very sure that all my life is going to be in Goa, just having fun. I used to play cricket for my state. So my life was set. And then fortunately or unfortunately, I got into a very good school, which I said I will go to if I get into, and that took me away from Goa at an age of 16. And so from there, I met all the bright students from all over India. And I had this desire then to go to the US to do my master's. And at the same time, I was also very much into design and specifically automotive design. So right after I graduated from National Institute of Technology in mechanical engineering, I went to work for Tata's, the car company, like the huge conglomerate. And automotive is a huge part of that. And within 6 months, they shipped me off to US. To bring jobs back to India, so there was a joint venture with this company called Johnson Controls from the U.S. that does like design of car interiors and seatings. They are also into building management systems as well, right? So they sent me to the headquarters, and here I came to Detroit. I think it was like a month and a half after September 11th. I remember my visa interview for U.S. was the next morning, and that evening I was in the gym. I was just running on the treadmill, and I. see these planes hitting the buildings. And I thought I was watching a movie. And then I was like, oh boy, I'm not getting to US at all. And luckily my visa got approved and I show up there. I think actually less than a month later, I think I got there in the first week of October. I arrived in Detroit. And then after a couple of years of being in auto industry, designing the seatings, interiors of cars, I got into the master's and PhD program at Stanford. So then I moved to the West Coast. And my first internship, I got into Apple and I had no idea what Apple was. There were just 2 companies hiring lawais back then because the market had crashed. There was Apple and Applied Materials.

By lawai, you mean like immigrants in America?

Yeah, because since there were no jobs, not even internships, they were prioritizing citizens rather than non-citizens. And so one of them was Apple and I got into Apple and I went to do an internship there. And the next summer I went back again, I requested my PhD advisor to take summer off, go back there. And the stuff we were working on was creating this touchscreen. And at that time, the touchscreen was like, you know, this—

Too bad that never went anywhere.

It didn't go too far. So this was like 2000— 2004, 2000— no, 2002, 2003 were my internships. In 2003, we were working on this touchscreen. And then they were like, hey, do you want to go back, spend like 3, 4 years Or you want to just stay here and actually build something? And I'm like, okay, let's do it. And so I didn't go back to school and I carried on.

What were you studying at Stanford?

It was mechanical engineering with focus on product design. So the department I was in later became the d.school.

Terrific. Yeah.

Yeah. So what I was working on was design for manufacturability. That was my research topic. How can you design products in a way that can be easily manufactured or that can be easily serviced, that can be easily assembled. So the whole concept of that then turned into the d.school. We used to call it Design Division at that time.

Yeah, and design thinking has now changed the world. Yeah, but you're in great company as a Stanford dropout. There's so many great people. It's a great filter. And then you're like, nope, too many other great opportunities. See you later, right?

But, you know, I had enough credits to apply for master's degree and I have my master's degree.

Oh, you do?

Okay.

Okay.

So I do.

Yeah.

Oh, that's great. That's great. That's great. So PhD dropout then? At least that's kind of a badge of honor.

Yeah. But if you go to our alumni website, they list me as PhD. I don't know how, why, like, there's like PhD. Yeah. There's like a PhD 2008 or something. They just assume I finished and I did it, you know.

Dr. Kapil Jain, ladies and gentlemen. Excellent. I didn't—

So this tablet thing, okay, we worked on it for a couple of years. We actually created Real tablets. We had thousands of tablets manufactured, but we just didn't have an OS to go on it or any killer app.

Interesting.

We just didn't know what to do with it. And at the same time, there was this other team working on a secret project, and our touchscreen got taken away from us. We were asked to stop, and this other team took it. And I was like, okay, here we go. And so from there, I moved on to other things. The iPad iPod Shuffle. They're very small that you could clip to your— yeah.

I like that thing. It was so tiny.

Yeah. So I was the product design lead on that along with another— yeah. Yeah. Come on. Yes. Yes.

Like I actually was lamenting, like, it's so great to go running. Like it was like the tiniest little device and it was like so sexy. It like had that little bevel in the middle that you could just click and you could easily, like, that was, I don't even know, and then take your whole goddamn phone to go running. Right. Like that was such a good thing. They don't make it anymore, right?

We were on loan to the iPod product design team because I used to work with the portables group, like laptops. And there was no tablet division back then. But then they wanted me to work on this iPod and it was me and another American, actually he's an American Indian. So we used to joke that I'm the real Indian, he's the fake Indian, and we are the guys. Great.

Oh, he was like Native American?

No, he's like an Indian, like Indian heritage, but born and brought up in the US. And we were joking that like, 2 Indians leading the product design on this iPod Shuffle.

Yeah, so I have dual citizenship with Ireland, but I call the plastic paddy, even though I'm a, I'm really an Irish citizen. I'm not really.

Yeah, so doing this iPod started, I started coming to China to do the manufacturing builds and stuff. But anyway, a year later while I'm in China, the iPhone is launched with our touchscreen. So that's where the touchscreen went. So there's 2 years of Love it.

Yeah, I was curious. I was like, did they ever do anything with that? That's amazing. Like that's the foundation that all that work, they were able to just piggyback off of that with the OS and then just off to the races. Yeah. That's amazing. Wow. Excellent street cred there, man. Wow. I didn't know that chapter.

When we started to do MacBook Air, the very first time we used to call them unibody Macs, which is machined out of a solid block of aluminum. That's when we decided that we needed some product designers in China. Because we were designing the product as well as process at the same time. It was a completely new process. And so I volunteered to move to China. So in 2007, I moved here as like the first 3 Apple product designers to move to China.

My head just exploded again. That's amazing. That was an incredible new innovation too. Wow. Jony Ive talks about that a lot, right? Did you bump up? Do you have any, can you maybe pause and give maybe a Steve Jobs or a Jony Ive anecdote, something that you kind of learned along the way or something interesting for our listenership?

Yeah, sure. So, Jonny, I've— and I recently talked about this at China Accelerator 8x8 last month, and this was about— so again, related to the unibody Macs. So before this unibody Macs, we had these pretty thick laptops and they had— they were held shut using hooks and there was a little latch or a button you pressed and it would disengage the hook and pop open the display. And then you could get your fingers in and then open the lid all the way. So that's how all our previous laptops have been. That was the user experience to open your laptop and get to your Safari or Chrome or whatever you do, right? And when we were going to this thin and light MacBooks, there wasn't space to put those mechanisms, hooks, or anything. And so we were tasked— it's like me and my friend Zach, who used to live in Taiwan, now he's went back to the US. One of the 2 guys who moved to China, we were tasked with coming up with this, how can we pop open a display when there is so little space? And we came up with these elaborate designs. We worked on it for 6 to 8 months and we had like some very crazy designs like magnets and solenoids where you press something and magnets shift and then they go in from attraction to repulsion and then the lid magically pops open and all this stuff. And we've been having iterations of different design. And then I think one of the final product design reviews with Jony Ive, when we went through all these 3 different designs with amazing technologists, and he simply went back to his office in the design studio and came back with a very old prototype we had done. And that prototype simply held the display shut with magnets. And there was a little notch where you put your finger in. And just pry it open like a woman pries open the purse where they keep money, right? And they're like, this is what we are going with. And I'm like, there is no technology. There is no nothing. It's just simply held shut with magnets. And what he said was, the problem we are trying to solve is simply to open your laptop. Why you want to burden the design with so many crazy things? It doesn't make sense. Your solutions should be like commensurate with the problem you're trying to solve. Just because you have a technology, don't try to overburden your design with things. And I see that today, like blockchain here, AI there. Do you really need this?

That's simple, but that's a gem.

Yeah. So that's one thing I just learned from him straight, that just be simple. which is simple in the design. Yet you need to try to solve problem because he gave us the leeway for 6 months, try to, okay, explore, go with crazy ideas. But in the end, when it's time to make a decision, okay, let's go with something that's solid, something that can be reliable over and over again. When you have too many moving parts, you have more chances of things breaking. And that was the design simplicity. But it doesn't mean find the easiest solution the first way. Explore everything. Otherwise, if you don't explore, you will not innovate. A lot of our innovations came from solving a problem somewhere else. Like, for example, the iPhone's touchscreen came from us trying to figure out what a tablet would look like, like 2 years ago, right? And so that's one of the direct—

Like Amazon failed with the Fire Phone, but then they took all the audio recognition capabilities and put that into the Echo. Right.

And also the things I would learn from Jony, he was an exact antithesis of Jobs. So people would be scared of Jobs. One day I was an intern, actually it's my first internship, and I was sitting there. We used to have like a big cafeteria and then there would be tables outdoors. And I sat on a table and I see Steve Jobs walking towards the table and my heart, yeah, my heart was pounding so hard. I'm like, Please let it not be this table.

Don't make eye contact or make eye contact. Don't move. I don't know. Don't spill your drink. Drink your drink.

Yeah.

Because I had heard horror stories and these are legends. Okay. But this could be true that, you know, don't ever get into the elevator with Jobs.

You might not get out alive. Right.

Or you will get out of the elevator, but you will have to hand over your badge to Steve. So that was his reputation that He would ask for your badge and you just like walk you out of the building. And yeah, he sat on the table and I'm like, I'm just an intern. That's my first, you know, words that came out of my mouth. Like, don't ask me about the project. So he's like, oh, I'm going to talk to all the interns in a couple of weeks. That was the tradition that he would talk to all the interns. There was a very elaborate intern program at Apple where they select the best interns from all Over the country, and they were groomed to be the future employees. That was their goal. Jobs come in and talk to all the interns like in a group, and they treated interns like actual employees. Because in my first internship, three weeks into the internship, I was on a flight to Taiwan to solve a problem on a production line.

Wow!

That's another gem. That's great. Are there other people sitting at the table, or is it just you?

At that point, it was just me. No one else had joined the table.

Did he ask you like? What do you think I should cover in this talk? Or do you— or you just—

No, he asked me, oh, what are you working on? So I said, I'm a PD intern. And he's like, oh. And at that time, PD is product design. And we were given this problem. Okay, we have this thing called FFA, so early field failure analysis. So whenever we release a new product, we get a lot of returns. And it's like the bathtub curve, right? The initial, the first half of the bathtub, you see lots of the infant mortality, lots of failures. And our role was to go and figure out why they are failing. Is it a design issue? Is it a quality issue? Or did they not manufacture it properly? And our laptops had these feet at the bottom, and they were like glued. So when people slid the laptops on the table, some of these feet would come off. And it had become like a huge fiasco. And he was personally very irritated by this, that we did such a simple thing, we didn't do it right. And so he asked me about the status of that. We had a joke, inside joke called foot fetish. So he talked about that. He got an update on that. And then I'm like, okay, I'm done. I had enough. And then I ran away. I didn't spend too much time.

Oh, but come on. That's great. You got to sort of bask in that Genius 101. That's amazing. I love those kinds of stories. But Jony Ive, I was mispronouncing his name earlier, but that's great that you were Interacted with him pretty frequently.

And so after I moved to China, I was his handler whenever he would come to China, like going to the factories. And he was very much like Jobs, like perfectionist when it came to design. I remember I was showing him the production line. It was iMac, very first iMacs where we had a full glass screen. And when we shipped them out, we would put a plastic film on top. And that plastic film would trap some of the dust particles when they were putting it on, or pieces of lint. And he really didn't like that. He wanted it to be very pristine. And so we had to stop the production line and figure out how to deal with that. And we had to build a clean room.

Oh, wow.

So, so yeah, so I happened to be the one to actually build the very first clean room for Apple in China. And now it's a standard procedure. I mean, it's not like a class, AAA cleanroom, but cleanroom good enough that you don't trap dust and lint in between the touchscreen.

That's microscopic attention to detail.

Yes. Wow.

Thanks for sharing those. Those are great anecdotes.

You know, I think your speed of China, right? And we could make all these things happen quickly. I don't think we could have done it anywhere else. It's the fact that this was all being played out in China is a reason We could make it very quickly. You can just like say something and it just appears the next day. And I think that's also one of the reasons that I came here in 2007 and I have never left since then. Right. And it's like you get into this expectation that things move quickly and you cannot go back to the old way of like slow and waiting for someone to do something. Well, like why it's not done? I need it yesterday. Yes.

Wow. So it was with Apple that you came to China, and then how long did you remain with Apple? Till what year?

2007 to— I came to Intel in 2011. Yeah, not long, because the last project at Apple was I led the product design for iPad from China. So we had 2 product design leads, one leading from Cupertino and I was leading from China. And after that, I was like, the life has come Full circle. I joined Apple to do the touchscreen. Now the tablet is out there, and I can't live this crazy life of. I was actually living out of Foxconn's factory in Shenzhen.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but I teach this course at Peking University Entrepreneurship in China, and there's these smart glasses VUE they're called View glasses, and the founder is a woman named Zhang Tiantian. She lives in the valley, but she's from China, and she took the class through. Their whole prototyping and the initial sort of production runs. And they were indeed like living in Shenzhen in the factory. And that's the downside. I mean, proximity and speed, but you know, the cycle is so brutal that it's a tough taskmaster.

Yeah, because I would still live in Shanghai and we used to like spend a couple weeks in Shenzhen, then come back home for a week and then go back for 2 weeks. But there were times when I would go there just to fix one problem, and I couldn't come back for two weeks, three weeks at a time because the problem is not solved. And I remember my girlfriend at that time, my wife now, she would have to quai di me clothes, extra clothes. It happened so many times, and there were times that I would just go spend a day in Hong Kong or Macau. Just to relax rather than come back to Shanghai and go back, get on a ferry rather than get on a plane. So it was brutal towards the end. And I think that's when I decided like, hey, I have learned enough. I've gone so deep. I can design things with eyes closed.

Like the iPad. I don't know if anybody out there has ever heard of that before. It's this piece of electronics. Ah, forget it, maybe. But yeah, I mean, you kind of climb the highest peak and then you're like, okay, I think I'm going to go look at completely new mountain range.

Yeah, something where you can have a more stable life. So that's when I joined Intel, and Intel wanted to design a tablet. But here's the thing, I'm not sure if you've heard of this thing called One Laptop Per Child, OLPC.

I did. I saw the founder Nicholas Negroponte launch it in China back in the day. I'm a huge fan. He wrote the first amazing book, Being Digital. We had lunch after. He said, thank you for laughing at my jokes. I was the only one in the audience who was a native English speaker, and he gave it in English, but that was an incredibly ambitious project to put laptops all over the world. I guess he did it; it just wasn't him to do it. He just forgot about Moore's Law and all these other giant organizations that were just creating things much cheaper than he could ever do it through a foundation.

Bingo! Yeah. So Intel took his idea of one laptop per child and created something called Classmate PC, and they were able to do it in a way that is cheap, that is robust, and they. sold millions, like tens of millions in emerging economies. And when the iPad launched, even those kids in these emerging economies, they were like, laptop is old, we need a tablet. So I came to Intel to design the Classmate PC, like tablet version of Classmate PC. And so that's what brought me to Intel.

Wow. Another huge, ambitious project. Amazing. And you were based in Shanghai. To do that the whole time. Why Shanghai and not either Beijing where the headquarters are or Shenzhen, you know?

Yeah, Shanghai had a huge R&D team, like engineers and stuff like that. Yeah. And so all the product design for this Classmate PC was done out of Shanghai. It was a global team. The marketing, the industrial design, all those things were done. Actually, industrial design was also done from here. So this actually project grew out of this group we created called Emerging Market Platforms Group. So we were trying to see. What could be the product for emerging markets? And we came up with this concept of netbook, which was like a PC that can simply connect to the internet, very low specs. And then the OLPC came along and then we put 2 and 2 together and we're like, okay, the netbook is perfect as a classmate PC. So that's the reason it grew out of Shanghai because we were looking for that emerging market, whereas people in the headquarters, they're looking like global PC markets, right? So. That's the reason it was done out of Shanghai.

Love it.

Great.

Wow. Tell me a little bit about that transition, Apple to Intel. It's quite a different culture.

Man, a huge culture shock. Quite depressing in the beginning as well, because at Apple you just had to solve problems. We didn't have to think of what it takes to solve the problems. But at Intel, it was more like a reality check that the resources are limited.

Like most companies in the world outside of Apple, right?

So, I mean, that was a huge life lesson, man, that while I was at Apple, I had no concept of money, resources, time. You just solve problems. It's like a kid in a candy store. Everything is an intellectual activity. You drive your vendors.

And very user and design-centric as well too. And yeah.

Yes. Very user design-centric. I never knew about how much it costs to build anything. Although, you know, later on when I became a manager, I had to look at some money stuff. But when you design something, nothing— like, I didn't know how much it cost to create that latch, or we just solved problems and let other people worry about it. But when I came to Intel, especially in the emerging market group, right, I was designing a tablet for emerging market, which is cost sensitive. Everything was like, how much is going to cost? And I'm like, hey, I have not even put pen on the paper and you want to know about the BOM cost. So that was a huge culture shock. And I was like, what have I done? Where have I landed myself?

And also very engineering-centric, as I understand it, Intel. And not in a judgmental way. It's just like, that's the DNA of the company from way back, right? Yeah.

Even now, right? So anyway, we did the tablets, we did a bunch of other things. My last project in this education group was a very cool idea called Content Access Point. So this is where You have a, like a little access point, right? Like a Wi-Fi router that you connect to, right, at home. But now this, inside that there is a hard drive. There's also 4G connectivity and battery. So what you can do is you can just take this along with you to the classroom and just turn it on and all your students connect to it, whether irrespective of whether there's power in the school or there's internet or nothing. So there's content on it. And you can run your classroom. So that was my last—

yeah. Interesting. So it doesn't even need an internet connection necessarily, maybe if it's too far away. So it's kind of like a local mesh just for like preloaded content. That's pretty brilliant. It's like a— yeah. And how's the uptake on that been?

I think we just couldn't get it going, I think. And that was kind of the last project before I—

Seems like a great idea, but it's really tough on the distribution side, maybe.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so those are the kinds of problems we were trying to solve, but somehow we were being held to the same standard as the other Business units like hey, that business unit makes sells like two hundred million. You're only selling five million, and somehow that that group disintegrated. And even before that, getting the ideas from let's say from China back to the headquarters was quite tedious because this is a problem anyone in China has, not just like MNCs.

Anyone trying to figure out what's happening in China, talking with the mothership and vice versa is really rough. That's just the nature of the beast.

Yeah, and so I was being frustrated that our ideas. ideas are not being heard, and I wanted to do something else. I actually was ready to leave when this opportunity came along. They wanted to create this unified innovation effort for Intel China. And this is right after the 13th Five-Year Plan, where innovation became a national strategy for China. And we had to have some sort of a strategy, both internal as well as external. And so for the internal strategy, they opened up a role. Which I took, and it was like a clean slate. Let's figure out what to do. And that's how I ended up being in this innovation role at Intel China and created this accelerator called GrowthX. Like you mentioned, Intel is a very tech company, so we have brilliant people here who can create amazing technology, but real innovation is solving pain points of your customers, users. bringing value to them, not just creating shiny looking demos, right? And how do we cross that chasm? Like, look at this journey of a startup. You may start off with some idea in mind, could be tech idea, could be a business idea. And you do a proof of concept, either a business proof or a technical, but to land it into the market, that's where everything falls down, right?

It's just fascinating, but it's also fascinating. And that gets me so excited, the whole reading Steve Blank's book, Crossing the Chasm, and like making that, manifesting that into the world like that. That's more fulfilling, sort of dangerous and intoxicatingly challenging sport because you're most likely gonna fail. You're most likely— it's like, I'm gonna go climb this mountain. You have a 5% chance of getting somewhere up the top of the mountain and probably a much less than 1% chance of getting to the top. And what happens if I don't get to the top? Oh, you're gonna die, right? It's like, whoa, you're gonna plummet to your death. And that's a fascinating, just another puzzle for you to solve. I think you're an excellent puzzle solver.

So yeah, so actually, I had no idea about how to do this. But all I realized that we had brilliant people, we had amazing labs within Intel that were creating all this amazing stuff. But I couldn't see them out in the market. And that's the puzzle I tried to solve. And accidentally, I met Our common friend William Baubin, and I didn't know what accelerator was because I had left like Silicon Valley before Y Combinator or any of those things. I didn't have this chance of like campus interviews and stuff because during the first internship, I just carried on with Apple. So there was no startups coming looking for me. So I had no concept of accelerators, startups, and all that stuff. And from William, I got this idea about this something called accelerator. And I said, okay, if this works for the startup outside, I can do that internally in a corporate. And that's how I created this platform where our engineers put a business case on top of their technical ideas and see if their ideas have legs. Who, what, it's like a solution looking for a problem, which I know it sounds bad because you want to create solutions to solve a problem-first approach. But we have so many things. Where do we put them? We are a tech company.

Yeah, but it's not the only approach. I guess solution looking for a problem can work if it's good, if it really has the right kind of foundation. But then also you guys have amazing just resources and brand equity and first, right? So a lot of times startups fail just because of apathy, right? They have a solution for this problem, but people don't even know about it, right? So you can actually bring things into light. Into the light and make it grow. So just to pause it for a sec, William Balbean, for people out there in podcast land, the fearless leader of China Accelerator and Hacks, the other hardware accelerator in Shenzhen partner at SOS Ventures. And we're both proud mentors, Kapil and I, at China Accelerator. And I think they do some really fantastic work based in Shanghai. So yeah, what an excellent sort of mix. And recently on the podcast, I had the most excellent author of Gorillas Can Dance. And I mean, and he's great and like a professor there in Shanghai. And I know he talked to you a lot about your good work and makes total sense. It's like there's a lot of that innovation theater I think that happened before, like, hey, I'm sitting at the cool kids' table and hey, look, Ma, I'm with the big kids because I'm dealing with this big corporation. But I think you guys really understand that dance of, hey, we do have resources and brand equity and users and startups have nimbleness and cool solutions and risk-taking, but they don't have any Resources or customers or brand equity. So, hey, actually you're not very nimble or not very risk-taking and don't have the cool solutions, although you're extracting those, and then you can click those together and make it really work. So tell us a few adventures, trials, tribulations, and triumphs along this new quest.

Man, it's always— the first challenge was setting up our little outpost outside of our corporate buildings. I wanted to run this program out of like an innovation hub. And just to get that going took us, I think, 2 to 3 months with lots of like questioning from different groups. Like, what about info security, IP leakage, and people security? And you need to install these cameras, and you need to install doors and stuff like that. It was like complete opposite of what We're looking for like open innovation, let ideas flow. Yeah, I mean, if you are a startup, you just sign a lease and move in a day, and it took us like such a long time.

Sure. So you're like, I want to be away. 天高皇帝远. Heaven is high and the emperor is far away. I want to be away from the mothership. And they're like, okay, we're going to lock you in this tower, and then you're going to have to let down your hair to be able to get released every once in a while. So how did you deal with that? What was that first Puzzle.

What I did was I just told them, don't just tell me the problem, come up with 2 or 3 potential solutions as well. And I created a spreadsheet and I remember, I think there were like 50 rows from different groups, like from HR, this and this. And they had like, oh, you can't do it because of this. Then I'm like, okay, what are 2 or 3 solutions? So let's put it there. And then week by week, I was like, okay, have you found a solution to this? And I think after like 3 months, we finally like, you know, That's great.

That's another gem.

All the reds to greens and some yellows. And finally we found our space. We moved in and we started running our program from there. Accelerator from Xnode. I think, I'm not sure if you've been to Xnode in Jing'an. So that's where we used to run. The second problem was this. The second problem was we run, we just run like China accelerator, like 2 batches a year, 4 months per batch. And We wanted all of our employees who get into the accelerator, they need to be there full-time for those 4 months. Initially everyone agreed, but when it really came time for people to move, they're like, oh, we cannot let go. And so then we had to negotiate that one day a week you need to be fully present here. So that was another kind of like a negotiation we had to do and compromise we had to do. Not ideal, but that was the beginning days. But now what we see Is if people get into our accelerator, the internal employees, it's like an honor. And their manager is like, yeah, do this full-time. But it takes time.

We're seconding you over there. Love it. Love it.

Yeah.

Because now you have street cred.

Yes. So before that, there's no street cred. It's like, who is this crazy guy? And what is this innovation?

So what kind of success stories could you— I'm sorry, go ahead. Keep going.

Let's talk about some of the stories, right? I think let's say for the first couple of years, We worked on ideas which are like drones flying in formation, like a service robot that is conversational, targeted towards healthcare, where you put him in an old age home and this robot goes to room, has a conversation with the, not inmate, the people who live there. Oh, I don't know what they're called.

Well, yeah, I mean, I have to say that I have some family members and friends who feel like inmates, so it's probably not too far, but the residents of the nursing home, I guess you could say.

Residents, residents. Yes. Yeah, residents. And they figure out what kind of a mental state they are in. Are they sick and stuff like that? But, you know, after 2 years, we really couldn't land them anywhere because these were like technologies like 5 years, 10 years out. And then we started focusing on things which are more adjacent. Like we have this technology, we have this chip. Today it's used here. What, where else can we use this technology by building incremental stuff? On top of that. And this organically happened because initially we started getting ideas from our research labs. Then we started getting ideas from business units, from people who are in the field working with the customers. And organically we started like gravitating toward ideas, which are these adjacent innovations. And one of the very first things we landed into the market is this. Our group that does desktops, right? They create chips for desktop. They see the desktop sales declining. And this was at the same time when Amazon launched Echo and Alexa. And we saw that this market is picking up. So this guy came up with this brilliant idea. What if we add this smart speaker functionality to our desktop? Maybe we can get the desktop sales to go up. And we're like, okay, great. So yeah, let's come into the accelerator and figure out what to do. And as we start with like, you know, business model, we look at all the, your hypothesis, your assumptions. And as we started validating this, we realized that there is a need to build a smart speaker from the ground up for the Chinese market with Chinese characteristics, with Chinese translation engines. And we said that has more potential than attaching a smart speaker functionality to a desktop. And we created this reference design for such a speaker, and JD.com was the one who picked up that design and that turned into like multimillion dollars of revenue for Intel.

Oh, yeah.

So that was our very first success story from coming out of this accelerator. And that's basically looking at the market, looking at the customer, not trying to come up— and it's a very simple— people will say, oh, it's just like Amazon Echo. What kind of innovation have you done? And this kind of a question, even today, right? Like let's say at Intel, People ask, is this innovation? Oh, we have done speaker before. I'm like, you had done tablet before, but who is the one who did the iPad and who made the successful tablet? It doesn't matter who did it first, whose idea it is.

Exactly. Exactly. That may be defined as like pioneering, but even oftentimes the pioneers get the arrows, right? And they don't succeed. I guess PalmPilot was way before iPad, or like, who cares, right? And then sometimes that incremental innovation, like China's really good at that. Does it work? Does the market want it? Then I think that's the sort of success story, right? Because just innovation for innovation's sake, that doesn't suit anybody, right? And yeah, being first, that doesn't always win. But yeah, I think being able to like instill that drive and nimbleness inside the organization, that's just something that probably has this ripple positive effect throughout all kinds of other aspects of the corporation.

Absolutely. And that other ripple effect is Employee growth. We have seen the employees who have gone through our accelerator, they go on to climb their career ladder 1.5 to 6 times faster than their peers, depending on their grade levels.

That's a great metric. Yeah.

Yeah. So that itself is a huge win. So now we are preparing our employees to be more nimble, to be more well-rounded. Yeah. So I think that's another thing was the learning.

And are there other innovation centers for Intel in other markets?

We have a global incubator. We call it Emerging Growth Incubator in Silicon Valley. What they're doing is they're looking at like long-term, like 5-year, 5 to 7 years, how can we create the next billion-dollar business? That's where they're at. And the way we differentiate ourselves here, and again, it's not like some competition with them. We started this 6 years ago. They started this like a year and a half ago. For us, we are looking at what do we have at our hand in China? What kind of employees we have? Our employees are super customer obsessed. Our geo is very sales-centric geo. In fact, I think about close to 30% of all Intel revenues come from China. So we are all like that. Like—

Wow. Interesting.

And also a huge growth of Intel comes from China. So we are very much like, what can we do now? What can we do? within the next 1.5 years. And it's a— the way you innovate should be, you need to look at, does your kind of innovation suit the resources you have or not? Just because someone is like creating moonshots doesn't mean your team or your organization has the same amount, same capability to do the moonshots, right? Of course, there's like a time and a place for all kinds of innovations. You have this incremental innovation that you do, like, from top-down planning, from improving features or adding new features from one generation to the next generation. That's like incremental. That's done very well by the business units for existing product. Then you have this moonshots where you're looking for what could we do in the long term. And then you have this adjacent innovation is how can we grow organically with what we have? Less risk, but moderate Kind of a result as well. So there are these 3, and I think any smart company will play in all these 3 areas. Also depending on what geo you are in, the reason we are going to be able to do this quickly is again, China speed. We can quickly build things, test things, prototype things. We also have the customers here who are even faster than us to give us the feedback. And so this kind of innovation is very well suited for us in China. I don't think I'd be able to Run the same program even in Silicon Valley.

Interesting. Do you have any, and if you don't, it's okay, put you on the spot, but any sort of like concrete examples of where that speed cycle manifests itself with like you're launching something more quickly because you have proximity to the manufacturing centers down in southern China, but then you launch something with a partner. Like how does that get manifested? Like how are they doing things more quickly and just giving Faster feedback loops. Is there any specific examples around that?

Yeah, I can give you an example. Let me think. Oh yeah, Intel makes this chip called— was it FPGA? Yeah. Oh no, it was something— it's an ASIC. So ASIC is like application-specific IC. It's like a CPU, like a processor, but it has very limited functionality, but it does those functionality very efficiently. Okay. And they're used for very specific purposes like network processing, Or for cryptography. A lot of these Bitcoin mining, they happen on ASIC because all they need to do is break the code. They don't need to do general purpose. And CPU is general purpose, right? It can do many things, but it does everything less efficiently. So ASIC is like super efficient, but only like a single purpose.

Yeah.

It's like CPU is like a Swiss Army knife versus ASIC is like maybe our Sledgehammer, I don't know, or maybe it was screwdriver.

A scalpel, a surgical scalpel or something. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, sledgehammer. You can do only like break big things. Yeah. And so this guy, he came up with this idea that he's the guy who writes the program code for network packet processing on this ASIC we have. It's called QAT. Okay. Quick Assist Technology. And the insight he got was that he can tweak those code to make it suitable for human genome sequencing applications. Because when you sequence a human genome, you have lots of data and lots of redundant data. Because it's not just you're sequencing thousands of genomes and you're assembling it, because every sequence is not perfect, you'll lose some things. So there is huge data redundancy. And he found out that you can use our same chip into that application. And who is the— who are the biggest human genome sequencers? BGI, Beijing Genomics Institute, is the world's largest sequencer. And so we approached them and they're like, yeah, let's do it. Let's do a pilot and let's figure out if it works. And boom, within like 2 months, we created the programs, we ran the pilot, and that opened up like a new business line for us.

So just sort of like sheer data, but also I bet that they were just a lot more responsive and Quicker to apply it and quicker to feedback.

If you were like, let's say working with like say Broad Institute, okay, like in the US, maybe they'll be like, oh, let us sign this licensing agreements, this, that, that. And so it may take a long time. And so the Chinese companies are much faster. And what we then realize is it's even faster to go with the startups, to go to the market, test the market. And I'll give you another example. I know we are running out of time.

No, please. This is gold.

I appreciate it.

And we had this, I think Intel only does chips, but we also had this 3-dimensional camera called RealSense. And so it's basically like iPhone's camera where it can do face recognition. And we had created a face authentication algorithm and we were looking for where do we apply this? The problem at Intel is that we create this, I would say, technology at like a very horizontal level. So there could be like so many different verticals to go into. The problem is choosing the right vertical. And we decided that we can look at so many things. But one of the things was for using this face authentication in smart homes, like opening your doors. And then we're trying to figure out who do we work with? Who are the big players in this? And I remember meeting one, actually there's this company called LifeSmart out of Hangzhou. And today they are like pretty big in smart home, operate in multiple countries, including I think Indonesia, Thailand, everywhere. They make really cool smart home switches and lighting and stuff like that. And I remember meeting him a long time ago and I happened to be in Hangzhou and he saw my post on WeChat and he said, hey, why didn't you come visit me? I'm like, sure. And I went to his office and I saw these doors with these fingerprint readers. And I'm like, I didn't know you did this. And he's like, yeah, this is our latest product. And I'm like, wouldn't it be even cooler if you don't even have to touch the door? You simply show up with your face, it authenticates you and opens the door. And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, oh yeah, we have a project going on. Do you want to check it out? And he's like, yeah, sure. Then I connected these people and 3 months later there is this huge exhibition in Guangzhou and the product is there. Intel LifeSmart. Yeah.

Come on. And it's okay. I could maybe do a podcast in Chinese with him and subtitle it. But is he an English speaker? Is he speaking to you in English? Yeah. So maybe I'd love to have him on the pod and just get his sort of experience taking all of that technology to other markets. That's a great example. I mean, like 90 days to actual being in a conference. I mean, like that's an exhibition, like that's unheard of in the West.

But just to clarify, he's into many markets, but not with this product, but with everything else.

Sure.

No, but with other things, yeah. To be able to like talk to his perspective of applying the China speed of Innovate, prototyping and innovation. And then, wow, that's a great story. So one last question. Are there examples in that vein of what we were just discussing of Intel kind of taking what was created in the crucible of China and like that kind of kung fu ball of power, just, and then pushing that out to other markets, like either some sort of methodologies or products?

Of course, a lot of these things, they become a part of our global product offerings. For example, There's this idea that came out of lab in Shenzhen, Intel Labs in Shenzhen, idea called PC farm. And the idea of PC farm is, you see, you have typical offices in China or anywhere, like our schools or training centers will have desktop computers on all the desks. And the idea that this guy came up with is, what if we take the motherboard from those desktops and put it in a server kind of a form factor and put it in the back room? So now all your office is uncluttered. You just see only monitors and keyboard and mouse.

Only monitors.

And they're still one-to-one connect.

Yes. Like why hasn't that happened? Like that's a little silly that there are all these individual—

Yeah. So they came into our accelerator and their idea, the initial idea was to use it in a VR cinema theater because at the time, the VR cinema theaters were popping up in China. I think they haven't gone anywhere anymore, but they used to have a PC under the seat. And then you would put your goggles and you sit there. But the problem is that the seats used to vibrate because it would crank up the CPU, fans would come on, it would make whirring sound. And so this, they, we thought that was the application, good application, because now if you can put the PC in the back, you'll have a better experience. And that's the idea they came up with. But then we found other, including—

Airplanes? I don't know.

Internet cafes.

Ah, yes. Yeah.

So then what you do is in the internet cafe, you just have your, just a display and keyboard and mouse, and the people don't like stick stuff in and stuff. So it just remains like pristine and you can easily upgrade to the next CPU. And then we found a usage of like end-to-end streaming, like video streaming, game streaming. And now this has become like a part of like Intel's entire end-to-end offering for content streaming. So it started in China to solve like one certain problem with the VR market because VR cinemas were popping up in China before else, and which turned into something different.

And then, yeah, that's amazing. And just sort of pivoted to that. I love it.

Wow.

Fascinating. Excellent. Wow. Hey, Kapil, that was just terrific. I love— I knew you worked at Apple. I didn't know you had such an amazing— like you were really in the arena in Apple, like fighting some Epic battle. So yeah, and then what you've been doing at Intel, really pioneering and driving innovation. I just, I love it.

Thanks, man.

I hope to meet up in person when I'm in Shanghai, when things get back to abnormal again around the world. But yeah, thank you so much for your time and to be continued.

You're welcome, Rich.

That's a wrap. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Rich Robinson Show, season one at the speed of China. Visit the rich robinson dot com forward slash show to smash that subscribe button. Please also go to iTunes or whatever platform of choice, rate and comment. And until next time, thank you very much. 再见，谢谢。