Anki Overdrive | Co-Founder/President of Anki Drive Hanns Tappeiner

What we thought we're going to do is we're going to— I'm going to give you a quick overview of what the company is and how it was started by my 2 co-founders and I, and that's hopefully useful for you guys. And the whole thing should take about, I don't know, like 25 minutes or so, and then we'll do a demo and show you what the product is like. And if I go over time, just let me know because I don't have a timer. If I talk a single minute more than 30 minutes, cut me off because that means I'm talking too much. Cool. So yeah, let's give you a quick overview of how the company came about. Before I do that, I want to show you something else real quick. This is before Anki. This is a different kind of company or endeavor. So first, Anki is a robotics company. So we are making products at this intersection of toys, video games, and robotics. But underlying the core of it, the core of the technology is robotics technology. My 2 co-founders and I were always really interested in robotics. And I just want to give you sort of like an idea of a failed endeavor, much, much older. This is when I was about 7 years old, already into robotics. And so the idea was— so this is an approximate layout of part of our apartment where I grew up. And my mom had a huge candy drawer. And so she would always collect my sister's and my candy, and we wouldn't get access to it. And she would store it in a drawer and she said, we cannot touch that drawer. So my best friend and I, we thought, hey, we found a loophole in that rule. She said we can't touch the candy drawer, but if we could build a robot which can go over there and get the candy out, then we would have a lot of candy. And the idea was then we can eat as much as we want and the rest we're going to sell to our friends. The problem was we were 7 years old and our tools were Legos, so obviously none of this worked. at all. But so I gave up on that idea, but I stuck with the robotics thing. And that's one of the things I want to mention. I'll tell you a little bit later. I'll give you sort of like the 6 most important lessons learned. And one of them is domain knowledge. And I'll go into a little more detail later. But it is— when you start a company, you have a huge advantage if you do it on a topic where you feel like you know a lot about. And so we, my co-founders and I, we had the advantage that we got interested in what we chose as a topic for our company pretty early on. And so I'm going to fast forward 20 years if I can somehow. Ah, here we go. So fast forwarding 20 years, we did this whole robotics thing significantly more seriously than when we were 7. So we did our PhDs at the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. And we were working on huge— woo, CMU? Yeah. Perfect. So we worked on huge robotic systems there. There are just 3 examples, wall-climbing robots, remote bomb disposal, autonomous self-driving cars. And those are multimillion-dollar projects and you can find at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, multiple universities now, a fair amount of those of those projects. But we got very interested in trying to figure out how to take some of the things we really like about robotics and apply them to consumer products, meaning not something which— where a government or research institution invests multimillion dollars, but something which anyone, you, I, anyone who wants to can go to a store and buy a product, and that product should include some form of robotics. So that was the— was the general idea, but at that point we didn't really know yet what we wanted to do as a company. And this was a little bit later, this is a picture of my 2 co-founders here in our first office in Pittsburgh, also known as Boris and my living room. So this is how everything started in 2008 while we were still in grad school. And so the first— there were 2, I guess, significant steps in the thinking. Later we moved to to San Francisco, but there were 2 significant steps in thinking in the history of Anki. The first one was, okay, we want to do something which is robotics-related because we really felt like there is technologies developing in a way that we can now use some of those things which we applied to big robots and apply them to consumer products which include robotics. And the second one was, we didn't really know yet what industry would be the best industry to start in. And that was the second big— it wasn't really an aha moment, it was more like over the course of about half a year where we tried to figure out, okay, what would be a perfect industry to start out with? And we found that industry to be right at this intersection of toys and video games. And the reason for it is that there is a huge discrepancy between how technology and products developed in the toy industry versus in video games. So if you look at toys, for example, from 30 years ago and you compare them to toys today, there's a little bit of electronics here and there, but the main play patterns are still pretty much the same as they were 30 years ago. On the other hand, when you look at video games and you think of the first video game you've ever seen, who of you knows Pong? You're probably too young to— oh, wow, okay. So Pong, one of the first video games I can remember. If you compare that to a video game today, like, I don't know, Need for Speed or something like that, they have nothing in common with each other. So the video game industry has been notoriously good at adopting new technologies, more processing power, graphics, the internet, mobile devices. And at the same time, that didn't really happen in toys. And we felt like that that's one of the reasons why a lot of people like to play with video games more than they play with toys, just because video games have gotten so much better. So we wanted to try to figure out how to use robotics and artificial intelligence to take some of the things we love the most about video games and apply them to a real physical toy and make it into a game. And so that was the idea. And that was in— yeah, as you saw earlier, that was in approximately 2008 while we were still in grad school. Let's see. Okay. So what that led to was that we— we're all huge car lovers, so we decided the first product we should make is car-related. And we wanted to reinvent sort of like a cross-generational genre of both video games and toys, and that's race cars. And so we launched the first version of our product called Anki Drive in October 2013. We were introduced at WWDC by Tim Cook because we're working very— we work very closely with Apple together. And then launched the product a few months later. And so that was— now we had the second season of that same product. And last year, meaning last fall, we were the Anki Drive— this is the new version which I'll tell you about in a second. That was the 2nd best-selling toy on Amazon.com over the Christmas season, only beaten by Disney Frozen princess dolls. Yeah. What can you do? So anyways, the new version which is called OverDrive is coming out this September and we're going to show you We're going to give you a demo in a little bit and show you how this whole thing works and what makes it different. But the idea is it's a racing game. You guys know slot cars, for example, or remote-controlled cars? So the idea is that it works with real physical cars. But other than that, it's very much a video game and not so much a toy. So, for example, I'll give you a few examples. The cars, you can either control them with your smartphone. And so you race one of the cars. You race it on a racecourse like the one you see here. And then you can either race with a bunch of friends or you can say, I want number— car number 2 and 3 to be self-driving cars and I want to race against them. So you can race against computer-controlled opponents and they're really, really good. That's where the robotics comes in. And the best part of it is not just that we're excited about robotics, but it actually allows us to do some really cool things. And they're all known in video games but really don't exist outside of video games. So for example, The toy you buy today is going to develop over time. As you get better, the OverDrive is going to get better as well. So in the beginning, it's easy to start and you'll see that in a few minutes. But then as you get better, it gets a lot more challenging. The AI opponents will get better over time. You can start upgrading your cars. They get faster over time. So the game you have in a few months from now is a completely different game than the game you have today. So,