How Sereneti Began, Timothy's Story | CEO Sereneti Kitchen Timothy Chen

Let me go ahead and first tell you about my journey and how I came to be where I am today. So I'm a little older than you guys. I started out early in the early 2000s where I did the first daily deals program. I threw daily deals from my community when I was in college in Georgia on a website, and I said, what if people can actually go to those stores and claim the daily deals? Because everybody wanted to offer something. So I had a little key fob, and I said, if you can go into the stores, you can tap that key fob on a device, and it'll show up that promotion for you. I can see when somebody looks at a promotion online and when they can actually go into the store. So that was the first online to offline tracking. And the only thing that I didn't realize, you know, within the first week of launch, I had 6,000 of 30,000 people signed up. And what we were gonna do is just replicate this, you know, all over the place. But there was zero funding. 'Cause out of Georgia at the time, there was, You know, there was not this atmosphere like it is in Silicon Valley. So put that on hold for a little while. And also it wasn't the right timing because Daily Deals really came along when, when these things came along. Because back then people were checking the internet, now you have it in your pocket. So timing is very important when you first start a startup. You guys are in a perfect place, the perfect time, and I think you can make anything that you dream of in this environment. So I went from there to become an entrepreneur in residence at Atata Group doing a lot of M&A work, and from there I joined an early startup as an early employee in robotics. So I started falling in love with robotics. Robotics, I think, is going to change the world in the next 10 to 15 years. In the last 20 years, you had years of information. Before Google, everybody was going through encyclopedias, they were asking their friends, but then you were able to actually have information at your fingertips. But now that you have all this information at your fingertips, you're starting to see all these companies that are popping up that do stuff for you. The Uber for X, the Airbnb for B, for X, right? You can actually take those things and make that your own. And you can have these services and goods. So we think that robotics is gonna enable that to happen even better and further, so that you don't have to do things anymore. You can just say, I want this, and this thing will be done for you. So, joined this early startup. When I left, I was leading Asia Pacific in terms of their business development, and they grew from about 20 people to about 200-something people. pre-IPO company. And that's when my sisters, who were your age, you know, they were, they were just as they were finishing high school, they came to me with a concept and they said, why can't robots cook for people? And why isn't cooking such a much easier process than just push a button, set it and forget it? And I said, I don't know, go make something. So they came back to me, they took our iTunes, they took our coffee machine, the Keurig coffee machine, and they put a spatula on top. This is your next cooking machine. I said, I don't get it. What do you mean, like, this is our next cooking machine? They said, if you think about it, music and food have great parallels because a recipe is the same as a musical score. Someone who cooks food, like a chef, is the same as someone who plays music because they're an artist. So if you can push a button on this to get great music, why can't you push a button on something like this to get food? And a data point that really just What just blew my mind was that there was 200,000 artists and 26 million songs, 2002 numbers, on iTunes. There are 2 billion chefs, of which 26 million of them cook professionally in kitchens every day. And there are trillions of permutations of recipes. So the challenge was, could you build the next iTunes and iPod of food? So we started, right? We started, said, you know, let's recruit some technical talent and get this done. So we went to the local university and helped them talk to the professors there. And they recruited some really, really smart people. And within 4 months after building our initial prototype— we just had an arm that cooks food at the time, right? So it was just an arm that moved around. We applied to TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield just hoping to get this on their radar. Usually they take companies that are more mature. You go through a program like Highway One, you go to a TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield or Disrupt to showcase. They took us and we were like, oh crap, what are we going to do now? We're 4 months into it. We have to build the rest of it. So it was nights and weekends, literally sleeping in the lab 24 hours. I spent Christmas and New Year's, you know, in the lab getting this thing done. We showcased. The machine didn't work on stage. And then we're like, oh crap, what are we going to do now? So luckily for us, CES and TechCrunch Hardware Battlefield was an amazing experience. A lot of people came to us. So we actually didn't know about Highway One. Highway One came to us along with a few other accelerators. We evaluated all of them and figured Highway One was the best one for us at the time because of their expertise. Saroya talked about engineering expertise in-house that can actually help you do things because they really get their hands dirty and help you engineer what you need to get done. And then also we looked at the overall bigger picture about PCH access. PCH is the parent company of Highway One, and when Liam, the CEO, said, you know, you're looking around at a lot of stuff, we understand, but we're a 3,000-person company. We are vertically integrated because we're going from prototype to manufacturing and distribution to help you ultimately get the product into consumers' hands. A lot of people do certain parts of that, but do you want to spend the time doing that, or do you want to work with a company that can really get you to To where you need to be. That was our deciding factor in Highway One. So I can tell you a little bit more about what I do, and I really do want to open this up to a question and answer session, especially for those people who are interested or want to know about hardware. There were some crowdfunding questions earlier. There are tons of companies that crowdfund, but the most successful ones are hardware. Why is that? Because hardware is harder to make. But when you do it right, you escalate your revenues like never seen before. You know, you're talking about Series A's up into the tens of millions, into $100 million level for like a Jibo that's done an extremely great job in promoting their personal robot. So how big do you want to dream? That's my question to you guys. Thank you.