Ian Smith, Founder & CEO of Ware.ai Artwork

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We interview the movers and shakers who are driving innovation forward and helping us achieve what previously was deemed impossible. As the nature of innovation itself is unpredictable, we consider a new generation of leaders emerging with breakthroughs that will even make this ambition achievable. Our conversations with world-class innovators look to uncover what they accomplished and what drives them moving forward. Conversations that are helping push humanity forward. Suman Talukdar is the founder and GP at AiSprouts VC, a Silicon Valley venture fund focused on automation. He invests in ventures that are pushing humanity forward, bringing the experience of working with startup companies that have achieved over $7B+ of exit value. You can connect with him on Twitter @stswww.

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Ian Smith, Founder & CEO of Ware.ai

December 16, 2021 • Season 1 • Episode 1

Ian Smith is the Founder & CEO of Ware, a company that is applying computer vision, machine learning, and drone technology to automate warehouse inventory management. We discussed Ian's journey into entrepreneurship and why he pursued the opportunity. He also shared some of his lessons learned finding a need, building a great product, and attracting marquee investors.

Here's an excerpt:
"What brought me to Ware is that this has never been done before successfully. And it's basically a secret of all the world's largest warehouse operators, that they don't know where everything is in their warehouses. And they lose stuff all the time. And the reason why, is because humans make mistakes and are doing these monotonous jobs -- they are dull and dirty, and sometimes dangerous. And it's just very repetitive and you make one single simple little mistake and you lose an entire pallet of inventory in a warehouse. That could be in a million-plus square feet, which is the size of 20 football fields under four walls and a ceiling. And then when you try to find it again to sell it or to fulfill it, or to move it again, it's like someone trying to find a needle in a haystack. There are 10s of 1000s of pallet locations that this piece of inventory can be lost in. And so that's a huge problem to solve. How do you do that with technology?"

(approximately transcribed via ai)

Suman Talukdar:
Okay, so Yeah, welcome. Thanks for joining my first portfolio podcast of awesome founders that I've had the opportunity to work with. So welcome. So to start, would you be willing to just tell me a little bit more about who you are for the audience's benefit?

Ian Smith:
Yeah, well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm honored to be the first guest have a little bit of experience doing podcast before. A bit about myself. Let's see. I'm based in San Francisco. I'm from Houston, Texas. Originally, I am the co founder and the CEO of a company called where we automate and digitize warehouse inventory management for the world's largest distribution centers and warehouses.

Primarily do that for our first product, using autonomous drones that fly around these facilities taking 1000s of pictures of every piece of inventory, and then we apply our you know, technology to it to extract all the insights and then deliver the answers that our customers are looking for.

So I you know, have had a pretty good you know, better part of the last decade of my career has really been focused on like, high technology new technology, you know, cutting edge stuff in startups. One of them I worked at a hardware company in France. And then what brought me to San Francisco here was more of a software focused company in the drone space, you know, kind of pioneering the way that large enterprises are adopting, you know, flying cameras drones, into their workflows, and seeing how we can really produce positive ROI. So I've done that across a variety of industries. It's been fantastic. And now myself as a founder, I've really just been like, you know, super laser focused with team here on, you know, warehousing and supply chain and logistics, which is, as everyone knows, you know, now that we're airing this like, we're kind of, you know, Omer cron variant is alive and well, it seems but everyone knows how much like a microscope or like a magnifying glass that's supply chain and warehousing has been under ever since COVID-19. Hit us like a whirlwind. So it's great timing, and I really enjoyed doing it. So that's a little bit about me used to fly helicopters commercially was a flight instructor brokered jet fuel to corporate fortune 500 flight departments, Gulf streams and citation jets of the world in the past, but really found with this great love of just these hard problems combining hardware and software to transform like legacy industries.

Suman:
That's fascinating. So a lot of the folks who are listening to this are either current founders, CEOs of companies, venture capitalists, or aspiring founders of, you know, startups. So one of the things that I'd like to just double click on is your journey here. You've obviously had kind of a background that's very, very relevant. But what led you to kind of make this decision to start this company obviously, it's going after a very big opportunity. But maybe you could tell the listeners a little bit more about your path here.

Ian:
So I think it really started at a young age. I've, you know, it's just like technology. For me. It's not business really. It's like technology and business is kind of like, you know, a byproduct of loving you know, if you really want and you're passionate about technology, you should get good at business because if you can combine the two they can really make something special happen as I was growing up, but so I mentioned I grew up in Houston.

I guess I come from a NASA family because my dad works at NASA and my sister also works to NASA. Now that she's grown up, but I grew up going to my dad's office, which happened to be, you know, a specific building at JSC in Houston, where that he ran, and that's where all the astronauts would train. And so I was like, incredibly lucky, five year old kid to have like unfettered access into the space shuttle cockpit mock up where all the astronauts train and prepare to fly the space shuttle like literally, and I would get to play around with all the switches and, you know, crawl around in all the little, you know, crawl areas play with the space toilets. And as I got older, there was an opportunity with a lot of other NASA engineers and some of their kids to build RC aircraft so those you know, balsa wood would shrink in the you know, the servos a little combustion engines with the little you know, the gas powered engines before there was even like the electric versions of these. Of these you know, RC aircraft and so I got to build those, learn how to fly them, crash them, rebuild them. And all of that kind of just led up into like this love of technology and aviation and aerospace and so, you know, the the next step of my journey, I guess, was just kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do. It wasn't very clear. Personally, I went to college and I was just like, what, architect chef? You know, what, like, marketing sounded so boring at the time. You know, just doing it for just some like random company. And then so I just decided I was gonna fly helicopters. A buddy of mine said, hey, look, let's do this. He was kind of going through the same thing as me. And I was like, This sounds perfect. So we wound up just doing all the training civilian paying for it, to learn how to fly helicopters, and I got to the point where I was a new flight instructor got my commercial certificate, and then it was like, 2008 you know, the economy crashed and everything, you know, the sky was falling. It was very hard to find a student who was willing to pay like $300 per hour for instruction in helicopters, so I pivoted a bit. That's where I got into that, you know, brokering jet fuel, which was pretty good business. Some fun times there. But that was like my first big exposure into like the office and business environment. You know, previously I was in the cockpit of the helicopter. And it was still touching aviation and touching these big powerful companies that are moving people across the world, the executives and we played a huge role in that as like their support system and extension of their flight departments is what we called ourselves.

And it was fascinating to me, and then that like, you know, propelled my interest in the business like combining Okay, technology, things that fly to the business side of things and always I have this kind of like, eye towards Silicon Valley, you know, like, you know, Google and, you know, these big companies out there and I would, my dream actually was I'm going to get a little bit personal here was to work at Google X, actually before it was rebranded X just X and then, you know, all this then like, I was like, There's no way I can ever do it. I was always like an Android phone nerd. So Google was the company I idolized above all else.

And through a crazy series of events, I wanted to moving to France, you know, getting involved in drones, actually, before I even moved there. Working at a company in France, doing hardware for drones, and then ultimately coming here, you know, in drones, again, from a software company called drone deploy to San Francisco and then realizing Wow, okay, this was like an opportunity that I could steez to get here and I've always just had this kind of entrepreneurial itch. I have a podcast I don't keep up with it. It's been over. Gosh, it's almost been two years. Maybe since my last episode, I reached 99 episodes soon. And so if you can get to that, if you can, my magic number was I'll call it a success if I get to 100 episodes. So I do have one episode I will do to kind of round things out.

But just you know, really made it my mission to network to engulf myself in the technology, and then try to become a founder myself, which is where I find myself here today. So that was kind of my journey, and my interest. And so, you know, maybe one day I can still work at at Google X.

Suman:
So when you're going through this, how did you know that? Where was the idea that you wanted to pursue? And how did you connect with the initial team that helped to get it off the ground?

Ian:
So I love hard problems. I remember there was this moment as you kind of sent me a couple of the topics we're going to talk about. I was just thinking about it, you know in the shower, you get the shower thoughts and you go down these rabbit holes and I was just recalling back when I was a lot younger before I ever chose I was actually like, okay, am I gonna fly I'm gonna fly something. I should fly helicopters. I know some pilots through family friends. I'm going to go to their hangar, they were corporate corporate pilots. And they were going to tell me, you know, they're going to give me advice I was hoping for and every single person in that hangar like I was, it was cool. I had lunch and we were in the hangar around the Jets, the big gulf streams, like amazing, you know, million million million multimillion dollar jets. And everyone there was a fixed wing pilot, and some of them had flown helicopters before. And they all told me don't fly helicopters, go fly airplanes. And of course, I went and flew helicopters. Like that's all I needed to hear everyone telling me not to do something. I'm going to do it. Needless to say, I love hard problems.

What brought me to where and you know, it's just this has never been done before successfully like having a you know, you kind of have to look at the problem. And it's basically like the dirty little secret of all these big you know, the world's largest warehouse operators, is they don't know where everything in their warehouses are. And they lose stuff all the time. And the reason why is because humans make mistakes and we're doing these monotonous jobs. They're dull and dirty, sometimes dangerous. And it's it's just very repetitive and you make one single simple little mistake and you lose an entire pallet of inventory in a warehouse. That could be a million plus square feet, which is the size of 20 football fields under four walls in the ceiling. And then when you try to find it again to sell it or to fulfill it, or to move it again, it's like someone trying to find a needle in a haystack. There's 10s of 1000s of pallet locations that this piece of inventory can be lost in. And so that's a huge problem to solve. How do you do that with technology? Fortunately, I was introduced to my co founder Joe mostre. He's our CTO aware, brilliant engineer, spent a lot of time in drones has multiple patents and autonomous technology and spent a couple years doing self driving cars with Uber at their hGD division in Pittsburgh.

We were aware just to being two separate people living and working in the current status of drones. How there was always this thought of like, maybe flying cameras can help track all that inventory in these warehouses. Maybe that's like the key because there's so many other like, you know, gotchas and all this other ideas you might have. There's always like a reason why not to do it. For drones and for cameras that have wings on them that can fly inside a warehouse. It was purely because it was never possible to do that previously. And so what we find ourselves in whenever we're co founding this company together and back in 2019 was a world in which drone technology had come a long way. And there was a very specific company who we're now a partner of called Sky do and we're very lucky to have this one of a kind partnership with them, because they make a fantastic flying camera platform, the most autonomous and smart one that exists on the planet that we get to build our technology on top of so we don't have to reinvent the wheel. We don't have to build this crazy drone from scratch. We work with them. We love doing it have a great relationship, and then we build on top of it and it's it's actually made this possible for the first time ever to have this autonomous self flying drone flying around a warehouse taking pictures. And it's a big hard problem and that's what attracted to me and also attracted me to it and also how it attracted Joe, my co founder, also how we were introduced as like me from the business side and him from the technology side. combining forces building this team and getting all these really nice high profile customers who are very happy with the technology. So big journey, big attraction to big hard problems, and we're not done yet we find new challenges every single day. So people that want to work here and you know that do work here. Really have to also love biting off a lot. You know, and being creative to solve all the all the things that pop up.

Suman:
Now, that's great. That's great. And it's amazing to hear your story. So I'll get into a little bit of how you're thinking about the company in a bit but you know the first step in and you guys are obviously doing amazingly well great traction. The first step is building a great product. So can you talk about how you've managed that transition from you know, you describe how you decided to find a team and took that entrepreneurial step and then hey, I'm I know I can build it. I have the relevant experience enterprise software, and I'm going to build this great product. So how did you start? What was that journey? What was that process? What are some of the things you've learned in getting to this point?

Ian:
It's a really good question. It also brings back a bunch of memories and it's just funny because it's like literally like a little over two years ago. Seems like a lifetime ago with the amount of stuff you learned just, you know, doing entrepreneurial stuff and building technology like this.

Biggest thing is like admitting to yourself, you don't know all your customers problems, and they're the experts and you need to talk to, you know, 100 customers, right? It's always 100 I don't know why it's always on but talk to as many potential customers as you can leverage your networks and really dig deep if you're gonna look at a problem and you want to build a great product to solve it. Validate the problem and understand from your customers perspective, how much they like what they feel about and how it affects them. And if your product didn't exist, what would they be earth your idea because if it's not a product yet, it's an idea. Okay, cool. You have this idea, you know, Mrs. Customer, like if this existed, you know, how would it help you solve this problem, but if it didn't exist, what are you doing today? Like, are you still solving it? The same way and how does that affect you? So you really want to make sure that what you're going to build and spend all this time on is something that they would use and that will bring them some positive ROI to justify this investment, assuming you're doing some b2b or b2c e product.

So talk to as many people as you possibly can you know, in the industry can reach out to them cold get up on LinkedIn and go to their office like at one point, you know, we and when I say we it was just Joe and myself. You know, we had never been in one of these huge warehouses before, which is kind of an advantage in some cases because you come at problems with a fresh perspective. But it's also great to build the team over time to have the experts from the industry, which is what we're doing. But I was going door to door renting a car I didn't have one at the time in San Francisco and trying to find big warehouses and just go up to them and I had a drone in the backseat and I walk up and I just like cold knock on the door and just say, Hey, my name is Ian and I had a little flyer I put in their face that I made, you know on like Google Slides and printed it out. And it was just like, you know, drone warehouse drones stuff like this. And getting a bunch of doors slammed in my face. I got laughed out of a couple warehouses, people mumbling under their breath, I'd come in and I realized that the warehouses I was actually going out if you know San Francisco, there's not a lot of big warehouses here. There's actually like none, so I had to start increasing my search radius gradually and finally found this place the breakthrough moment was finding this place called Venetia. I never knew it existed. I'm not sure if you know where it is, but it's like the northeast of Berkeley.

So it's almost like 45 minutes an hour and a car, depending on traffic from San Francisco. And I walked into this warehouse from this company that does Beer Distribution, and it was the biggest building I've ever seen in my life. It was like 700,000 square feet. It's still a large warehouse in relation to the ones I've stepped in.

But it was just humongous and I was like finally this is it. So I get taken into this guy's we're into this guy's office I show up we're all that. You know, truck drivers show up and I say hey, I have this drone and the lady's like okay, let me go find this guy and see if you can talk to him. He brings me back to his office. He puts us he leans back. He puts his feet up on the desk and he goes like you got five minutes. It was like, it was like straight up like a movie and five minutes turned into 45 minutes and we were walking the warehouse floor. He was showing me introducing me to the lady who manages all their inventory in the facility. And I just uncovered all these problems and then, you know, blossomed into this opportunity for us to you know, work on some of our early technology there. So, moral of the story, talk to as many people as you can, you'll be surprised with the insights that they have. You might have an idea in your head, but it can quickly be D validated Once a customer realizes, especially it once a customer gets their hands on your technology, especially if it's something you're not familiar with yourself. The kind of, you know, big piece of advice. I think that's out there is like, solve a problem that you feel the pain of a lot. I didn't feel the pain of this I was more of a consumer side feeling the pain of like, Oh, my package is delayed or they delivered me the wrong thing you know, so can inconvenience staff to return this.

But you can still do it. You know if you're really deliberate about how much you learn. And I would say that's like the step towards like the critical steps towards building a great product that your customers love and it never ends never never ends. The feedback from customers constantly taking it, putting it slotting into the right spot, putting it on the roadmap telling them when it's coming or when it's not and these types of things. So, always a challenge, but that's how we approached it. And I subscribe to that mantra of just like, just constantly be inquisitive and asking those customers about the problem, figuring out how you can solve it better and then using you know, smart people and smart team to figure out the best ways to do it.

Suman:
So that's amazing insight. So how did you know so going from that like, you have the you have the problem identified? You have the people you kind of know the end goal you're trying to work toward How did you know when the product what you were building, and I'm assuming it took you a while to get to that point, but when it was ready to actually sell and even before that when it was ready to hand it off to your first set of customers that believed in you.

Ian:
I don't have a good answer to that. Because you're just kind of flying by the seat of your pants to those very early days. The really cool thing about venture capital and getting funding from VCs as a startup entrepreneur, is that you really can do it with just an idea. Like some people like are very have an advantage. They're like second time founders right maybe had some success and like, you know, they're much more likely to get funded with just an idea and get some funding a couple $100,000 here maybe a few million if you're super lucky.

So we didn't have that luxury at the time. And so we were really doing this, like on the side, you know, my co founder was not paying himself. He was just like living off of his Uber stock that he had gotten and so you know, I was like working another job at the time.

So we just, you know, tried to be as flexible as we could.

Our first version of the product was fully manual, there was like nothing autonomous about it. The drone could fly itself, but the data processing like the drone is interesting. It's cool, whatever, but like we're so jaded on this technology, we just view them as a simply a means to an end a tool that can capture the data that we ultimately need to process heavily with all of this different complicated computer vision and localization and all this stuff and then tying into API's with the customer system. We didn't have any of that part of the product in the first stages. And we just use pure brute force to get introduced and inside of one of the world's largest three pls third party logistic companies. Down in Southern California, we would get on an airplane go down there. They we didn't they didn't pay us anything. We just said, Hey, if we do this and if we build this will give you a huge discount. And they were like okay, cool. So they let us into this amazing, beautiful warehouse and everything was manually done. So really, there wasn't a specific time that I said it is ready right now to sell because I was constantly trying to sell them. We were doing you know, update scaling in their in their conference room getting everyone around and you know, it just showed a lot of promise to them. And I think when we truly knew that it was ready I guess, was when we got our first customer and that was our first ever customer called teleworks logistics. We met them at a conference seven days before San Francisco became the first big city in the US to go under lockdown for COVID-19. So it just kind of happened. And I think the moral here is like you know the the thought process just like I think a lot of you hear a lot of advice about don't wait till your product is just like, you know, this like perfect, like everything's perfect and locked in and you have every feature that you could imagine, like try to sell it depending on what your product is and who your customer is trying to sell it constantly until someone finally bites on it. And then I think you know, okay, we have the most minimum viable product here that someone will actually pay for. But then the clock starts ticking because it's game on.

And you better start moving fast and listening to them constantly to develop and so we've had a lot of opportunities like that. Our the nature of our product is we got to do a lot of pilots it's new tech frontier stuff for customers. And so each pilot that we've done for a relatively modest amount of money, you know, revenue for us, has produced just a ridiculous amount of learnings that have made its way into the product making it better and better. And even if we didn't win the pilot, they win them as a full customer after that. It's still a huge win for the company, and all the rest of our customers who do believe in us because they reap the benefits of all the energy and the passion that the pilot customer put into the feedback that we you know, extracted from that and eventually makes its way in the product. So yeah, that's like a journey. I think it's a lot just by feel from the early early employees of the company and systematic hustle if I can say that right? Systematic hustle Exactly. Yeah, you gotta just will things into into being that's like the best yourself. It's hard for some people to do that. It helps to have a little bit of a sales background, if that's your thing, or marketing or just being in front of people like service industry experience. I mean, you know, working in a bar, a restaurant or something, just talking to people. This is how you make it all happen.

Suman:
So you're here you have the team you have the product now you're pursuing the opportunity you're going through the process of building a business right? And so you to have any to do at all. How did you sort of go from there to you know, the next step which was really have a great group of investors, you have some amazing funds involved. Some big names, I want to talk about that. But how would you sort of how did you go to go from there to be able to connect with them and then get their interest so you really have the ammunition to build something big?

Ian:
Yeah, fundraising is tough. It's great if you've done sales before because it's just like any other sales process. You got your leads, you qualify them, disqualify them, run them through the process all that I was fortunate enough to have met our first ever like institutional check into the company, Min Kim from Bloomberg Beta. I met her not as a founder of where I just met her as someone who was interested in founding a company eventually. And she, I guess, you know, like what she saw and believed in me, you know, my my determination and everything. And then I was able to reach out to her about three or four months after meeting her at this event, and I said, Hey, I actually have a company now I know that you're an investor. How does this work? How will you give me some money, please?

And so she actually walked me through it. It was great. There's a lot of great early stage investors that are more than happy. And understand that sometimes first time founders just don't know they're, you know, there's all these rules that you will read. You'll do research as a founder looking to fundraise. Oh, there's all these rules. You got to have this you got to have this and then like all of a sudden, you know, you go into Twitter and everyone's just like you don't need a pitch deck. My favorite pitch deck was a loom or a notion document or all this stuff and you're just like, What the heck is going on here? There are no rules. And that's like the biggest thing I've learned is like there's rules but then there are no rules and you have to know the rules first to break them.

So anyways, yeah, I think it's just, you know, putting yourself out there being confident in your vision, and then trying to leverage again, it's just about people really, like you have to know people.

You're trying to know people get to know people network with them, and you know, be willing to just like get completely shut down. We got laughed out of not laughed out. That's probably a little too extreme. But we got like, almost like reprimanded the first I remember the first in person pitch we did before men ever believed in us. Like people were just telling us how wrong we were like how this is bad. That's bad. And I was like, dang, but for every one of those types of investors that are out there. There's so many great ones like yourself that are just like, you know, the cool thing and the thing I love best and I'll toot your horn a little bit here is you're like super committed the first time I ever talked to you. I think I remember like I was just like, okay, cool, new call potential investor. And you're just like, sweet, that sounds great. Like, you know, this is really amazing, really amazing problem you're going after.

You know, I think I think you almost verbally committed on the first call, if not the first call we ever did. And that was really nice.

So at this point, yeah, I don't really have like a lot of, you know, advice or whatever. But it's just yeah, putting yourself out there, getting it done, and believing in what you're doing and try to talk to as many many investors as possible. If you're going to compare the two sort of experiences from the challenge of building a product that customers care about, too. And the challenge of, you know, building a company story that investors are really excited about. How would you compare those two? I mean, you need both right, but is there one Yeah, it's Yeah. So I mean, well, we'll finish the question actually, because I want you to give me a little more help on what it's like.

Suman:
As a founder, you know, first time around, I think second time founders know how to kind of allocate their time on both things. But as a, you know, somebody that is just getting started doesn't really know what's ahead of them. How would you potentially prioritize those two things?

Ian:
At the end of the day, you have to care about and think about the problem and the customer over everything, no matter what you're doing, and that better be the first thing you're thinking about, or else you couldn't get laughed out of the room or you don't know the problem well enough to articulate where you can't build the product that solves it, you know, to the best of your possible ability.

So you really have to have that. And I hate the word customer obsession because it's just like such a trope now and a cliche but like you just do you have to be just very invested in the problem and understand it takes some work and you got to you know, uncover you know, turn a lot of stones over to try to find these hidden like insights, investment and doing that. I mean, it's so hard to compare the two to me the chicken in the egg things that happens like you got to have the problem and everything that you feel strongly about. You've tried to validate as much as you can, and then I think the investors can come it helps to have revenue. That's always the thing you want a customer if you're at the very earliest stages and you don't have a customer yet. That's cool. You can still do it but if you do, if you can get a customer like we were trying to get mo use and you know all these things like you know, a pilot, just anything like that helps tremendously at the very earliest stages. Comparing the two, it's, you know, you have to have two different types of pitches for the customer. You're solving a pain point, for an investor, you're painting this big vision of like, Hey, this is an actual sustainable business, that we're solving a real problem that's happening in the world. And imagine how much money you can make on it. As much as we like to think that this is all about, you know, emotional like Oh, or you know, proliferating technology to help humans do things better and we're just great happy go lucky people. A lot of it is about the big opportunity and, you know, making money, frankly, so you better be able to kind of tie that you know, connect the dots between all these different pieces of this puzzle, and make sure you can kind of build that cohesive narrative.

But ultimately, it's the same thing. I mean, you're selling yourself your idea to a customer or to someone who can become, you know, like a benefactor. I guess if you will, of the business, for the financial aspect of it. No one's investing in companies because it makes them feel good. Some people are maybe, but you know, we can't all be Bill Gates on that point.

Suman:
So here you're doing a great job promoting your concept and that's a big vision. You have the company behind you, right? Or in your you're the leader here, the CEO. So how did you think about that responsibility? You know, what were some of the sort of folks that you admired in your career and how did that how did you bring some of that into kind of being this manager and leader of this corporate entity, right with strong commercial ambitions? Like what was that experience like?

Ian:
That was a very well articulated question.

The people who I admired who I took these people I've worked with and they were never startup people.

This is like the, this is, you know, I imagine some people are like, oh, yeah, Elon Musk, you know, like, but no, no, like, No, I don't admire Elon Musk for like any type of leadership that he embodies, like, anything like that. It's like the people who I worked with, from my very first office job from my very first job ever.

Are the people who I take inspiration from and the ones I've modeled myself after, like, the greatest piece of professional advice I can ever regurgitate to anyone is always follow up. That's always been like the thing that has guided me through sales through entrepreneurship through anything and it's like the tried and true method if you look at you know, if your salesperson and like when you're first like a green behind the a wet behind the years green horn salesperson, if you ever get like professional training, it's like, the more you fought like studies show that more deals closed on the seventh time you follow up without a response versus just following up three times. And so that's like, just like determination and grit has been the whole thing.

I don't the other aspects are intangibles to me. I think people are just different, you know, in terms of just being the leader of the company, everyone's got their own style. Everyone has their own past experiences that are gonna shape the future. I don't believe in reading a book is going to tell you how to be like an actual person who people will just follow through the trenches through tough times, good times, all that. I think it comes down to just who you are how you were raised. What you believe in and you know, how passionate you are about the problem and how much you care about these people that are, you know, risking a lot to join you.

So that's the Yeah, that those are my thoughts on that. But I just remember taking a lot of experiences from my early jobs in office environments. And seeing the people who are in charge and taking the good ones. And of course, there's plenty of bad ones, especially in startups, if you're working for startups, too. You're working with a lot of folks too, that may not have a lot of experience. You know, they're they're new and so there's all these horror stories about founders and execs and directors and even new employees, you know, it's tough sometimes, but finding the good ones, focusing on what they did, and trying to model myself based on you know, ways that they acted, things like that.

Suman:
So, so just to put you on the spot if there's like one person to take out to dinner right and like at this point, just kind of trade notes and they're listening to this or you know, whatever who would that be?

Ian:
It would be someone from one of our customers and it would be probably someone from I want I want the big at this point in my in my phase of where we're at in the startup is I want to take out you know, a someone that's high up in the food chain at like DHL supply chain. You know, they're the largest third party logistics operator on the planet. They have a total different perspective when you get that many levels up on how the world is in their business and how it works and how everything ties together. So that's what I would really want and those are the people that I admire is just like learning these dole industries like everyone's driven around on the highway, and like until you work in supply chain logistics, or you're involved with a company that focuses on that. You don't care about the 18 wheelers. Now my eyes are like glued I'm just like, oh, cool, okay, there's a DHL trap. There's a geodis truck I see the truck like all this, you know, okay. United National foods.

You start noticing all these things. And so that's like the backbone of the global economy. I don't care if the internet sure is one thing and it makes it all go around. But feeding our human nature of eating and like acquiring material goods like are all these warehouses, all these trucks, the truck drivers, the companies behind the whole thing, global trade. It's fascinating to me, so that's who I would want to kind of take out to dinner and have like some like deep conversations with and see, you know, learn how they see the world.

Pretty, pretty interesting stuff. And then what would be going through all this now and you're looking ahead in your mind, like what's the ambition for what you're trying to do longer term with where we are a software platform, we're a platform whatever, software, hardware, whatever, we're more software than hardware. Obviously, we don't make any drones or any hardware ourselves, but we're a platform for revolutionising the way that warehouses make decisions and operate.

That's the big, big, big opportunity. Here. So we are going after what we believe is a very hard problem, but it's the low hanging fruit still of inventory tracking because there's no technology that exists to solve it. And to be worth writing this current wave of, you know, understanding all the different little pieces and how everything fits together. You know, cloud computing and IoT devices and, you know, autonomous flying cameras and, you know, mixing it all up in a pot and popping out a product to solve our customer's problem. That's like, you know, the first step here and, you know, taking that and going as far as we can with it. But also expanding to other parts of the operation of these big, big warehouses. These big buildings, they're not getting any smaller. They're not getting any, you know, like lower in height. They're just growing constantly multi story warehouses, you know, inventory all the way up. 30 plus feet in the air, solving all the different areas of inventory tracking, but then also expanding into different parts of the facility as well, using low cost sensors to do so. And I don't want to spoil too much of our long term vision, but that's how we're thinking about it. It's not just inventory tracking. It's the whole enchilada. There's so much inefficiency that goes around this and there's so much pressure on these facilities to deliver literally to us, as we add to cart and click Checkout, whether it's from Amazon or anyone else, like there's a ton of pressure that's that's there and there's a lot of money and effort being wasted.

That we're going to help, you know, alleviate that pressure and make you know 20 minute delivery a thing we can count on across the board right because we're never going to stop as humans you know, just consuming all the things around us as possible. So yeah, big problems logistical stuff, and we're gonna be the platform that makes it happen from a visual and three dimensional perspective. And so obviously you're busy guy but you know, in terms of people want to reach out to you talk to like, what are what are sort of active conversations that you're looking to have at this point from from the business side. So customer side, you know, people in the industry, people want to join the company, what are some sort of top of the list relationships, open a building, always looking for customers always looking to hire we're very fortunate in that we are solving such a critical problem that customers a lot of them come directly to us. We never really have to go out. But I'm always you know, happy and interested to talk to anyone who's working in a warehouse who has insights into into into inventory control and management.

You know, if you're experiencing a problem yourself, come to us just go to our website, it's where.ai W ar e people who want to work here like if you like hard problems you like working with the latest, literally the most cutting edge like flying robots computer vision, machine learning, IoT stuff, cloud computing, photogrammetry neural networks, like you name it, we have like all the buzzwords literally in our product. So if that gets you going and you're an engineer, you're on the business side of the house to always feel free to reach out. We want to talk to you and we want to show you what we're up to. I think I think it's really fulfilling and of course, very challenging to but yeah, those are the big things. And the best way I guess is like LinkedIn or send you a note on the website, LinkedIn. Ian Smith, you know, look me up where.ai Fill out our contact form. I'm hesitant to give away my direct email address, but if you're clever, you could probably figure it out.

If you know your way around how email dresses are formatted these days.

Suman:
Now and obviously this this this amazing opportunity you're in front of, I guess if you've mentioned a lot of these automation and machine learning, if you're so you're going to listen to this podcast, let's say four years from now it's been out or whatever. You're going to make a prediction today about the future. And I'll close with this. What is one thing that you feel highly certain about? That's going to happen? In the future that hasn't happened yet?

Ian:
I'll tell you something that's not gonna happen as fast as everyone thinks. And it's I'm calling some companies out here I wonder if they'll hear this but I'm fully so there's this thing called fully dark warehouses are fully like no humans in the warehouse at all.

A lot of folks seems to think that those are like coming very soon. And in reality, they're not and actually, I'll tell you just it's like, it's not really a prediction. It's just like a tell all it's like, think of who you think is the world's best warehouse operator with the best technology and the most robots. And then think, again, because there's so much inefficiency going on. There's a lot of robots and a lot of automation in warehouses. But it's not to the level that a lot of folks think, and there's just so much human labor tied to all of this that's very inefficient that people don't even like doing the jobs. So my prediction is something that's not going to happen is that I mean, we'll even go 1020 years from now. I don't we'll say 15 years, just to be safe, but like those fully dark warehouses and like, you know, no humans in the warehouse at all and warehouse just operating. Those are still so far out. There. So cost prohibitive. There's so many humans that need to maintain those warehouses to that's just, you know, your start just fixing the robots whenever they break down. And then also like autonomous forklift companies. Those are those are while ways away. They're very dangerous. They're very slow. today. And as you know, they're kind of offs in the kiddie area of the warehouse, they get separated from the real adult forklifts that are human powered, that are doing all the work. Those are going to those are going to come but I just don't think of your company as quickly as, as people that they're that they are. So you're predicting kind of a semi autonomous or blend of high autonomous plus hybrid human involvement.

Warehouse, basically for the for the next 10 to 20 years. It's yes data. Warehouses in the same networks of companies are not as automated and need more of this like retrofitting of robots that can come in and use their existing infrastructure and solve all the immediate problems that we have over the long term. Then we'll start seeing a lot more of these like much more fully automated warehouses that are built from the ground up to be to be operating in that type of way.

Suman:
Yes. Awesome. Well, that's great to have your, you know, stake in the ground on that. We'll follow up with you on that at some point and yeah, no, and thanks so much for taking the time to chat in and, you know, look, look forward to obviously continuing this journey with you. And, and, yeah, any any closing remarks otherwise, you know, we'll give you a couple of minutes back at the top of the hour.

Ian:
Yeah, nothing specific to close on. I just really appreciate the opportunity Suman for being on the show first guest always an honor. Love to do it and really appreciate the support. Folks, if you're listening to this and you want a great really hands on helpful investor, you know who to contact.

Suman:
Awesome. Thanks. Alrighty. Take care and I'll talk to you soon.