Tech's Edge in Fitness and Mastering Movement with CEO Steven Webster of ASENSEI

Join Krissy Vann on the "All Things Fitness and Wellness" podcast as we dive deep into the future of fitness with our special guest, Steven Webster, CEO of ASENSEI. Discover how Steven's martial arts background and a relentless pursuit of the 'never been done before' have propelled him to the forefront of personalized health and fitness experiences. In this episode, Steven shares invaluable insights into using motion capture technology to revolutionize customer engagement and retention in the fitness industry. 

Learn about the challenges of scaling a startup, the critical role of conviction in fundraising, and get a glimpse into the promising future of connected fitness. Steven's journey from leading high-performing teams at giants like Adobe and Microsoft to coaching winning sports teams showcases a unique blend of creativity, leadership, and customer focus.

Through ASENSEI's innovative use of 3D Computer Vision and Connected Apparel, fitness companies of all sizes can now offer tailored wellness experiences that truly engage and retain customers. Plus, Steven reflects on the profound impact of coaching and the essential equation for turning bodies into athletes: BODY + COACH = ATHLETE.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone in the fitness business or industry looking to leverage technology to enhance their coaching and create more personalized fitness experiences. Whether you're a fitness coach, a startup enthusiast, or just passionate about wellness, Steven's story will inspire you to embrace the era of connected coaching and explore how technology can unlock human potential.

Don't miss this insightful conversation on how technology and personal coaching converge to shape the future of fitness. 

Subscribe to "All Things Fitness and Wellness" with Krissy Vann for more episodes that inspire, inform, and transform the fitness industry.

Connect with Steven Webster:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenwebster/
https://www.asensei.ai 

Connect with All Things Fitness and Wellness:
www.atfw.ca
https://www.linkedin.com/company/all-things-fitness-and-wellness/
https://www.instagram.com/allthingsfitnessandwellness/?hl=en 

Transcript

0:00

I don't think the future is like more cowbell. It's not like more and more AI and more and more. It's like how do we just make this kind of pervasive and accepted and expected whether I'm at home, whether I'm out on a trail run, or whether I'm in my favorite gym or in the studio? This is all things fitness and wellness posted by Krissy Vann together where uniting industry thought leaders and fit flew answers on the mission to inspire innovation and encourage people to live a life fit and well. In today's episode, we welcome Steven Webster, someone who prides themselves on living in the land have never been done before. As the CEO of a ASENSEI, he's at the forefront of using motion capture technology to create personalized health and fitness experiences, enhancing customer engagement and retention. On the episode Stephen shares how his martial arts background has been crucial in shaping his entrepreneurial spirit, teaching valuable lessons in resilience and adaptability. He discusses the challenges of growing a startup and the importance of conviction in fundraising. Plus, the episode looks ahead at the future of connected fitness, providing insights into its promising advancements. I'm Krissy Vann, your host of all things fitness and wellness, be sure to hit like and subscribe. I host new podcasts weekly, featuring industry thought leaders and influencers. This is ATFW. Well, I am so appreciative to have Stephen Webster joining me here, the CEO of SNC. And Steven, I was looking into your background here. And prior to even hopping on to the podcast, I was talking about how one of the things I appreciate so much about this industry is no matter how much success someone sees, they're still very rooted to their why, why do they care about getting more people moving? Why do they care about adding more technology into the space and helping people function better and reach those goals? So we're going to start way, way way back when to when young Steven may be connected with fitness for the first time and felt it resonate? So what was that for you? Because I know you've got some serious accolades around your belt quite literally. There you go. I like I liked what you did there. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on the show. Looking forward to our conversation, but I grew up in Scotland I grew up kind of halfway between Edinburgh and St. Andrews, the home of golf, right. So no, I'm not a good golfer. You and me both. My childhood is defined by the sports that played you know, when I think back to being a kid, you know, I played every day football, soccer, but football and hockey like ice hockey, street hockey, representing Canada there are no more players than a Scottish kid should, but wasn't on the pitch or I wasn't on the rink. I was in the water. I was windsurfing and kayaking, but my passions were martial arts. I got picked on at school. And so my kids, my parents packed me off to a judo class. I think it was seven, and so judo and then jiu jitsu and that was my obsession. That was what I woke up every day wanting to be good at and wanting to be better at. I've often said that fitness is never something I did. It was something I got for free just being kind of super excited about sport. Well, I think what you speak to you there, and we don't need to live in it too much. But it's a really relatable experience for a lot of adults that look back to their childhood and have faced I mean, it's one thing to be picked on but being bullied and things like that is a terrible thing to overcome. And so how great for your parents to be like sports. That's the thing that's going to be the change and it obviously shaped you because you didn't stop with martial arts. What's this UK is youngest jiu jitsu Black Belt. Is that true? Yeah. So no, that's that's absolutely true. Like I said, Judo Canada. So jujitsu became my passion as a kid I was training like four or five times a week. And when I was 13 ish, I was ready for Black Belt. But the challenge was by the time I passed that I'd be 14 And then I would have to go back again when I was 16. So my instructors spoke to the Federation, you know, that we created with was like, Look, this kid plus the the kids he trains where they can do the idle text. And so we got permission to do the idle testament. We stood in a room with the adults, adult adult Scottish American. We stood in the room with the adults and we greeted with them. And June 4 1988 Don't forget the day over is as a 14 year old, you know, somebody untied a brown belt from my waist, threw it into the corner and tight a black belt on my waist and that's why I'm here today. That's why I'm an entrepreneur in California building a company so pithy one liner I like to use is if you can show people that athletic potential you can show them their human potential you unlock more than just the talent in sport. And fitness and sport is a very honorable way in to kind of just realizing your capability more generally. So I love that metaphor, I actually used an example of exactly that with an individual that was going through a hard time right now. And they are quite athletic in the gym space. And I had to remind them and say, you've already proven to yourself that you have the tools, you actually have the evidence of what you're capable of. And I think that's so tremendous of this industry, because it does give us that. That's funny. And I was at Adobe. So I sold my first company, to Adobe, just a casual mention there. In there, you know, which was great. Like it was, you know, I started this design and engineering consultancy, Adobe and Macromedia were one of our key partners, we use their technology. And all of a sudden, I'm working for Adobe, and I'm like one of the leadership team of their worldwide consulting organization that was professionally I learned more in that transition. And I've learned at any other part of my career rather than no Sensei, but definitely had you know that that story of you know, Steve Jobs, like do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life, I had my sugared water moment, Adobe, because Adobe kind of made this pivot. And I love Adobe, and I love where they are. And I and my dearest friends are there. But there was a period of time where we were like, just a clotting ad tech marketing tech company after another. And it was very soulless. To me, it was taking the creativity out of creativity, it was all just like, well, we don't need design, and designers will just use data to decide what color something should be. And I had this moment of like, what am I doing, like my parents didn't, you know, scrap and save for me to go to university, so I was an ad tech. And so I decided, you know, I want to do something and kind of health or fitness or something meaningful. And then I was just randomly I was in New York for work. And as I often do, because I taught at a university creative club at Emory University, Craig club, I just put this note to the diaspora, right. So hey, I'm going to be in New York, if anybody's around. As often happens, that enemies around, I'd love to catch up for a drink. So not, you know, the standard hotel or the standard grill in New York, but it was at standard grill with a couple of my students, one who was living in New York trying to become an actor. And he ended up in choreography choreography and, and movies with like Jackie Chan and Matt Damon. And then another of my students, Melissa, who's now very senior in the BBC, in their digital production team. And I sat with them, and they've not seen each other for years either. And so we just got to this conversation that I realized that had several times before with several different students. And when we got into this sort of nostalgic reminiscing of our time in the club together, it was this common theme of you know why I came to Emory University to study law, or medicine or engineering. But I learned more in the dojo and more on the mat and more in the team and more in competitions that I take on in my life. And I still talk about these lessons I learned, you know, in the karate dojo, and I talked about them way more than my law lecture or my medicine lecture. And that was my sugared water moment. That was the blinding flash of the obvious of like, I'm not a doctor, I can't start health tech company per se. But what if I could scale coaching, like a problem that I lived as an athlete and as a coach, like, what if coaching could be digital, and but to do that, you have to solve a fundamental problem. Like if, as a coach, if you can't see people, you can't coach them? So how do you solve for that, but that was the beginning of the pitch of this is the problem in the world that I've kind of feel like, uniquely, you know, excited to solve right now. This is like 2012. Well, that's like the proverbial call of entrepreneurship right there where you're like, there is a question in front of me, that I know could change the world and people if I answer so you get the edge. It's one thing to have that it's another thing to listen and actually pursue that. So what was the process to actually bringing this company to life? Well, it's funny, because, yeah, I mean, as a recovering entrepreneur, right, you always have ideas. And every time something happens in your life, you're like, there's an app for that, or there's a technology solution, but you know, it's your, like, bad instinct. But the thing about s&c and I've only felt this a few times in my life and once I didn't act on it, and it became mint.com and I wish that had been made that becomes the motivator for when you're close to starting that company. on a beach in Barcelona, I decided not to wrong decision. I mean, that's probably my beaches will get ya. Listen with the same seat when I kind of got to, you know, very quickly became panic. Like if I don't do this Someone else is going to do it like this, this urgency. And again, this is like 2012 2013 2014. And, you know, people are trying to imitate us left, right and center right now and still can't but I just panic of if I don't like drop tools and start doing this now someone else is going to do is so damn obvious that this problem needs to be solved. And then Microsoft, and at Microsoft, I was working with the inventors of Kinect and HoloLens and X, Xbox fitness and Cortana intelligent agents, and the quantified self was a thing. And Fitbit was huge. And just all of these technology forces were acting and they were all pointing at the same thing that I cared about, of, you know, which point can we teach a machine to watch and perceive and understand a human's movement, and then turn around and coach and correct and, you know, steer them along the path the same way a coach would or on behalf of a coach. So Microsoft was kind of that final moment for me of like, all of this stuff exists. And it's never going to happen in a company like Microsoft, because it takes forever kicking off a new business, that is a billion dollar business straight off the bat is like really hard. So that's how I ended up. Just I got to do this, I got to quit my job and my two co founders. So 2014, we incorporated the company a few months after my son was born. So slightly busy time in life. I turned to my wife, I was like, I've been into it. And we've talked about it. It's not like a struggle on our bus, like I'm gonna do, I'm gonna I'm gonna quit Microsoft, and she's like, I'm pregnant. It's probably a lot more conversation that ensued. Yeah, I think I stayed a couple of extra quarters, the vest a little bit more stock that was the bootstrap fine. But as you know, as soon as I decided I wanted to start a company, it's like, Ocean's 11 You've got to assemble this kind of weird team of crackpots. Right. And my two co founders to this day, Ross, I've known Ross since we were 18. We were classmates and flatmates together at university. I lived in the same house for three years, you know, kind of became best friends. And then sort of life just takes you like apart from each other. And then, weirdly, when I left Scotland, I was like, hey, Ross, I'm moving to California. I'd love to catch up with you and your wife before we go and Ross, his wife, and you know, my No way, hit it off. And we ended up just becoming friends again, after university and Ross, chip designer, he's worked on like 70 Plus chips for Apple iPods and Microsoft Kinect and Galaxy Gear watches. As your the hardware guy, you're the product guy. And one of my karate mentors, or CO mentors, we can, you know, I taught him Jiu Jitsu, and he taught me karate. And we kind of like we were part of a very small group of instructors all over the UK, we'd get together and coach and train together, Bill, but Bill was also like one of the only other entrepreneurs that I knew he built a speech recognition company that he took public in London. And he just accidentally, you know, he's taking a company public and, you know, work there for a number of more years, and then he just quit thinking he's retired. And then I came to him with a sensei. And so I can't say now, next thing you know, over a Delaware C Corp, there's three guys and three guy that geez, I'd say San Francisco, London and Edinburgh and that's going to CNC got started. So obviously, it is a medium that we're speaking on right now that people can't physically see the product. So can you do your best to kind of dial down and explain what it is and how it works? Yeah, so think of a CNC first of all, you can't see it. Everywhere senses and ingredient technology. I want you thinking of us like an Intel process or bilby audio or an Nvidia GPU. We're the technology that other companies put inside their products to give it a superpower that they don't have the time or the money or the know how to put in their product themselves. And because we created this category, we call it movement recognition. We're the leader we're the most widely deployed solution so our customers I much prefer telling you about our customers and telling you about ourselves. So our customers are leading digital brands like Chris Hemsworth center, the recently announced alter connected fitness mirror you were speaking with we say about boats, the boxing bag with the brain. And then we have legacy brands and your brands that you've known for 1015 2030 years like power block or vertimax. And you know, we power at home fitness devices like connected fitness mirrors or set top boxes on your TV or just a digital app on your phone. But we also put Our experiences in gyms and in studios things that can elevate the member experience with these, I like to call them the tasteful touches of technology. It's not like all in your face digital, but how can we elevate the experience? So, I would say think of us like speech recognition. But for movement, so any sport, any fitness modality, physical therapy, even jumping around playing kind of physical acts or games, they call them right in front of your TV, or VR and AR. And in all of those environments, we do three things. So I'll just quickly give you the theme please. So first is motion capture are first investors came from Lucasfilm Industrial Light and Magic, you know, the world of you know, motion capture and movie making. So we do that we motion capture your skeleton in 3d in real time. Now, we can do that with an ordinary camera, just you know, the camera on my smartphone is enough for us to do that. We can also do it with sports apparel, we can put sensors in sports apparel, we're just by pulling on your shirt and your yoga pants. We're capturing your scale and but most of our customers are using cameras to date so we'll kind of stick to the arc. Once we've captured your motion, the second thing we do is we've taught a machine to recognize and understand what you're doing. So are you doing a warrior to in yoga? Are you doing a plank? Are you throwing a left upper car? Are you swinging a baseball but a sense you can recognize what you're doing and how well you're doing it. Now, some of the pioneers like peloton or temple, they tried to do this themselves. But they really struggle adding new exercises or adding new understanding of the exercise to the product because it takes them months of video capturing hundreds of people doing that exercise, training a machine learning kind of machine to understand that. And that's what most other companies try to do. And it just doesn't scale. So we have a very different approach that lets us add new exercises to our library and ours. And so unlike other movement recognition technologies, we also have this other concept and that comes from a martial arts background, you'll see that background in your product, we have this kind of beginner to Black Belt approach to thinking about something so it's not Passfield, did you do the movement? It's much more of a, what were you trying to do? What should you have been doing? How well did you do it? And based on where you are right now? And how well you're doing that exercise and how we like to coach that exercise? What should we tell you about like, what should we give you? What's that one thing that if I never coached you again, but I coached you this now and you absorb that coaching, you would leave your bed. So then you came in? I mean, that's coaching that repeat ad infinitum. That's, that's how you coach right? Well, and that also helps people stick with it. Like I like how you're saying, you know, we're not going to show you step XYZ, if you haven't mastered a so let's start at a so the fact that it can recognize because how many times if you think of the consumer, then that's using the product, if all of a sudden this machine learning and this coaching is trying to get you to do that you're gonna give up, you're just No, I love that you said that you pick that up, because, you know, we see this all the time progression as retention. And that's true. Not even with technology. Like that's, that's how I kept students in my club for seven or eight years. That's why a student would graduate with a bachelor's at Emory University and choose to do their PhD at Emory University because they wanted to keep doing karate, they wanted to be a first time and a second time and a third time. And so if you can show the member, if you can show the athlete that progression, and if you can show them that they're on a path to that progression, not just that, you know, I'll tell you when you get better, but I've got you, like, I'll get you better. If you can put that ingredient inside your product, then that's how you solve for churn. That's how you solve for engagement. You know, it's not what are all the bells and whistles that I can do that, you know, trick you into coming back. And we know this as coaches intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation. So if I can give you that intrinsic motivation that I had as a jujitsu obsessed kid, of like, I just don't want to be better at this. I want to be good at this. I want to know that I can defend myself I want to compete in a competition one day, I want to be the youngest black belt in the UK. Yeah, exactly. And then and then and then, you know, there's always like a next goal and the next goal, that fundamentally the technology that we're giving to customers, but the last piece the third piece is the intelligence around coaching. So with so many technologies, we have all of this data, but we have this kind of So what now what experience with it, like what am I going to do with this information and a good coach distills that down into just the feedback you needed to hear. So we do one of two things for the moments where the coach or the trainer or the instructor isn't in room with you you're practicing at home or you're practicing in the gym, but not in a personal training session. In those moments, we deliver the feedback directly to the individual. So it's like and we can do that in an AI voice that sounds like a celebrity athlete or a celebrity coach, having a coach in the room over your shoulder watching you. But we're all coaches, we're not building a sensor to replace human coaches. I do believe that coaches that use products powered by s&c will replace coaches that use products that are powered by SMC. But when there's an expert in the room, physical therapists, personal trainer, you know, pitching coach usciences, and assistant coach s&c can do the job of watching the athlete of knowing the curriculum of knowing the syllabus of knowing past history, you've got their superpower, but the job of delivering that feedback to the athlete that can still be the job of the coach. And so for a lot of our brick and mortar or sports based experiences, s&c is in that role of assistant coach, but delivering the information to the human so they can deliver it to their member or to the customer or to their client. You know, you said that you kind of started this journey 2014 And obviously technology. I mean, you know this better than anyone from the.com boom to now it's not slowing down. So with that transition with the adoption of AI, how much did it change? What you were doing from the original concept? How much was involved from the beginning? And how much has it evolved? That's a great question. catchphrase I stole from my last boss was never mistake, a clear line of sight for a short distance. And I actually share with you the original video we filmed in 2014 for the company meet a Sensei, your personal trainer, who knows your every move sensors throughout your clothing, I can still remember that one minute track. And when I go back and watch that video, the vision is exactly where we are today that the fundamental idea. I think it comes back to what you said about because it connects strongly to the why not the poor and not that how. So this fundamental idea that we would basically, you know, give everybody access, you know, democratize access to world class coaching, that your movement would be tracked in real time that we would do whatever we have to do to just give you the very simple experience of a voice in your ear telling you exactly what that coach would have told you. That hasn't changed. However, a couple of things my point of view, when I started the company was like how am I going to do this motion capture. And I've been working very closely with Microsoft Kinect, which is kind of very expensive camera system and IR infrared depth camera. And I just couldn't fathom that that was ever going to get small enough or cheap enough that it would fit in a phone. And I didn't like the idea that you were tethered to the TV. And so everybody's like, why don't you use cameras? I'm like, No, you guys are wrong. And I believe and I this is quite classic me. I'm a big believer and like having conviction that you hold loosely. So you can't be loosey goosey and like, well, we'll chase two rabbits of wands. It's like no, I think the future is connected the paddle. Remember, this is the time of Fitbit. This is the time of you know UnderArmour are sticking heartrate monitors and sharps and briars and everything's going inside the fabric and like that's the future that I want to will into existence. I want you to walk into Nike town, buy a piece of Nike Nike golf shirt, powered by a Sensei, that puts the voice of Tiger Woods or Serena Williams and tennis in your ear. That was the original vision for the company. And if we hadn't have done that we wouldn't be the best in the industry right now. Because that I won't bore you with too much of the implementation detail. I don't you have the right audience we're not a boring audience, but we don't want to be the nerd guy in the middle. So I mean, it's where your success came from. So again, nerd away, it's very welcoming. So I'll say that I kind of touched on tempo and peloton and I don't mean to pick on them because they did what almost everybody else tries to do as well which is let's give them machine images and videos of people doing things and ask the machine to understand the image because we started with connected apparel connected clothing, there was no video or image. So when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail right? So when all you have is a video everything looks like a video processing computer vision problem. Whereas we had a let's have an abstract representation of a skeleton and let's teach the machine to understand the skeleton by teaching it to understand biomechanics posture and time. You know human movement is just static postures frames per second and You move any of us, of course, any sport, there's a setup position, there's an intermediate position, this is the position, I want you at the end of the technique, there's timing, move your hip before you move your feet, move your hip before you move your hands. And so that's how we taught a machine to understand movement. And not just long story short, that is the underlying reason why our approach is so much scalable, and so much more accurate and so much more nuanced than people that are treating this like a vision problem. However, where I was wrong, I never imagined just how good this thing would get. I knew it was a supercomputer in your pocket, holding up an iPhone, by the way, I'm holding up an iPhone, yeah. I never knew. I never really anticipated just how good AI would get and just how good the sheer compute power on that phone would get to pause you there. But I actually remember the first time because I came from the land of blackberry and Ontario. And I remember the first time that somebody showed me a video for the iPhone before it was released. And obviously with touch screen, and I looked at it and I was like, No way that's not real. You know, there's a whole movie about Blackberry, and you just basically give the plot away, right? Like, there's no way that's happening. And then I mean, look at us now in our relationships with our phones. Oh, yeah. We're in the industry, and also still underestimated just how far we'd be, I guess, video of Steve Ballmer mocking the iPhone, it doesn't even have a keyboard. Like, how did that work out? It's the it's so. So yeah, I hadn't anticipated the compute power. Because what that fundamentally meant was, you didn't need that expensive depth camera that the Kinect sensor had, you could just use what we call an RGB, red, green blue camera, on the phone. And you could, you know, software your way out of the problem, not hardware, you're aware of the problem. And so, three or four years ago, we decided we think computer vision is going to be a credible alternative to connected apparel, and an easier on ramp for customers, it's just easier to get started with the camera people already have. And so we made the decision to embrace computer vision. But we've like rapidly outperformed the state of the art because what we do with that computer vision is we turn it into a skeleton, and essentially doesn't know whether that skeleton came from, you know, Tiger Woods Nike golf shirt, or that skeleton came from an iPhone camera, or that skeleton came from a TV. It's just a skeleton with posture over time. And so, you know, that's really kind of fundamental to how we how we think about solving, movement recognition and motion capture. Well, it's really amazing to think of where you've come and I kind of want to like, lead us into paths, and then I'll go future. So on past, you know, you talk about how the idea landed in your brain, you make this bold decision, your wife's pregnant at the time. So you know, your lives are going to be changing in this big way. And innately, you're like, I got to do this. And then all of a sudden, all these players in your life that just fit the puzzle pieces perfectly come together and boom, we're doing this. Was it as obvious to other people when you were looking for investors, like the same level of conviction, like Yeah, why didn't anyone think about this? Or because connected fitness was evolving and emerging? Did you face the opposite? What was that experience? Like? I hope they're watching. You know, we had investors in Fitbit pass on us because they thought we will be competitive with Fitbit. I don't know if you remember ethosce, who were putting like muscle sensing sensors and Chamath, who was one of the investors or owners of the Golden State Warriors, he put 15 million into Apple OS and every investor in the valley was like, skim over Chemonics given 15 million to athel, US Canadian based company Waterloo, I would look at a lot of these companies and be like, don't you see they're like technology solutions and start with problems or they're not problems looking for solutions. So yeah, I mean, just generally, especially when connected apparel was our go to market investors. Hey, capex, they hate their money going into tooling and plastic and Shenzen and electronics and logistics. So being a hardware business made it impossibly hard to raise money. No, we're before peloton I mean, I crowdfunded the peloton bike and you know I saw peloton I was like finally like I'm not the only one talking about this stuff. But then of course investors like well, you know, how are you going to compete against peloton we're not competing against peloton it's like it's like this idea that Amazon exists so you know Walmart are never going to be able to sell online ever even though they're bigger online retailer than Amazon and you know certain categories. So no, we just said like most companies quite frankly, we had an impossible time you kiss a lot of frogs, when you're fundraising, you have the double edged sword if there's nobody else in your category if people don't believe in the category, and as soon as there's two or three well funded players in your category, like peloton, and you know, I don't know who else tornal are active or whoever was around at the time, well, they're going to win the category is just, there's no, there's no middle ground. And so it was very hard to convince people to raise money. But this is the deal. In early stage startups, this is the game you sign up to play, you kiss a lot of frogs, you get a lot of noise. And your job is to find the few people that have conviction. And we were super fortunate that KB partners, a new sports tech funds out of Chicago, the partners there, they got it. And so they gave us our first Institute, you know, along, we scraped along with, you know, $25,000 checks for two or three years, just not paying the founders, but paying other people to help us, you know, get something to market. But our first institutional money came from KB partners, we now have 76 capital and shuffle capital to other great kind of health and Sportech funds. So at the end of the day, you have to have enough people around you with conviction. But I love that saying that $1 from a customer is worth $10 from an investor. And so that's really been our focus. And you know, that's the thing I'm most proud about. I remember meeting an investor who also didn't invest. I remember meeting an investor who said, you know, we see a lot of companies trying to do motion capture and more motion recognition. Why is it you're the only one that's got any customers or any customers we've ever heard of. And so that's been our focus is like, let the work speak for itself. Let our customers deliver the experience that's powered by SMC and all else follows that. Well, and I think that as one of the OGS in this connected category, you know, you clearly nailed it because it has grown. And so those ones that were your yeses, I'm sure are getting happier and happier as the momentum continues to build. So for yourself when you think of the future of connected fitness, and I know that that's a broad question, but what do you see in your mind's eye? Where are we heading? I love technology that disappears. Like my favorite technologies are just part of the fabric, no pun intended, but they're part of the fabric of our life. DVR versus VCR great example, like, My son doesn't even my son's nine, the concept of like, going away on vacation for two weeks. And so we've our program the VCR to record their favorite show. And if the news runs late, you know, it won't record devastating, devastating, they will never know the devastation. Half the people watching this podcast. What is he? What does he mean I don't understand the failure. But then the DVR is like, you know, record every Golden State Warriors game, the end, you know, and you know, it's just done. And so I think you know, the future for connected health and fitness is that technology is like the same so you can have fade to black, they disappear into the background. I don't want to be touching these cold black slabs of glass, you know, to do my workout. I don't necessarily want to be tethered to a screen long term. I just want to know that my effort is being noticed and it's being noticed by somebody that understands whether I'm getting better or getting worse should I be trying this should I be hanging out in a stretch a little longer? Or should I be doing this drill to isolate some apartment technique? So I think about us as an invisible technology. And by being invisible that can be pervasive and everywhere. We always have this like VHS versus Betamax, we always have this Flash versus HTML in person versus at home is the you know and you know my view has always been physical is going to get more digital and digital is going to get more physical and ascendancy is that connective tissue for omni channel experiences. We also want to think about how do we elevate again, I said earlier, these tasteful touches of technology, how do we elevate the experience inside a studio so that my heart rate isn't the only thing you can put on a leaderboard or give me kudos and congratulations for recognized my reps recognize my fatigue, reward me for good technique over by technique, tell me to drop weights recognize that I've picked up a heavier weight and you know, recommend that maybe, you know, drop my reps and focus on this aspect of my form. Tell a coach on the floor that Stephen sitting on a rowing machine and he has no business being on the rowing machine the way he's rowing and go over and teach them a positive finished drill so that he gets the coordination correct. So there's so many another one that we love and that we're deploying in brick and mortar facilities is what we call a smart warm up. Just go up and warm up. Oh Were there in front of that TV that's telling you, here's your act of warmup. Don't make me do some clinical movement assessment, hold this pose for three seconds drop down here. A sense, he knows what you're doing recognizes the difference between the bottom of a squat and the top of a squat. So we'll do all of that stuff that as a coach I just did, because I'm a human being with the best neural network on the planet are one of the best one of 5 billion of the best. But you know, I coach naturally looks over at people warming up and is like, Steven looks like his hips are a little tight today. So let's just Hey, everyone, let's move on to a pigeon stretch. And let's just open up those hips a little. So we can deliver that kind of tasteful digital experience in a physical environment. So I don't think the future is like, more cowbell. It's not like more and more AI and more and more. It's like, how do we just make this kind of pervasive and accepted and expected? Whether I'm at home, whether I'm out on a trail run, or whether I'm in my favorite gym, or in my favorite studio? Great response, and bonus points for the more cowbell mentioned, for sure. Well, Steven, honestly, I've so enjoyed learning about your story. And I really loved ones. I mean, it's just cool. I start a lot of the times finding out people's route, because again, every single time it impresses me so much, how connected people in this industry really are to those beginnings. How much that served you though, is probably what was my most surprising takeaway through this conversation, right. And like also, those people that really re weaved back into your life from that from the students in New York City, to your pal that you had connected with the became part of the trio. So using your coach, coaching background, I love to kind of leave people with a little nugget of wisdom or something that we can take with us to fuel our day. So what do you have for us coach, nugget of wisdom. I was kind of known as a coach, anybody that trained with me for like more than three years, would roll their eyes like Here he goes again, when ignorance is mutual confidence is king. It's not the biggest, it's the smallest, it's the fastest that he's the slowest. You know, I've always had these kind of, you know, things I've picked up along the way. But I think my rather than share one nugget because I have so many won, I think just philosophically, being a Sport Coach has served me well. building teams like karate teams and teams of male and female beginner and senior forms and fighting cat and committee. Those have all been things have served me well in building a culture inside a company the size of Adobe, or in a company the size of a Sensei and attracting talent. And when investors ask me what we're going to do if Google, you know, entered your businesses, like it's not the biggest heats the smallest, it's the fastest that he's the slowest, like, bring it. You know, I'm not scared of Google. I'm a little scared of Google. But for other reasons, that would be my leave behind is running through the DNA of a samsi. We're all coaches, and we're coach first athlete second technology last with many of our customers, they come to us, because they've heard we've got the best SDK, they've heard we've got the best technology. But why the stick with us is we understand them. And we understand their customer, because we are them and we are their customer. And so I think the nugget I would leave anyone starting a business is if you want to be in the sports and fitness business, you better be passionate about sport and fitness and not passionate about convolutional neural networks and pose estimation. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. It's like how can you deliver the best imaginable coaching experience, digital skill, and I love waking up every day solving that problem. I love that. Stephen Webster, thank you so much for joining us on all things fitness and wellness. I genuinely enjoyed the conversation so much. Likewise, thank you so much for having me. You've just listened to the All Things fitness and wellness podcast posted by Krissy Vann This episode was brought to you by fitness world your fitness your way. Be sure to hit like and subscribe. We have new podcast episodes weekly featuring industry insiders and influencers together we're on a mission for everyone to live a life fit and well