Jeri Ellsworth: Invention as a way of life

Jeri Ellsworth is a tinkerer, inventor, and entrepreneur who grew up fixing toasters and building race cars - then moved on to inventing the future of AR at Valve, CastAR and now Tilt Five. Jeri’s got a unique take on bringing innovation to market - and a healthy appreciation for the human side of technology development. Listen in and discover how a quirky kid from rural Oregon transformed herself into a Silicon Valley powerhouse.

Check out the episode here: https://youtu.be/a6NRfwmSoFE

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Intro: [00:00:01.6] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha. The show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.

Amy: Jeri Ellsworth is one of my favorite humans on the planet. She's a tinkerer, an inventor, and an entrepreneur who grew up fixing toasters and building race cars in rural Oregon.

Then moved on to inventing the future of AR at Valve, CastAR, and now Tilt5. Jeri's got a unique take on bringing innovation to market, and a healthy appreciation for the human side of technology development. 

Jeri: I didn't realize the virtuous feedback loop of mentors until later in my career. I recognized that there's this feedback loop that you can get going.

Like the, the machinist that taught me how to [00:01:00] turn metal and weld and do all of these crafts that you just can't read about. Our virtuous cycle was he worked in this one man shop and he didn't have a lot of interaction during the day. 

And I found out reflecting on this later, I provided him company and he got to pass on like this trade that he had worked so hard and I was so enthusiastic about learning because I had a reason to learn it, that it was this great feedback cycle. 

And he would let me do things that cost him money. Like he would, intentionally let me break, you know, milling cutters just to teach me a lesson. Thinking back on it, he would pretend to be upset, but, you know, I could see in his eyes that he actually enjoyed when I would mess up and actually learn those valuable lessons.

Amy: Listen in and discover how a quirky kid transformed herself into a Silicon Valley powerhouse.[00:02:00] 

Welcome to the Getting2Alpha podcast, Jeri. Hey, it's great to be here. I'm thrilled to get a chance to hang out with you today. It's always a pleasure to hang out with you. So before we get into the meat and the history of All the amazing things you've done. Just give us a glimpse into like your, your daily work life.

What do you spend your days doing? Who do you interact with? What kind of decisions are you making? What kind of areas are you exploring? 

Jeri: I'm at a really interesting crossroads right now in my career. It's super fun. I'm at the point where I'm doing a startup. I'm bootstrapping it, bringing it up from just a handful of people and trying to grow it, as well as winding down a pretty exciting project that I worked on, which was building flight computers and a navigation system for a rocket.

All layered on top of dealing with having shut down a [00:03:00] startup about a year ago. So my days are really packed right now. So on any given day, likely communicating with the rocket guys and handing off some of the technical stuff, or I'm working on a technical aspect of the new startup, or I'm dealing with You know, winding down some aspect of the startup that didn't quite make it.

And I absolutely love this like kind of frantic point in my life. Like I always thrive on like these situations when things get run of the mill, same thing every day, I get kind of bored. So I'm kind of running on adrenaline right now, you know, bootstrapping a startup, there's lots of decisions you have to make, which are pretty critical that could, you make or break the company or could be completely fatal to the company.

Some of the decisions that we're making right now, you kind of have to live with them for years to come. So you have to do a lot of research and, and make sure those decisions are correct. Also decisions on [00:04:00] team, your team makes or breaks your company. And, uh, I've definitely seen good partners, good employees and bad partners and employees.

And so trying to filter the people coming into the company is important as well. 

Amy: You know, it's too bad you're not ambitious. No, I, I love that. It's actually fascinating for me to get that glimpse. So how did you turn into the person who's having these amazing days? How did you? Become a rocket scientist and, uh, you know, AR pioneer.

Where did you first get started in design and tech? 

Jeri: Gosh, that goes way back. I think it was something that was kind of innate in me. Like ever since I was a young kid, I was super fascinated with technology and I It did not like not understanding why something did what it did. So at an early age, I would take apart all my toys to try to figure out how they [00:05:00] work.

Like this was, I was probably like somewhere between the age of like six and nine years old or so. And I would ripping apart all my toys. We got to the point where my father was so frustrated. He stopped buying me toys. He owned a gas station at the time and he put a box out in front of his gas station with a sign, like, please bring your broken electronics.

And people would come and like drop old toasters and broken AM FM radios into this box. And like every couple of months or so he would bring home this box of broken electronics and just let me rip it apart. And eventually it got to the point where I learned enough that I was able to start fixing some of these things, which was super exciting.

So in some ways I had like really amazing gadgets at a pretty early age because I was able to like revive some of these things. 

Amy: So you always wanted to know how things worked. 

Jeri: Yeah. I don't know why. I just needed to know. As I got older, I, I started [00:06:00] learning how to like build my own things instead of just kind of fixing things.

I started changing some of these, you know, devices I got or building complete circuits on my own or mechanical things. And eventually, um, I went through this kind of wild phase when I was in high school because I was kind of a picked on kid. So it was a little weird. how And I found that if I was a little edgy and a little bit, you know, kind of extreme, kids would leave me alone and actually respected me a lot more.

And I got into auto racing, which was a pretty interesting thing. And I eventually started building my own race cars and racing, and racing this race circuit up and down the I 5 corridor in Oregon, multiple little dirt tracks. I think it was about four or five years into racing. I decided I was going to quit.

I was just tired of the rough lifestyle and I was changing as a person. But there was another situation that had happened. I was just seeing with one of my high school friends, you know, he had, uh, kind of moved on in his life. He'd bought a house. He, uh, [00:07:00] uh, had his kind of man cave out in his garage and I was over there visiting.

He took me out of his garage and he showed me this. PC computer that he built. And he told me, he's like, I tricked a wholesale vendor into selling me these parts. And this 486 computer, you know, normally would cost about 1,200 dollars, but I got all the parts for 600 dollars. You know, isn't that an amazing deal? Like, wow, that's a lot of profit.

Why don't we open a computer store? And so that night, just a spur of the moment, I'm like, let's open a computer store. And this is 1995, Windows 95 hadn't come out yet. And so I immediately got out of racing cars. I sold all my equipment, sold my cars and, uh, took all my money and dumped it into opening this computer store.

Amy: So you opened a computer store and your partner was, what was his experience up till that point?

Jeri: He was just a hobbyist. He actually knew more about, [00:08:00] uh, Windows PCs than I did. Windows 95, in the process of putting this computer store together and figuring out how to do that, Windows 95 came out. He became an expert in installing Windows, which was not an easy thing.

He knew how to build these computers. I knew about electronics, but I didn't know how to You know, set up PCs back in the day. It wasn't, there was nothing plug and play about the computers back then. You had to do a lot of configuration to get the things to even turn on. 

Amy: But you had an entrepreneurial instinct.

Jeri: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when I was racing cars, I didn't just race the cars. I built the cars and sold them as well. And I think that probably comes from watching my father bootstrap his gas station business. Like he started that business when I was four or five and he went through a lot of struggles. You know, trying to get that off the ground.

And so I think that was a good, good to be exposed to that. So when I got into racing, it's like, well, there's money to be made here. [00:09:00] And so I would build cars for other people and make money on that, as well as the purse that I would win at the tracks for winning races. And I was ready for a change at the time.

I was tired of getting in trouble all the time and tired of like dealing with. You know, the knuckleheads at the racetrack. And so I jumped into this computer store, you know, headfirst. So we opened this computer store. And, uh, me and my business partner start having friction right away. Like I'm really rough around the edges and he's trying to, he's just who he was.

And he eventually like pushed me out of the business, which was really tragic. And the business was really taking off. And at this time, you know, I was in this little, uh, little town, not a lot of opportunity. I was sitting in my little apartment, no money left cause I dumped it all into the computer business felt kind of hopeless.

I try to figure out what to do, crying a lot and talking to my friends, I'd ask my friends like, well, [00:10:00] what should I do? Talk to my father. What should I do? And everyone's like, well, you should just get a student loan and go to, to school, get your GED and go to college. But you know, one night I was just sitting there and like, no, I'm not going to do that.

It's like, I'm out for revenge. So I scraped together every penny I could get. And I found in an adjacent city, I found it was an old barbershop. It was a one seat barbershop. And I rented this place super cheap, ripped the barber chair out, moved out of my apartment, broke my lease, moved into the back of this barbershop and opened a computer store.

And, uh, I didn't have any. Money to buy inventory. So I'd go over to my business partner's dumpster and I'd get all these like colorful boxes that the electronics came in and I just put them on the store fixtures and it made it look like I had inventory and when a customer had come in, they'd want a sound card or something and be like, well, that one is reserved right now.

If you give me half the money. I'll get you one here in three days. [00:11:00] And that's how I bootstrapped the business. It was pretty brutal. And this is where I ran into probably one of my most influential mentors. So I'm struggling. I'm living in the back of this computer store. It's like so bad. At one point, the police stopped by and told me if I kept throwing garbage into the neighbor's trash cans, cause I couldn't afford, Garbage service that they were going to cite me, which was very embarrassing.

And they did this in front of one of my customers, but across the street was this insurance salesman who took an interest in, in mentoring me. And so he'd come over on his lunch break and he'd bring me, you know, ramen noodles and food and stuff. And which was very appreciated. I really appreciated that.

And he found a way to kind of break through this hard shell that I had, because I was still like really goth and I would, Swear in front of customers. And I was not relatable at all. And he's, he'd start teach me about relatability. [00:12:00] And he's like, well, you know, to gain the trust of your customers, you need to be relatable.

Like, I know you have this side to you, but you know, sometimes you have to kind of change your appearance. And I took that to heart and I slowly, even though it was really difficult, I started changing my appearance. I started, um, taking his advice on like how to communicate with customers. And sure enough, like my business went from, you know, a struggling little business to very explosive growth.

Like every one of these like kind of life changes that he was suggesting made a huge impact in sales. And I, I became a happier person as well. Like I started to realize that a lot of these. Kind of weird things that I was doing was just more of a defense mechanism than really who I was. 

Amy: Wow. That's a great story. And he was an insurance salesman. 

Jeri: He was. Yeah. 

Amy: And he would understand relatability. 

Jeri: Yeah. Yeah. 

Amy: Okay. So this is in an adjacent town. Your [00:13:00] business is now taking off. Thanks to your insurance salesman mentor. You're living in the back of the store. 

Jeri: Yeah. Eventually I can move out of the back of the store, which was fantastic.

Amy: And then what happens? 

The store like grew. I mean, this was around 1996. Everyone was getting onto the internet. It was just explosive growth. There was tons of profit in building custom PCs. I started hiring my first employees. I started learning what to look for employees, which is so important. I made a lot of mistakes in the early days hiring the wrong people.

You know, one thing I, I think this was a valuable lesson I learned during the computer store days is You could hire someone that went to school to build computers or, or do scripts or whatever you need them to do. But if they're not passionate about it, they're not going to be nearly as effective as if you find that person that they just live and breathe what they do.

So some of the, the most [00:14:00] valuable employees that I found for my computer stores, they just loved technology. They just, Yeah, there's this one gentleman, he came in as a technician, you know, talking about relatability. He didn't have like great relatability, but I just kind of kept him in the back working on computers.

Um, but he would be in on the weekends, I'd show up at the office just to drop something off and he'd be in the back, like working on things and be like, what are you doing here? It's like, Oh, I just wanted to come and catch up on work. I'm like, well, I'm not paying you for today. It's like, Oh no, I'm just doing it for fun.

Um, And the same gentleman, like a couple of years into the computer stores, he had this amazing transformation, which I just absolutely love. Like he had really long hair and like ripped up stained clothes and stuff like that. And one day he showed up at work with like a button up shirt and he's like, I'm ready to do sales.

And he had cut his hair off without prompting. He decided he wanted to, uh, you know, be [00:15:00] more customer facing and it's pretty amazing. He's got this really amazing professional career now and really awesome seeing that transformation. Wow. Level up. I mean, maybe it means something to me because I kind of did that a couple of years prior, but.

Amy: Well, in a sense you mentored him like other people mentored you. You gave him the space to grow. 

Jeri: Yeah. And it's so important early in your career to have those people that will take a leap and, uh, believe in you maybe when they shouldn't, when there's no, maybe no indicators that they should. 

Amy: That's true.

And you've been able to attract a number of people like that, which is really interesting, but you also took them up on the opportunity. I think a lot of people might encounter potential mentors and not even recognize it. 

Jeri: I didn't realize the virtuous feedback loop of mentors until later in my career, I recognized that there's this feedback loop that [00:16:00] you can get going.

Like the, the machinist that taught me how to turn metal and weld and do all of these crafts that you just can't read about. Our virtuous cycle was he worked in this one man shop. And he didn't have a lot of interaction during the day. And I found out reflecting on this later, I provided him company and he got to pass on like this trade that he had worked so hard.

And I was so enthusiastic about learning because I had a reason to learn it. That it was this great feedback cycle. And he would let me do things that cost him money. Like he would intentionally let me break, you know, million cutters just to teach me a lesson thinking back on it, he would pretend to be upset.

But, you know, I could see in his eyes that he actually enjoyed when I would mess up and actually learn those valuable 

Amy: lessons. Wow. That's really powerful. Uh, and it's, at that point, it's an [00:17:00] apprenticeship. It's beyond just mentoring. You're really apprenticing. And, and that's very, very powerful. Deep stuff about the relationship of learning, you know, that it's really a relationship.

Jeri: Yes. Yeah. 

It's not just knowledge. It's the whole relationship. Okay. So you ran computer stores. It took off. You had this one store. Then what happened? 

Jeri: Eventually I had five stores. I kept investing. And at this time there was no end in sight. All of a sudden five stores, super profitable, more money than I could ever imagine.

And The, uh, computer store market completely tanked. It was about year 2000. There was this big hype, you know, Y2K is coming. Sales were through the roof because I was selling replacement Y2K computers. Immediately after everything tanked, all of these low end PCs came out like a 299 e machine. So my five, 600 profit margin disappeared overnight.[00:18:00] 

And, uh, in a matter of a year, um, I lost everything. It was, it was so fast and I, that's how technology goes. Like you can just change overnight and you sometimes don't see it coming. Eventually I, I just, I went to the team. We were, we were having to lay people off and I'm like, if anyone wants to just take one of the stores, you can have a store, I'll give it to you.

And if you can find some way to turn a profit and repay me for just the inventory that's in the store, it's great if you don't, great. and I just gave the stores away. Most of them didn't make it. Um, although one of them, uh, it could still be there. I had a store in Canby, Oregon, and, uh, maybe five years ago, I drove through that little town and it was still there.

I could not believe it. I walked in and looked around and I couldn't spot anyone that I recognized, but pretty amazing. Wow. So during this time when I had the computer stores, I had continued working on [00:19:00] electronics and actually had money to buy tools, like really good tools. And I got into doing these things called FPGAs and CPLDs.

They're these programmable chips that can emulate what a full custom microchip can do. And I was really passionate about that. I thought they were really neat devices. And I started building circuit boards and designing circuit boards to hold these chips. And I was just doing kind of passion projects.

So I would take one of these chips and I would program it up to generate video. And these chips and program it up to do audio and input, like for keyboards and mice and things like that. And so when my computer store imploded, I went to my father and like, well, what should I do? And he's like, well, this was a good run.

You should go to school, which was his default thing to say, and asked all my friends. And there was no clear answer. So I'm like, well, I've always wanted to build and invent things. So why don't I just start going to Silicon Valley and see if I can get a [00:20:00] job, you know, designing electronics. And so I started flying down to Silicon Valley and going to all these different events like design automation and, you know, ESC and these different trade shows and meeting people and trying to find a way to get a job doing what I was really passionate about.

And it wasn't going well. I was running out of money because I'd lost most of my money during the implosion of my computer stores. And it got to the point where. I took a part time job in a, uh, a little electronic store in Oregon that sold just little components and made a deal with them that I work three days a week.

And then the rest of the time, I was just trying to find a way to get my first design job down in Silicon Valley. And so, um, I'd go to these trade shows and I would get interviews, but then I would never make it through the interview. And a lot of times I'd get walked out of the interview early, which was really frustrating.

And so like, I would meet folks at [00:21:00] these events and they're like, Hey, come in, get an interview. I do the interview and usually it'd be like one or two interviews in there'd be an HR person. They'd be like, come in and be like, well, we're looking at your resume. And like, where'd you go to school? We don't see where you went to school.

I'm like, well, I, I didn't like, uh, where have you worked? And I'm like, well, I haven't really worked in this space. And I just couldn't make it through an interview, but I got my first break. I went to this trade show. I met this, this guy and I always carried all my little circuit boards with me. And I showed him.

The circuit boards. He's like, wow, this is the kind of stuff that we really need. We need that kind of creative thinking. And he's like, can you come back next week and interview with us? I show up to the interview. I go in, I make it like one or two interviews in and they're walking me out and I'm walking down the stairs.

And I run into the founder of this company. He's like, where are you going? And I'm like, well, I said, we're done. And he's like, what do you mean? We're that you're done. Like, he's like, have you even talked to [00:22:00] any of the engineers yet? I'm like, no, I don't think so. And he's like, come with me. And he, so he took me back upstairs.

He grabbed a bunch of the engineers and put us in a conference room. And he just in the round, he just like did a group interview where he moderated the whole thing and just like forced it to happen, which was amazing. Like someone that took a chance on me, that was kind of like the first little springboard.

And from that, I was able to get another little job and another little job. And I just did it. You know, half dozen of these little tiny jobs and started to get a reputation as the person that will do whatever it takes to get the design done. And so the early part of my career was just hopping from little contract to little contract.

And I padded out my resume, which was so important. Once I got that padded out. And then I started to get a reputation and people would refer me. Then it became a lot easier to get gigs and food on the table. And then I got a break, a big [00:23:00] break. So on the side, I've always been passionate about building and inventing things, especially electronic devices.

And so on the side, I'd been reverse engineering some of the old computer systems from the eighties, like the old Commodore 64s. And I was fairly public about it online and showing my work and a toy company spotted that I had been reverse engineering the old Commodore 64 computer, which was super popular in the 80s.

And there were a lot of really great videogames written for it. And so they wanted to build a joystick that had a single chip in it that emulated the Commodore 64 and it had a bunch of videogames built in it so you could plug it into your TV and slap some batteries in this thing and play your favorite games.

And so they contacted me and they're like, we need someone to do this. Can you do this? And this was a full custom chip, which I'd never done before. And so I just took a deep breath and said like, yeah, no problem. Had no clue. I knew the mechanics of doing a chip design. So [00:24:00] I came up with this plan where I would use FPGAs to emulate them at first.

And so I went out and I put a team together that would do the software side. Cause there was a little software, um, work to make menus and stuff to select the games. And then I set out to make a developer board as fast as I could with an FTGA that they could work with to write the software on. We put this whole project together an amazing amount of time and Somehow I stumbled through all the back end process of making a full custom.

And that was really humbling, having to work with these foundries and, and to let them know, like upfront, as I was working with them, I had no clue how to translate this FPGA into a full custom ASIC. Somehow in, I don't know, it was probably about an eight month project, which now that I look back, It's so hard to like pull off anything like that in eight months, but we managed to do it.

Did full custom chip. We didn't have enough time to do any test chips. [00:25:00] So the toy company did, it's called a hot lot where they just push the chips through untested and they spent like millions of dollars building these chips untested, which was super frightening for me. Like if I messed one thing up, like I just cost them millions of dollars.

And they were going to produce 250, 000 of these devices. The first production run, which was well beyond anything I'd ever done before. So it was a, a scary, scary moment. So the chips came back, they sent them to China, they mounted them on the circuit board, and I got this angry phone call from this irate New York toy executive screaming at the top of his lungs that the toys didn't work.

They had bonded these chips down and they were just dead. He's like, tomorrow, or as soon as you can, you're getting on a plane and going to China. And you're going to fix this. So that was pretty intimidating. So figured out how to, uh, get my passport in line and get over there as fast as [00:26:00] possible. And I get to the factory first time to China.

They, they hand me one of the pre production units. I open it up and I pushed on the back of the circuit board and the thing fired up. And I was like, huge sigh of relief. It wasn't completely dead. I hadn't completely botched the design. And so it turns out that. The design that I had sent over to them, the Chinese factory had decided that they wanted to cost reduce it on their own to improve their bottom line.

And so they removed a bunch of components from the design and they had relayed out the circuit board. in such a way that it just would never work. I don't know if I would ever do this again, you know, expose myself so much, but this was a bit of a passion project for me because my first computer was this Commodore 64 computer.

And so me and the programmers, we put a bunch of Easter eggs into this toy. And some of these Easter eggs included like pictures of the programmers drinking beer with like famous programmers. [00:27:00] And, um, I put instructions on how to take the screws out of the bottom of this toy and solder wires to the circuit board so you could download your own games into it or hook a keyboard up to it.

And just a ton of love. There's some extra videogames, um, in secret menus that you can get to. And I was over at the factory doing, you know, some some checkouts on this device and I dropped into one of these like secret menus and one of the toy guys saw me drop into this menu and he's like, what is that?

I'm like, oh, we added a few things. And he's like, what? Show me right now what you added. I can't remember what the game was at the time, but there was like a huge scandal going on because there was some racy content that snuck into like a videogame and parents were upset. So the toy guys were freaked out because we had these pictures of like drinking and we had a game in there where you jumped off of the top of a cliff and you had to like, do twirls and land on the rocks below and crack your head open to get the highest score.

And, [00:28:00] and so they forbid us from telling anyone about these, you know, secret menus. So I came back and I was dating someone at the time that was quite the hacker. We made the decision that this was just too good to keep a secret. And that we were going to leak it to the internet anyway. And, you know, just a few people would probably find it.

And so my boyfriend at the time helped me make this fake website with everything backdated to look like a blog site. And it was a fake blog as, as if it was a factory worker who like hack on things. And he was working on this new toy. The toy had all these really cool features and this is how you get into it.

And he managed to get this thing to go viral. And that was my first exposure to any kind of viral marketing at all. I didn't even know what it meant, or maybe no one knew what it meant back in 2004. And, uh, It went to the top of Slashdot and there was like all this buzz. It was like two or three days before this, this product [00:29:00] launched in a very weird retail channel.

Uh, QVC is where the first product launch was going to be and this huge buzz just like just explosive took off and then here, here comes the phone calls from the mad executive yelling at the top of his lungs that he was going to sue me. Um, Like, oops, I was pretty scared, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube, right?

Like it had been done. What's interesting is the first week that this launched, they sold out. They like sold every, uh, unit. It was like 70 of them that were allocated to QVC. Boom. They sold out immediately. QVC was completely baffled because they only were launching it domestic in the United States, but about 50 percent of the orders were overseas.

And they weren't even broadcasting, you know, this product overseas. They couldn't figure it out. So this toy exec had a complete you know, 180 [00:30:00] turnaround. He loved it, of course. And, uh, he actually embraced it and let us talk about it more. And in future products, let us put some Easter eggs in as long as they were approved.

And I didn't get sued, which was good. So then what happened? That was my big break. Like I'd been kind of scrapping along at that point, but all of a sudden I was in the New York Times. I had some like big article, I had articles being written about like this strange lady that raced cars and had computer stores, never went to school and is now this like designer.

It was frightening. It was frightening for me. I was not used to that kind of public exposure at the time. And in fact, for my career, it was great, but for my emotional state, it was a little bit much. And so I had a little bit of growing to do at that point. Also something I had to learn, I had to learn how to take the negative criticism that you [00:31:00] get on the internet.

That was rough. I was not ready for, like there was a New York Times article, and that's really when things busted open and I got all this, you know, nerd attention. I mean, people are super critical on the internet, and I didn't know how to deal with that. Even though, like, Only one out of 10 comments was negative, but that one comment was so poisonous for me, and I had to learn to just slough that off and just understand that people just say crazy stuff online, but that took a while.

I mean, it took me several years to start to come around. What really kind of turned me around is I took a job after doing all these consumer products. I did a job that did a really high end video compression IC, which was a super fun project. And that led me to a job where I worked on a device that you plug into the internet and helps you stream video to the internet called the TriCaster.

And this is back when [00:32:00] YouTube was just like in its infancy. And streaming video was like really an, a difficult thing to do. So you had to have some dedicated hardware to do it well. And so I'm working on this device and I'm like, you know, this, this new trend, I should learn about it. 

So I decided like with some friends, like let's do a kind of a nerd talk show every Sunday. And so I took one of these boxes, I hooked it up to the internet, I got a bunch of cameras, a bunch of us got together. We started doing this like video podcast each week where we'd invent some crazy inventions and just stream it to the internet. And that was pretty interesting.

Um, I started to really enjoy that engagement and I learned about the knights in shining armor that can be there as your your wall to protect you from kind of the creepers. Tell me more. Well, you know, some of your superfans, like if you just express to them, That you kind of need this help, that you need [00:33:00] to kind of keep the creepers or the super negative people under control, they'll happily do that and it, and it makes them happy to do that.

Although today, like I'm so like hardened to all the negative stuff. It's just like, whatever. I just, I go on my YouTube channel now and I just like enjoy looking at the negative ones. Like, really, is that, is that all you've got? Come on. Can't you make it more personal? Hahaha. 

Amy: Wow. That's a transformation in attitude.

Jeri: Yeah. But it took me a while to get there. But that was for fun doing the live video stream, like doing a live show and that evolved into all kinds of crazy experimental stuff that I was just doing on the side. 

Amy: What do you think about Twitch when you look at Twitch and you're like, Oh look, it's what I was doing.

Jeri: Yeah. Yeah. It's super fascinating. I go watch Twitch all the time just to see how people are doing it because. I was there in the early days doing it and making all kinds of mistakes [00:34:00] and it was really rough and Not very good. It's interesting to watch the evolution of Twitch, like from Justin TV to Twitch and like how they found their niche.

Amy: You sure have a history of being ahead of the curve. Okay. So you're, you're doing this cool live streaming thing, building a video live streamer, et cetera. Then what happened? 

Jeri: Uh, I just keep doing different projects and eventually Valve Software, which is a big videogame company, like spotted my YouTube channel and some of my UX experimentation that I was doing.

And they felt that I was like perfect to run their brand new hardware lab that they wanted to put together. And so this was really interesting. Like I'd never had a company chase me so hard to convince me to come work with them. I started getting emails from them. You know, I get a quite a few, you know, random emails wanting me to work on projects, but I had, I'd never really used steam too much.

[00:35:00] So I hadn't even like put steam and the word valve together at the time being. So I was getting like these weird emails of like, come work at valve. And I'm like, must be spam, I guess is what I was thinking. So I was just discarding these things. And eventually they start showing up at various like events.

That I go to, like I collect pinball machines, so like I'd be at this random pinball collectors event and here's these valve software people showing up and like, who are you people? And, uh, you know, like, Hey, you should come in and interview and I'm trying to pitch this idea to me and I'm like, I don't want to really go work for a videogame company.

And, uh, especially in Washington, like I was more focused on Silicon Valley at the time. And, uh, finally, Gabe Newell friended me on Facebook and started like Facebook messaging me and he's like, Hey, I want to fly down and just have lunch with me. Will you at least do that? And I did a little research. I'm like, Oh, well, that's a little bit bigger than I thought.

Okay. And, uh, He comes down and have lunch with him. He's like, just [00:36:00] come up for, you know, an afternoon, like it's not a real interview, just come up and just see if you like the team, like, okay, I'll come up for an afternoon. So it was a trap, a total trap. It was an interview and they stuck me in a room and there was.

I don't know. There was probably five to 10 people. It was just so many people. And it was this rapid fire kind of interview of like, all right, you're going to make a game controller. 

How would you do it? And I'd be like, Oh yeah, I'd go to this contract manufacturer and maybe this bring in this person that I know that does industrial design an hour or an hour and a half into it, the whole group like stands up and leaves and like a couple of them, like, like he come with us, including Gabe, he takes me to the fourth floor of the building. It's like this entire floor. 

We're remodeling. It's yours. You have an unlimited budget. I have a mission for you. We're worried about Microsoft not being a viable platform in the future.

We need to get into the living room and I want [00:37:00] to. Bring a broader demographic onto our steam platform and he's like, I think you're the person that can put the team together to do that. It's like, wow, the biggest offer I'd ever been given in the most latitude I'd ever been given on a project. So it was really hard to pass up.

I told him like, well, give me a week or two to come up with a thesis of like how I would do this. This is like really big what you want me to do, like bringing a whole family together in the living room around videogames. So I thought about it and I came back to them. I'm like, okay, this is how I would do it.

I would get one third rapid prototypers, maker types that can build hardware projects really fast. I'd get one third product focus people and I get one third researchers and then I'd put them all on this floor together. And we would start off and do fundamental research. And then we would start to narrow on products and all the rapid prototypers would just be building either prototypes [00:38:00] for, you know, the researchers or prototypes for the product people.

And so that's what I did. I put, you know, I came on board and I started putting this dream team together. It was pretty amazing. Like, like the stuff that we were working on, I got to see 20 years into the future because we had such a huge budget. We could brute force things that, you know, a small startup couldn't, we could prototype and see what it would be like, you know, we started to split up into groups as the team grew what we were going to do for products.

And so there was a set top box, which would be all the compute for our, our game platform. There was input devices, so there was a game controller, so a group went off to work on a game controller. Then there was, um, ARVR, which I was pretty passionate about augmented reality after doing some early experiments and seeing how it really is.

The thing that in gaming that you could bring the whole family together and that everyone could relate [00:39:00] to. And so we started working on these two AR and VR kind of separately. So pretty exciting project. And then there was like a big riff in the, uh, the team. Um, I was given this mandate and I believe I found like the perfect product that could bring the family together.

But there was this, um, idea that virtual reality fit the DNA of Valve better. So hardcore gamers like virtual reality and the AR aspects were a little too cutesy. So that was kind of maybe the underlying, uh, friction there was I was pushing really hard. 

And, you know, lesson learned, I was pushing really hard for AR and they ended up cutting the entire AR team, which was really sad that you know, we showed up at work one day and they're like, well, we're cutting this, this group, but a group of us, you know, two of us got together and we went to the founder of a valve and we asked him, like, if we could buy the technology [00:40:00] or we were working on. And he's like, yeah, sure. We're not going to use it.

And so handshake and a few hundred dollars, just as a token, we, we got rights to. you know, develop this AR headset. And from there, I spun up the company called CastAR, which were focused on augmented reality a little bit too early, probably. I mean, VR was just going through its huge hype cycle, and we were showing augmented reality at all the events where You had this volumetric display on the table.

You could do hand interactions. We could put playing cards on the table and have little game characters spawn out of the playing cards. We had wands before anyone had a wand controller. And, uh, we ended up doing a Kickstarter. We did quite well. We, we raised a million dollars. Then we raised a million and a half in seed funding, and then, uh, we eventually raised $15 million for our Series A, which learned [00:41:00] so much during this time, like how to bootstrap a, a venture backed company.

Everything was looking okay, even though we were a little bit ahead of the curve for, for augmented reality and just everything went sideways in our company, uh, several years into it. And I think this is just how Silicon Valley works sometimes. Like there was this notion that we weren't spending the money fast enough because we were only about 20 people or less for the majority of the company's life.

And so our investors had us replaced some of our leadership team, brought in some professionals that started scaling the company up very rapidly. So we went from about 20 people to 90 people in a matter of four or five months. It was very traumatic to the culture of the company and, and the product.

Like our development slowed to a screeching halt during this period. We ended up, uh, having to shut down the [00:42:00] company because we couldn't raise money to support this. Yeah, explosive growth in the company. It was really sad. But, you know, that happens quite a bit here in Silicon Valley. There's this, you know, idea of like, you need to spend fast.

You need to like become a unicorn. You need to have a big exit and that's the partners that we brought on. That's what they wanted. If it would have worked out, it would have been fantastic, but a big gamble that didn't work out. 

Amy: Right. Sometimes it does work and they get a big exit and then the people who bought the company slowly figure out.

That it was growth before product market fit. Absolutely. I mean, that's what I take out of your story and you're right. I've seen it a lot here in Silicon Valley is don't pour the growth. Don't, you know, fuel the growth engine before you've got product market fit. Unless you're playing this kind of clamshell game.

Jeri: I think that's one of [00:43:00] my most valuable lessons, you know, that I'm doing a startup again. And it's also in the AR headset space. I love the Gardner hype cycle charts. They don't predict anything, but it's pretty fascinating. Like now that we're past all the huge hype around AR and VR, I think the smart money will come out where investors that believe that you have to do baby steps to develop a brand new compute platform or a brand new market.

Whereas when we were going up that, you know, steep hype cycle, you know, that's when the kind of crazy fast exit money is like being thrown around. And there's just a lot of big gambles being made. So I'm actually a lot, a lot more excited about our current startup and finding the right partners this time than, when we were a little bit too early.

Amy: So that's fantastic. You have been on the edge of innovation for many years, and you have been iterating on failure, [00:44:00] like learning from failure and not giving up, but iterating on it also. I am so good at failing. So good. So, but then you come back bigger. So that's really interesting. So what do you feel looking back on your experiences right now.

What do you feel that you've learned about? Innovation and successful innovation that you wish you'd known 10 years ago and that you're carrying with you now in your decision making. 

Jeri: There's a couple of things to that. I think as an engineer, we like to set a trajectory. And like stick to it because we know we can do it.

And I think something I've learned along the way is that you need to, you know, adjust your course more at times and be open to that and make sure that that's part of your company culture or your team's culture. I see that far too often that a team will get very stubborn and, uh, they won't make the [00:45:00] small changes they need to make to, you know, to adjust for the product.

Other things that Like learned and I just continue to learn more about it's like I'll never be there is just customer focus and it goes back to the toy guys that I worked with their extremely customer focus and one of the lessons that a toy executive taught me was I was pitching a toy idea and it technically it was an amazing piece of technology.

He's like, I'm not sure that's going to be. Fun for a kid is what his feedback was. He's like, I want you to go home. I want you to cross your legs and sit in the floor and pretend you're a 12 year old kid. You know, if you have to get up and dance around the room to get your head in the right mindset, do it.

Become a kid for a day and then think about this thing and come back to me and repitch it. So when you put your team together or when I put my team together, I'm always trying to emphasize that, you know, the team needs to be in the [00:46:00] right headspace for the product and the demographic you're going after.

And like they need to understand what they're going after, like everyone in the company and everyone in the team. 

Amy: You also mentioned earlier, you learned a lot about team building and hiring and hiring from hiring the wrong people. You learned how to hire the right people. What do you now know about that, that you're bringing into your new company and the new projects you're doing?

Jeri: Yeah. You know, something I learned at Cast, the company that didn't quite make it is that we weren't very good at letting people go that didn't fit the culture. And I don't know how. I lost control of that because when I was running my computer stores, I was pretty vicious at letting people go. I've been doing a lot of reflection on that lately to figure out like, how did I get into that position where I was not good at letting team members go that weren't working out. 

Going forward I'm definitely going to, to [00:47:00] work on that. I mean, part of it is I wonder if. Like, I just have more compassion these days than I did back when I had to be more brutal about survival. It may be because at CastAR we, it was so easy for us to raise money that having a little bit of dead wood on the team was not, not as bad.

Not life threatening. Yeah. Yeah. I think now when I look at investments in augmented reality, I think we're at the bottom of, uh, I think money is going to be a little bit harder to come by. So we're going to have to be a little bit more scrappy and we're gonna have to be more discerning about who we bring on the team.

I knew it the whole time. I don't know why I was failing so, so badly. And it could have also been, I hopped from well funded project, well funded project as well at Valve, like. Yeah, you're very well funded. Maybe I got a little soft. 

Amy: Yeah, I think you're, uh, I think you're onto something there. [00:48:00] Especially because I work both with startups and with corporates.

I see that, you know, the effect of the funding and the timelines. I think when you're on short timelines, it's really different. Deadwood's really different than long, fuzzy timelines. 

Jeri: Yeah. And, and there's also a, a dimension to this. I'm trying to figure out is like, In a startup, a lot of times you're not getting like the tip top talent because like the big companies are really pulling in a lot of the amazing talent because they can just heap money on them and, and free lunches and back massages and stuff.

So sometimes you get a little desperate and I'm trying to figure out going forward how not to get desperate and tolerate non ideal personalities. Like I would say looking back at CastAR, it wasn't that these people weren't talented. There was just some bad personalities that should have been eliminated from the team, like the highly functional folks were complaining about [00:49:00] these folks, but we wouldn't get rid of them because they brought some key piece to the team that we were scared that we wouldn't be able to replace.

Well, I think there's a lot of facets to this and I'm still going to have to, uh, keep analyzing and see if I can do better. 

Amy: Yeah. Given what you know now, what do you feel is your deepest superpower as a creator? What lights you up? 

Jeri: Hmm. I really like to make a change in the world, like projects that I've really been proud of are ones that I can point to.

that are big and grand, like the toys, like it was really fun going to a Toys R Us when they existed and, uh, you know, seeing my products sit there or better yet, seeing like a hole where people had bought them all. Or, I mean, a chip that I worked on ended up in a bunch of TiVo and, and set top boxes and televisions that was like, even though no one in the world knew that I worked on it, just that I could walk by a television set in someone's home [00:50:00] and, you know, And no, like, Oh, a piece of my DNA is sitting in that, that television.

And I think some of my, you asked about superpowers, I think something I'm quite good at, and I'm getting better at is. I like to iterate really fast on products and kind of sling a lot of mud early on. And I try to validate my course and direction early on in a very simple way, whether it's just thought exercises or it's hot glue and cardboard craft projects.

I think those are all valid. And, uh, I often bring that to, to a team where a lot of engineers will get like really hyper focused on the technology and they forget about the customer focus and, and trying to validate that the direction is correct. It's also a detriment at times too. There's definitely been times in my career where company cultures or teams don't get it.

It's always a challenge to walk that line of. Jeri's craft time with the hot glue [00:51:00] gun can come across as like, I'm just screwing around and not being serious. And so I think I need to grow at helping people understand that that's valuable. 

Amy: Prototyping for the win. 

Jeri: Yeah. I mean, it seems obvious to me, but it's not always obvious in certain organizations.

Amy: No. And that's a whole another conversation. But I think There's a lot of deep value and wisdom there. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your great stories and the painful and valuable lessons you've learned. It's, it's really interesting to see how the threads of your career are actually pretty consistent.

Jeri: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I still have mentors today and I actively seek out mentors and they're super valuable. And whenever I can be a mentor, I try to as well. 

Amy: That's a great way to live life. All right. We'll talk soon.

Jeri: Thank you. 

Outro: Thanks for [00:52:00] listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.

Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting(number)2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.