Scales Of Success Podcast

#31 - The Founder Who Followed His Fire with Assaf Glazer

• Marcus Arredondo

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What if the nights that broke you open became the ones that built you? In today’s episode, Marcus connects with Dr. Assaf Glazer, father, founder, and maker of meaning, whose journey flows from sleepless cribs to soulful kitchens. From Nanit to Vinst, this is a story of reinvention, where AI meets instinct, and technology learns to care.

Dr. Assaf Glazer is a seasoned AI expert and product innovator with a Ph.D. in computer vision from the Technion and postdoc work at Cornell Tech. He’s led teams across industries from semiconductors to consumer tech and is now focused on transforming home cooking through his latest venture, Vinst. Known for turning complex tech into practical tools, Assaf brings a rare blend of deep science, creative thinking, and real-world impact.

Get in touch with Dr. Assaf Glazer:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/assaf-glazer-264aaa20/

Episode highlights:
(3:04) How Nanit was born
(7:28) Transforming baby sleep with AI
(11:32) Built Nanit, funded smart, and learned lessons inside
(19:43) When a team breaks down
(24:22) Creating culture with core
(29:04) Why Assaf left Nanit
(34:48) A culinary reinvention
(40:49) How Vinst is changing cooking
(48:16) Assaf's outlook on AI
(50:46) Life lessons from building startups
(52:59) Outro

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Note: The transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.

Assaf Glazer: 0:00

It's important to create an alignment. When you are getting the money or the investment or the commitment, you need to say what you want to do, Not only for the next until the next round or the next milestones, but where you want the company to go.

Marcus Arredondo: 0:21

Today's guest is Asaf Glazer, an AI expert, entrepreneur and father whose son's crib sparked one of the most trusted baby tech brands on the market. That crib became the foundation for Nanit, the smart monitor powered by AI and computer vision now used by parents and researchers worldwide. Asaf shares how building Nanit pushed him through executive shakeups, leadership pivots and the hard decision to step down. We talk about what came next, including culinary school, AI-powered recipe design, and his new startup, Vinst, focused on bringing personalization and data to your kitchen. There's a conversation about invention, identity and the search for meaningful alignment. Let's start the show. Asaf Glazer, thank you so much for being on. I am very excited to talk to you. For the record and audience, it is 9 pm in Tel Aviv, where you are, so I appreciate you extending your day Welcome.

Assaf Glazer: 1:11

Thanks, thanks for the opportunity. It is a pleasure.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:14

Well, just for the audience background, you and I met many years ago while you were getting a small company off the ground which has become a juggernaut called Nanit, and you were starting to raise money. I won't get into the details. I was part of an angel group that invested and we got bumped and to this day, that was the biggest check I'd ever written at that time and I was so enraged that we got bumped. So I got my check back and I'm still ruining that. I wasn't a part of that. But fast forward.

Marcus Arredondo: 1:47

I had a son two and a half years ago and, of course, the first thing on the list was the Nanit, which had improved considerably above and beyond what was already, I think, a state-of-the-art, you know, ahead of the curve type of camera. But I want to talk about Nanit just to lay some groundwork for the audience. We're going to cover a large swath of information, but including your new startup Vinced, which I'm excited to talk about as well. But if we can, I want to start with Nanit, and I know this was.

Marcus Arredondo: 2:24

I think, all what I found in a lot of entrepreneurs and founders is that it all starts with scratching your own itch in some way, and I know that you had started Nanit because of your son. You had just had a son and I'm wondering if you could just start us out from the beginning. What sort of promoted that? And just for the audience, you have a Master of Science in Computer Science and a PhD in AI and Computer Vision. You've done some considerable amount of postdoctoral research, so you are well-equipped to be the person that spearheads this. But I wanted the audience to have a little bit of that background, so I'll transition it to you. But I'm very excited to hear about the genesis of Nanit.

Assaf Glazer: 3:03

Yes, for the majority at least. Until I launched Nanit, I was always kind of from the algorithm, ai, computer science side. My background was, before going to my PhD, I worked at Applied Materials in the semiconductor industry, working on process control and diagnosis, like if you would cover many aspects of what I did at Nenit and before. Process control is part of it and we actually find defects on silicon wafers and use AI to classify the type of defect that. This was my main work and by doing that, improving the process. And from that I moved to my PhD and I had my first boy and say you know, this crib looks like a chamber. Let's do process control for babies. So it was about process control and identifying disorders, diseases earlier, using early signs with a camera.

Assaf Glazer: 4:10

But soon after I became a dad, I didn't sleep, so you understand that sleep is your problem and I finished my PhD in 2013 and moved as a postdoc to Cornell University. I joined them. A program called it was at Cornell Tech. They opened a new campus in today it's in Roosevelt, but back then it was at Port Authority, the Google building and I joined a program called Runway. It's part of Jacobs Institute, with Cornell and Technion together. That actually became my first investors in NANIT and from early detection of diseases and disorders and we actually we raised our seed round and became a consumer product. That first. You know we still want to expand our knowledge on human and baby development and sleep, but it's also helping parents to see their child from remote but also equip them with the information they need to make better decisions for their child, where sleep is the first thing that we look at, their child, where sleep is the first thing that we look at. We use vision to identify sleep but also parental intervention and give parents tip and recommendation of how to improve sleep.

Assaf Glazer: 5:34

Over time we were very science driven. Back then. The president of the Technion was one of the founders of sleep medicine and really helped us to connect with top researchers in this field of sleep and development. We put cameras in Cornell sleeping labs. We did a validation study for our sleep technology. We worked on behavioral science and how to actually move through emotion and incentive, how to improve sleep, and we actually showed over time that parents with nenit, their baby, sleep more and and the product you have it already uh, on the research side, we're also kind of a platform for for, uh kind of a gold standard, even to measure baby outside of the lab like in the natural. So we are widely used by the research community for research purposes.

Marcus Arredondo: 6:34

Well, the thing that I really have enjoyed about Nanit is obviously it highlights, you know, key moments when he first stands up or whatever, and then the information that's been provided, how to potentially help. That's been actually very critical, but when I was looking at this as an investment opportunity, something that caught my eye was the ability to sort of transpose the ability of this camera onto more clinical type studies where you might be able to determine on a large scale, large volume, number of reps, monitoring even adults, at least at the Genesis. Was that ever something that manifested? Did that come to fruition? Because it seems like this camera could be a partner in your life for much longer than just as an infant.

Assaf Glazer: 7:23

You have so many things to say about it. This is, I think, the most exciting part about NENIT the consumer-facing health aspect, the ability to use biofeedback for improving and maintenance. And we did a lot of collaborations, from early detection of autism studies with UCLA and Autism Speak, a development study with CUNY University, with Yale, like dozens of, we showed that baby girls sleep more than baby boys. With the data we actually integrated an IRB, a clinical study, into our all the users were asked whether they want to participate in a clinical study that we approved with a committee. Around 20% of our users accepted and we built this platform that can be used for research and this was the enabler for all the collaboration that we have done and still exists with dozens of journal paper peer review. There was even in the Journal of Sex study, which is not like something that we are finding the correlation between baby sleep and sex patterns Okay For the parents or for the child later in life. They found out that the only correlation is with the number of awakening events.

Marcus Arredondo: 8:56

Right, I could have told you that you don't need to study for this.

Assaf Glazer: 9:02

you see, Right, right.

Marcus Arredondo: 9:05

And it's sort of like it became a little bit more interesting for me too, just because I didn't know it at the time, but I have come to know it since that my dad has sleep apnea and how important as I've aged and having a kid how important sleep has become just to my overall. I mean, everything I do during the day is really functioning to drive better sleep, because I think it's a compounding effect. You were not an expert in sleep before you started this. What have you learned about sleep hygiene and how has that translated to your own daily routines?

Assaf Glazer: 9:39

I'm not a sleep expert like by training sleep expert, like by by training um, but we work closely with really uh top minds um on this part and everything that we know in sleep is pretty new, like from the feelings, like before that there was no much knowledge uh, but the sleep architecture and the development of baby sleep is a fascinating topic, like from how we change during the first month, and there are a lot of it's related to our development in general in life and I I think it is. It's a leading measure in our health and our sleep and I my kids, are sleeping really well, very good, like I can say that if there is something that uh came out of, it is a good sleep for me and for my kids and I think that it's also related to your like there's so many things that we don't know still about the connection between our sleep at childhood and adult. Lots of learning still to do on this part.

Marcus Arredondo: 10:51

Speaking of learning, I want to talk a little bit about the business side of Nanit. When you, I think starting from, was it your series A Tell me about that process of actually going from a world of academia. Was this your first startup?

Assaf Glazer: 11:07

I had some trials before, but nothing came into a maturity, as I named it.

Marcus Arredondo: 11:15

So what was this process like? Going to raise money while running the company, while trying to grow it, while trying to build R&D that was sufficient to be a foundation for the company. Wearing all those different hats, I'm just curious what your experience was like.

Assaf Glazer: 11:32

They're different, like every round has a different dynamic and for us we had our seed round that led by Upfront Ventures and Mark Suss led the round and brought a lot of expertise and knowledge and I was pretty much green on everything. You know I came from to build a consumer hardware product with lots of innovation, risk. You know we run computer vision in the cloud, in firmware, in mobile and working into like a place like with almost zero tolerance, like parenting, like if the camera doesn't work for a second or you don't hear your baby cry or a sleep tip, that you know how parents are opinionated about different topics and no background, nothing. Finance marketing. It was extremely it was a huge challenge to go into it, but this is what all founders do Like usually, like there wasn't, there are second timers, but on this part it was a huge challenge and we managed to bring on board the financial partners and the directors that help us to do the learning. The seed was pretty much, you know, raising money today and raising money 10 years ago was different.

Marcus Arredondo: 13:09

For sure. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Assaf Glazer: 13:13

I think that AI made a big change. I don't think that you need a lot of capital to show early signs of real business and, on the other side, the expectations of what you come with. I think that today I was like it was probably too early and too amateur to give $4 million with nothing. I had nothing and they put $4 million for the C-Dwan and definitely the hardest round was the A round. There is kind of a desert between the seed and the A Sure and this is the toughest round that we had, with lots of challenges, and I can talk a lot also about this and I can talk a lot also about this.

Marcus Arredondo: 14:05

So talk to me about what is the difference from the seed rounds to the series rounds. What is the biggest in terms of your frame of reference, how you're approaching it, what you're having to bring to the table.

Assaf Glazer: 14:20

Yeah, when you start you have nothing, and if people believe in you, usually it's your friends and family. This is the beginning. Then at some point you have some institutionals that say you know professional investors that said, okay, let's do a pre-seed or a seed round and put some structure in what you're doing. And this is where still there is a question. There is before you start selling and after you start selling, or when you build dreams and when you need to meet expectations, those are and I think that before that, your partners or the financial partners there is no much use of a word, because you need to do a lot of things and meeting your projections from quarter to quarter is not discussed but after that, after the seed round, it's like I always try to look at it as a nuclear center that you put the uranium poles inside the water and then no one can enter this nuclear setting again.

Assaf Glazer: 15:28

So this is what happened after you kind of start selling and building your company and then you have projections and you have a burn that goes against spend and and this is where the board has much more impact and influence and support that they can provide to the company and this is after the Series A, the Series C. The Series A is OK, so it's working. The unit economics is working. Let's do it bigger, let's do the next stage. And the Series B. It's like OK, let's now put NetSuite and bring all b. It's like okay, let's now put net suite and bring all the uh c levels. That will take you to whatever. And then the c round and d round are kind of the same.

Marcus Arredondo: 16:14

You know, it depends how much money you need well, and what do you think you take away from raising? What do you look for in in partners and financial partners, knowing now what you didn't know then, and also not just from a financial perspective. But what else do they bring to the table that's meaningful to really help to accelerate growth, to ensure that you're not going down a path that could be treacherous down the road?

Assaf Glazer: 16:43

going down a path that could be treacherous down the road. Your partners and it's not only the directors that are on your board, everyone that have some stack in the game. Everyone is a multiplier on what you're doing. Like I said, usually these are high-profile individuals that have their network and your network. I won't say that it's the most important thing on your experience that you bring so far, but it reflects some of your work that you have done and if you bring the right people around you, you can cover many of your blind spots.

Assaf Glazer: 17:30

And I think that the entrepreneurial path is a search problem. Every time you encounter a problem that you need to solve and how do you solve it? It's a research, it's like go there or that, and this is where you you approach your partners and to help you with their advice, their solution. You take what you know you need like don't take what you don't want to take, and you continue to your next challenge, if you will manage to solve it. So your partners, your board, are really instructive or helpful on this part.

Assaf Glazer: 18:12

But it's important to create an alignment. When you are getting the money or the investment or the commitment, you need to say what you want to do, not only for the next, until the next round or the next milestones, but where you want the company to go and you know the biggest problems or the most important things that are. You think or you should talk about it in the beginning, and this is the point when, when you actually decide to work together, and so if I have some lesson learned about, it is about this type of communication say what you want to do, have an alignment and agreement around it and continue to move forward.

Marcus Arredondo: 19:06

Well, on that note, I want to sort of unpack a little bit about when you parted ways with your COO and your CRO and I know that you brought on a new team and had an offsite shortly thereafter and I know that you've referenced that that was a big contributing factor to not only just a learning process but to actually bringing a team in that was more aligned. Can you talk to us a little bit about what you observed going through that and what you take away in sort of your new venture and elsewhere, you know, as you approach shaping a vision, I talked about it with my friends or my partners.

Assaf Glazer: 19:47

It's the first time that I'm talking about it in public and this was one of the painful moments that I had in my life Until now. It has a lot of impact on how I function today as a founder, as a CEO, as a company. You know I, when, when you, when you have some disagreement with your friends or whatever, there are two ways to solve it. Right, they are like let's talk about it and let's go to prosecution. You know there are two, two ways to work around it and and usually if it's your friends, you share some values and you solve it. So when shit hit the fan, you manage to solve it and you continue to move to the next phase. But when there is no culture fit and when there are disagreements in values, then it becomes a problem. Then it become a problem. When I said that Series A was my hardest round, I guess it's because the partner that we met saw that there is some problem with the team.

Marcus Arredondo: 20:59

They highlighted it to you.

Assaf Glazer: 21:00

We had this agreement and we didn't manage to solve them. Eventually, we solved everything like grownups Okay, I don't think that there was something like it's happened in life and we need to break apart and, like to everyone, need to, and to continue to place that they want to, left alone with. Just understand the situation. We were moving our manufacturing site. We were bleeding cash from supply chain inefficiencies. It was just before the holiday season. We had a new camera to launch. I had to take on me like finance, marketing, legal and sales and operations and I had to hire those people while running those things. A lot of learnings with blood, sure, and in three months I think, we bring VP Finance, vp Marketing, vp Operation soon after VP Sales.

Assaf Glazer: 22:28

It was a hell of a quarter. We launched Amazon. During this quarter, we built display for the first retail store, so we had like built display. I had no one on the team to, so I had to. It's a search problem.

Assaf Glazer: 22:43

This is where I had a great idea on this top part, on this side, like my board was the perfect board to support me with this side, my board was the perfect board to support me with this effort, with lots of experience and connections, but eventually I was alone and my co-founder was in Israel running my CTO, so he wasn't on the business side. He wasn't on the business side. Yeah, I think that you know when I'm reflecting. Soon after we finished Ocired, we went on an off-site weekend and built our core values for the organization and learn how important it is to build your venture about a culture that you feel comfortable, as a founder, to work and communicate and this was, I think, the most important learning how culture and core values are important in putting them in the right way for how you, as founders, are running a company.

Marcus Arredondo: 24:03

What are some of the questions you would use to help define a culture? I mean, to some degree I'm assuming that you're actually laying the groundwork for other people to be coming to as a founder. But there is some collaboration, even with some of those partners where you want to incorporate their own perspective and make sure that it's aligned with what you're trying to achieve.

Assaf Glazer: 24:22

The culture is something that you build with your executives. It's something that should be done in collaboration with who we are today and should come doing it with a management that you hire, just like. It's. Probably sometimes when you are not the one that hire people, it's harder to like. There are challenges there, but it could work. It really depends Initially. You know it's like these are like best practices of how to make it work, like how to define core values. So we had people that write everyone write what they think are what is important for them. We had a moderator that helped us to collect all this feedback and come with some level of conclusions, and there are some exercises that you do together before, after, to put it together on a paper and think about it. It is a process.

Marcus Arredondo: 25:28

Yeah Well, what I find fascinating about this too is I mean, from my experience it's primarily real estate, both in a broker's capacity and in an ownership capacity these deals tend to happen in relatively short order and you're having to put the team together pretty quickly and you get better over time. You don't know this. You can't read this in a book and sort of identify how to best identify good partners. You know you've got a good partner when you're in the foxhole and you're under attack and nobody leaves their ground, that's a really good partner that you have. You don't always find those types of people when you're sort of scattering and scrambling to get this team assembled. You hopefully get better over time.

Marcus Arredondo: 26:10

But I guess my question here is, as I've gone through this process, at each iteration I've upped my own. I don't know if it's emotional intelligence or perception, or maybe aligned my behaviors with my gut better, but you have a sense of people who are going to be collaborative and contributing in a way that is a creative. It's greater than the sum of its parts, but you can't always identify it upfront except through some sort of gut sense. I guess that's not really the right word. I'm curious if you have any comment on having gone through it, because culturally, post-series A is probably a little bit different of a culture than it was in the seed rounds. You also knew a whole lot more and now in another venture, invinced, I'm sure you're having to take a lot of those skill sets and apply them. So what are you bringing to the table that you wish you maybe had known at the beginning? Or what advice would you give to somebody trying to assemble a team with culture?

Assaf Glazer: 27:20

The brand and the core values are always evolving, like, but there are two ways you can let them, and there are always core values in brand, even if you didn't define them. Sure, you can decide whether it will be managed or it will be not managed, and whatever happened will happen. In my second venture, vince, the first thing that I did was to write down the brand strategy, and it was just. You know, I took myself. My co-founder said you know, what are we building? What is the purpose, what is the goal? And from there we pretty fast jump into even visual identity in a very early phase of the company, since I worked with my co-founder at Vinst used to be our Ken Fisher, used to be my SVP of R&D at Nenit, so we work over a decade together. So culture was something that we already had and maybe it's a good lesson learned. Working with someone that you have some work experience with it's a good start. It removes a lot of the risks involved in culture conflicts or whatever.

Marcus Arredondo: 28:55

I'm wondering if you'd be willing to share what your process was like when you decided it was time for you to step down from Nanit.

Assaf Glazer: 29:04

It's also a long story. I was very optimistic. We in 2019, we actually launched, we actually become a market leader. We started in early 2019. We started to meet our projections After changing the management.

Assaf Glazer: 29:29

By the way, there was the series B that you this is where we met. It was an oversubscribed round, like when things are moving well it's it's also reflected in in in the round. And then we I think that there was a joint decision with us and the board. The board said we don't need more innovation. We have a great product, let's sell and let's bring some sales mentality. And I moved back to Israel and the concept was we first brought a senior executive to lead the sales and marketing and then we kind of switched position when I'm moving to the chairman position and chief product officer, like you know, working with the board on strategy and product, with strategy, and you know, I was very optimistic that it will work, but it didn't work. How so? Founders that are CEO are like white elephants. A professional CEO that go into a company, wants to bring their people and their culture into and I've seen it many times um and uh. Eventually we didn't share, um, the same vision for the company in some sense or we're in a line on on the direction.

Assaf Glazer: 31:05

I, uh, was a big believer in health. I saw that I said you know we can more, but there is a glass ceiling for this market $4 billion. We should look into the data and go after health and I was working really hard on trying to convince the board to do a spin and start to work only on the data. We signed a contract with HSS on early detection of cerebral palsy and other neuromuscular disorders. I signed a contract with J&J on using biofeedback from NANIT for precision medicine for some eczema medicine. It was a study that was supposed to start in June 2020.

Assaf Glazer: 32:02

Covid started and nothing happened. But think about it, you know signing with J&J a product on clinical trial of development drugs. And we started to work with UCLA and Autism Speak on early detection of autism during the first year and I said you know we build an amazing consumer attracting product, like the kiosk with the best sandwiches on the first floor of the hospital. Let's build a hospital. And I convinced some of the boards but the consensus eventually was every dollar should go to growth and for me it didn't leave a place to bring myself and it was a challenge for me. For me it didn't leave a place to bring myself Right and it was a challenge for me. I felt that I shouldn't. I cannot stay, so I decided to leave eventually.

Marcus Arredondo: 33:03

You seem like a tinkerer, somebody who wants to. You seem like a tinkerer, somebody that tinkers with things, that likes to fix it and improve it and make it something more iterative and to continue to push that boundary. Is that something you faced being restricted from in this position?

Assaf Glazer: 33:21

This is what I always wanted to do with Vuthan. It was from the very beginning. You understand now my background and what I'm doing. This is consumer-facing health beginning. You understand now my my background and what I'm doing, like this is um um, consumer facing health. And also, with vince, we're thinking about precision nutrition and how to use bio feedback to improve our health. With ai today you can do much, much more. You can go into unstructured data and find diamonds in how consumer like just monitoring how babies sleep or how people eat. This is where you know, at some point with Nanit, we moved to textile. Before my PhD, even I tried to take a textile manufacturer and bring there some tools for process control, and I did it also for flowers and, and you know, I for tomatoes. Like process control and trying to look at this kind of early detection is something I'm very excited about in almost every every domain that I'm going after.

Marcus Arredondo: 34:28

Well, on that note, it seems like you wanted to add yet another moniker to your name with the Culinary Master Diploma from Bishulam. So, you left, Nanit, you took about what a year off. Yeah, I took more than a year off.

Assaf Glazer: 34:45

yes, Okay, no, during COVID I was in New York, okay. Now, during COVID, I was in New York, Okay, and I couldn't stand watching my three kids and toil over. You know, I don't know where you were, probably in LA, like in New York. It felt like Armageddon.

Marcus Arredondo: 35:04

Yeah, yeah.

Assaf Glazer: 35:08

So I couldn't stand watching them eating these double-crust chicken fingers and I put two-hour slots on my calendar and start cooking Now. I was never a professional. I worked in restaurants before. I like service. As you can imagine, I have a lot of energy. This is also why I can work until late.

Marcus Arredondo: 35:29

Yeah.

Assaf Glazer: 35:32

And I love it, you know, sitting with your kids around the table and having some time to understand their picky taste, and it's improve your uniting and it's a way to express love and it's a way for us to feel more healthy. And once we make the food that we eat, we're more aware and I, I think that that there was a point in time that I started to watch netflix series on food, like, and then read michael pollan cook the book, and then modern cuisine and gastronomy and anthropology, and it started to grow on me. You know, I, I, my, my passion moved from baby sleep to nutrition and I started to feel myself cooking, said. You know, it's mind-blowing, like with multimodal and ai, you can put your phone like this, looking at you and it will tell you what to do by watching, like Waze or Google Map for cooking, I can watch into your steak and show you how it looks in five minutes from now and when you need to flip it from one side to another and you know where to start. It's 10% of global economy. It's not baby sleep.

Assaf Glazer: 36:48

So when I stepped down from Nanit, I stayed at the chairman on the board and the board was very generous with me. You know, I gave me that the wealth work for me and for my family and I stayed at the chairman. But no one listened to me at this time. It was very kind of polite, like nice, from them, but uh, I didn't really, um, and I said let's immerse myself into this. Let's go into first. Start with the human trait. Like why do we eat? Why what is tasty? So I went on a cooking school full time for a year, learned also pastry. I worked as a cook in a fine dining restaurant, surround myself with people that explain to me how to put the practice it was. I mean, you know, my wife told me you know, are you crazy? You know we are a 17-year-old coming and I was cleaning the kitchen until 2 am. I love it. I felt that I learned a lot. I also went to the academia and work with food tech founders and I was even trying to connect between the two. It is amazing. You're going to a faculty of food and agriculture, whatever. Wherever you go, they do not get any practical knowledge about culinary. They go home and eat daisy cheese and cucumber, like it's not. And I said you know you are a food scientist. Like why don't you get? So I connected between my school and the Technion and they did some pilot run of trying to educate people around home cooking.

Assaf Glazer: 38:41

I think that what I found like a shared purpose is what like when you look at our food system we want to make it uniting, we want to make it healthier, we want to make it cheaper, with less resources and environmental friendly. These four reasons are the top reasons why people cook at home. We cook the food we love for the people we love. We want to be healthy, we want to save money, we want to serve our environment. So let's start by making people cook more and start to aggregate the data and with the data that we aggregate, let's start to use biofeedback and precision attrition and try to look into even longevity like things that how we can improve our health through our nutrition habits I would say through home cooking and there are a lot of studies that show that people that cook at home statistically have better nutrition habits. So it's a way for us to just bring more health practices to our life.

Marcus Arredondo: 39:52

Well, I also think we've gotten so distant from food in that we can order it, it's quick. A lot of people use microwaves. I think a lot of Americans are byproducts of the 80s, where you had frozen dinners and the like, and bigger pantries meant more storage and more preservatives and the like, and I think we got farther and farther away from what is healthful and I think that there's a bigger shift. The pandemic, I think, certainly helped that. But this is an interesting time for you to be pursuing this. I'm curious. Well, I've got the video of Vince. I was wondering if you might just walk us through, while I'll just do a share screen here of what vinst actually does, because I think it's super exciting to witness and I want to make sure that I'm not missing anything. So I don't want to mince any words, but you can see this right. So this is going to be playing at a little more than regular speed. I don't have the sound, but I'm wondering if you can talk through for the audience who's listening.

Assaf Glazer: 40:47

You can pick whatever recipes from whatever location and put it in one place, whatever, and we give you an easy-to-follow format that you can actually watch the recipe and cook with ease what you saw before. It's like our bookshelf, but you can every recipe. You can tweak it with AI to to gluten-free, easy to make. We prepare all timers for you. If you are, you can watch multiple recipes. You have your chat, of course, that you can talk with in the context of the recipe. If you take images, we dress up your recipe and put it in a really nice format, or you can generate images with AI, if you want, and to play with it, and all the data is extracted. So we also break the recipes into category and help you to organize it. It's the new age of media.

Marcus Arredondo: 41:44

It's amazing.

Assaf Glazer: 41:45

It's the Spotify. It's like Spotify for cooking. Like it's a playlist with all your. It's really fast. So I you like. But, yeah, you can print books Eventually. This is the heart. Like, everything that you saw in the app is free. We think that this is part of the pain that I have from Nanit. We did a lot of research, but only if you can pay $300, you can enjoy Nanit. So are you making a real impact on society? And when we started Vince, we said we want to be in every kitchen. When we started Vince, we said we want to be in every kitchen. We, we believe in um and and and. Cooking is very collaborative. Like it's a recipes and inspiration from your mom, dad, blogger. It's all about sharing. And you have your cooking team and people. So everyone should be able to enjoy Vince, with all the AI tools and whatever. And let's build this collaborative environment. And if you want to do some gifting or if you want to preserve family recipes, it's not a must. Like, it's an option. Like I think that I can print a book.

Assaf Glazer: 43:06

That actually is super amazing to me because I think it's Just my mom's pickles the best pickles.

Marcus Arredondo: 43:10

That's so good because it's an heirloom, right? I mean you're capturing a moment of time that's timeless.

Assaf Glazer: 43:16

This is self-published books. I love it. It's not for cooking, like just for showcase, but it's nice that every recipe, this cookbook, come with Spotify. So if you will kind of go to the bookshelf when you download the app and go now and download, you will have one book in the bookshelf. It's this book. That's great and it's an example of a book that you can make. And every recipe also have kind of a qr code so you can, you know, you can take, show it to someone and we will carry the recipe and with you and the book itself has a qr code, so you can actually share books and we create a collaborative cookbooks where do you see this going?

Marcus Arredondo: 44:09

I mean, what's your goal for? You've eliminated the production aspect of it. This is all digital, so you can effectively scale without any intrusion from other people, in a way that was very difficult to do with a consumer product like Nanit. I'm hoping that gives you some freedom, but I'm curious where this goes in the long run in your mind.

Assaf Glazer: 44:30

In one word education. Yeah, in two words. Three words education and process control.

Marcus Arredondo: 44:38

This is very process control. I mean when you were talking about it. It's working in the restaurants scrubbing until 2 am. I saw how it fit into your area of expertise.

Assaf Glazer: 44:50

There is one area that I'm very excited about. The intersection with AI is education, and for two reasons. First is that education is our way to find our path in life, so education, it's a big thing. Second thing, the whole concept of education with AI changed Like think about a professional book that you're writing. There is no reason to read this book as it is. The book should rewrite itself according to what you need to know. You should tell the book I want to know this and the book will arrange itself. Now add to this voice and vision. It's a complete show, like an image worth a thousand words. So you can now build a crazy, different, disruptive technology with AI that will take every professional book and turn it into a very efficient, engaging educator at your hand. Doing it in home cooking is very, very exciting.

Assaf Glazer: 46:01

Our core technology, by the way, is vision support. We have a patent around it and this is where Vin started with a patent on vision support. I love the. You know vision and AI is one of my things that I've been working on all my life, so it's pretty straightforward that I go after that. But I think that combining it with education and cooking now is very exciting. Now when you're putting together the things that we have done with NANIT around the data and how it can use for sleep training, then you can think about every week using biofeedback from sleep, Apple Watch or even blood test that is connected to healthcare and to see what you ate during the week affect your biometrics. Yeah, and using biofeedback, you can use AI to make changes in the household nutrition Like. It's not like looking into AI, calc or whatever, and it's more looking as a family how we actually consume food, and this is very, very, very exciting that we can do it now with with the technology, and this is where we're going after with Vinst.

Marcus Arredondo: 47:33

I want to take a minute and just expand outward, because we've had a couple of people on the show that are more embedded in AI than others. You are probably the most or second to none of all the guests and most listeners are not computer science backgrounds. I'm curious if you could just give us a sense of what do you think? You've been in AI for over a decade. You've seen where it was, where it is now. What's your take on where we're going? Do you see concerns arising from what's being developed, what don't we know and what makes you so excited as well? I mean, I'm not trying to be, I'm very excited about it, but I think there are concerns.

Assaf Glazer: 48:16

I'm trying to be optimistic in my life. It's my nature. We always build technologies that bring a lot of value to our life but make us more dependent. Bring a lot of value to our life but make us more dependent. Eventually usually and unfortunately through bad experiences, we improve the way that we use the technology, but I think that we will see in the next few years a lot of productivity that came out of it.

Assaf Glazer: 48:51

Ai is like electricity it should go everywhere. Like every domain in life, ai can do something. So it is, and I don't think that it's going to release people, at least when I'm looking at my business. It's just everyone will be 10x more efficient. There is kind of the Moore law for semiconductors that every two years we have that transistor to shrink by two. I think there is the AI law, like there is some level of efficiency and eventually it can build your product roadmap for the year just based on the data from the previous year.

Assaf Glazer: 49:28

It can be like how we can improve. I think that every company that has more than five employees need to do some reconstructions or rearrangement, or having some chief of staff with AI expertise that will raise their hands every time that wait. We can do it better with AI, so use it. I don't know how the adoption will, how fast it will happen, but it will change industry, I think, in a positive way. We should be responsible, we should be nice to each other, we should think about our values, between people and between nations, and these are the important things. Ai is just technology.

Marcus Arredondo: 50:20

I want to ask, as we wrap this up, what advice do you take from these experiences of founding these companies and seeing the grit and requirements in order to make them successful, how that applies to how you parent, how you view your sons, how you implement processes for them.

Assaf Glazer: 50:47

It took me time to trust my instincts and, as a founder, you need to trust your instincts. Like every person that you you meet is um, is a visitor for the moment. Like you're alone for the majority of the time. And if you are the right person or you have the passion and you lead with your heart, okay, no, try to be authentic with yourself. And now there is a real problem that you are trying to solve. And if you will believe in yourself and lead with your heart and listen to people and take what you want and have the confidence to take not take what you want uh, you have probably the chances to be successful or to do something with an impact. And usually most people like 90% of the things around they don't know, like it's a search problem, like so shouldn't be a barrier, it shouldn't be something that, like everyone is like this just lead with your heart and trust your instincts.

Marcus Arredondo: 52:09

That's such amazing advice. I'm so grateful that you were. Everyone is like this Just lead with your heart and trust your instincts. That's such amazing advice. I'm so grateful that you were as open as you were and for coming on as we wrap this up, any closing thoughts or things you think I might have missed?

Assaf Glazer: 52:24

First I would like to thank you for reaching out. The pleasure is all mine. Yeah, I remember I think it was the Upfront Ventures that we met outside yeah In the annual Summit, and I hope that next time that we'll have the opportunity We'll also get together over A cup of coffee. I would love to, and maybe with Vince it will work.

Marcus Arredondo: 52:51

Well, I'm very excited about what you're doing at Vince and hopefully that's another opportunity for you to come on again. But thank you again, asaf, it's been great to see you.

Assaf Glazer: 53:01

Thank you.

Marcus Arredondo: 53:06

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