Ep. 11: He Lived in a Chinese Factory for 5 Months

"The speed at which you solve problems on the factory floor is the speed at which your product ships." - Ryan Dunwoody

Ryan was 24 when he flew to Shenzhen with a suitcase and a crowdfunding campaign to deliver. No Mandarin. No manufacturing experience. The factory gave him a bunk bed in the workers' dormitory. He took it. Five months later, the first production run shipped. Ten years later, he's still there.

In this episode:

• Entrepreneurial beginnings: sex toys at 14, megaphone marketing at 17
• Flying to Shenzhen at 24 with nothing and sleeping in a factory dormitory
• How the factory boss named him 杜无敌 (Du the Invincible)
• Pi-top: $35M raised, 10,000 laptops shipped, Guinness World Record
• Why remote hardware development kills startups
• The scooter man: Huaqiangbei delivers ICs to your window in 30 minutes
• Powerhouse's rule: every engineer must assemble what they design
• Hiring in 996 culture (3 months for one mechanical engineer)
• What Westerners get wrong about Chinese manufacturing
• Why your factory isn't the problem -- you are

Connect with Ryan: LinkedIn | powerhouse.engineering

About Asiabits: Weekly insider stories from Asia's tech & startup ecosystem. Subscribe: asiabits.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The first five months of being here was pretty much hell. Moved to Shenzhen, moved to the factory, and you're the only guy in Shenzhen that's actually developing the product and trying to get it to market. Sleepless nights, like not sleeping, working all the time. And I remember I got it working at like I think it was 4 a.m. When you've literally like hit a brick wall, like so many times when you're trying to get something working, and you you lose all hope. And then it started working at 4 a.m. Just like you sort of put your hands in the air like this. And I literally did that. It's like on my own in the factory, and I ran around it. I ran around the assembly like screaming.

SPEAKER_04 0:40

So what was your first business?

SPEAKER_01 0:42

My friend had bought a domain called afternight.com. He bought a website uh for£10 called afternight.com, and it was a sex toy drop shipping website. We didn't sell a single product. You go and speak to boss, like, right, we need to change the factory, we need to do it. By the time I've finished speaking, there's already a guy like with a sledgehammer like knocking down walls, like literally destroying the whole factory. And I I just walk out and I'm like, this is exactly why I love China.

SPEAKER_04 1:15

So Ryan, is there one one moment from your time here in Shenzhen, from the years you've been living here, that you absolutely hated when it was happening, but now you're almost almost glad that you had to go through it?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

Well, I mean, the first the first five months of being here was was was pretty much hell. Um, because I yeah, I moved to moved to Shenzhen, moved to the factory, you know, just put myself in there, and then basically trying to get a product to market whilst the rest of the company is uh in the UK, like they're trying to do all they can on the sales investment side, and you're the only guy in Shenzhen that's actually developing the product and trying to get it to market. So yeah, just like sleepless nights, like not sleeping, working all the time, yeah, eating like nude Lang Jolamien. All I ate. Yeah, it was just like, but it it was fun. Like I was learning a lot, obviously, throughout the process, so it was also very fun. Uh in that regard, it's 2015. Also, almost 11 years ago. Yeah, yeah, it's 11 years in June since I moved here. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:27

Yeah, and um we really would love to understand the story how you came here because it's not normal for a British guy living in Tinjun for so many times. So uh when we go back to your childhood, like you were one of these entrepreneurs who have this great story. When I was a teenager, I already started the DNA. Yeah. So what was your first business?

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Uh so my first ever attempt at a business uh was a bit of an odd one. Um so my friend, my friend had bought a domain called afternight.com. He bought a website uh for 10 pounds. Uh it's called afternight.com. And it was one of those really funny, you know, uh websites from you know, like the 90s, like black background, like black colors, everything like that. And it was a sex toy drop shipping website. So it was they they'd set it up with a uh a drop shipper, probably in China somewhere. You you could basically place orders through this drop shipping website. And then he so he bought this website thinking that he would develop a business with it. So I went around to his house one day and he's like, Oh, you know, I was getting into web development at the time. So I was like, let's let's revamp the website, let's like make it really nice, let's uh choose all the different products we want to do. Um, so we did this whole work, we we sat in my house, like building this whole website, and then we finished the website, we're there like you know, picking all these products, like I had no idea what we're doing, obviously, for obvious reasons, like we didn't have any experience. We we hit we hit the button to put it on Google and we sat there like looking at the emails, like anyone ordering? Yeah, where are the orders? Why are they not flowing in? Like, we're literally like click refresh, like what is going on here? Like, click refresh, like something must be wrong. Like, why is nobody ordering these products? So, obviously, then we learnt about you know, you need to promote, you need to do marketing. So we're like, right, how do you do marketing? Well, probably you you you make leaflets, you know, you would you print a leaflet and go and do market. Like, this is like like our childish brains, like trying to come up with a business strategy. I designed this leaflet, um, and I I went round to my grandma's house to print it. She's the only one who had a printer. Obviously, I didn't show her what we're doing, but I went around to my grandma's house, printed it out, used the little thing to cut the leaflets out, and then we literally went door to door posting leaflets around the village overnight.com. Um yeah, we didn't sell a single a single product, so yeah, you asked me um, you know, what happened to the domain because this is quite a nice domain. Yeah, what a video. Yeah, yeah. We we we lost it, we just stopped uh stopped working on it. So I mean there was a bunch of things, like another one was uh yeah, got a talent.com. That was like a video sharing website, like a bit like YouTube for uh talent videos. Uh so this was like the X Factor Britain's Got Talent uh type era when everyone was like loving these TV shows. Set up this website, you know, every every day at school, like after school, trying to like modify the website, like build it, customize it, do the logos, do all this stuff. Like the logos look terrible when I look at them now. It's just like awful. Um, but then yeah, again, we we hit the issue of like how do you do marketing? So, and the same friend actually he helped me out with it because he was he was kind of like getting into marketing uh back in the day, and he's and he still is to this day. So we decided to go and drive around to all the X Factor like auditions in the UK. So we drove down to Birmingham, we hired some uh some people to come with us, and we had these like giant blow-up microphones, and we would go around like talking to all these people, like and they you know, we'd film them like you know, doing all these videos for us. And it was amazing because like you then you looked at the Google Analytics and you saw this like massive spike in traffic, and like people were contacting me, like you know, we're trying to do like partnerships and things like this, but yeah, again, no no money was made, like it was just like complete, yeah. Um, again, just yeah, complete failure. But um, that's how it is, right? You gotta you gotta learn.

SPEAKER_05 6:35

That's uh that's a lot of stories about like web designing and software. Like what what did you do then afterwards? That was like when you were 17, probably.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Yeah, that was like teenage years. Uh I also had another um, I said I worked with my my dad's a builder, so I worked with him from like the age of 11, uh, you know, carrying bricks up ladders, uh, mixing cement, sweeping up. Uh and I was like his best, I was his best employee because he didn't he didn't treat me, you know, he didn't treat me as the son. He trot me as a really hardworking guy that he paid very little money for. So at least he paid loving it. Well, he paid a little bit, yeah. Uh no, he he yeah, he he taught me a lot. So uh very grateful for that. So I worked with him most most weekends, most summer holidays, up until I went to uni. Uh then my stepbrother also got me involved in a business he was starting. We we we chopped uh firewood. Basically, we had this project where we had to like cut all these trees down and we were like, okay, we may as well sell it. Like we've got all this wood, we may as well uh you know turn it into uh firewood and sell it. So literally started a business called this called the the log stores. Um so we would and it was it was quite uh for a for a kid, it was quite a hard business to do because you had to dry the wood all year. Like we had to sell it seasoned logs, right? So you would literally have to work all year without any payment or anything uh and prepare all this wood. So every night after school, we're in we're in the in the in the shed, like chopping all these kindling uh things, uh, you know, bagging up all these logs, uh drying them, uh, and then obviously in winter we could we could sell them. So yeah, it was pretty like it it grew like steadily over the years. I ended up going to to college uh to focus on studies. He actually continued it and sold it a couple of years later to like a local business. So yeah, I learned a lot from him. Like he's a like my stepbrother's like a yeah, proper businessman entrepreneur, like he knows how to like see an opportunity, uh, you know, build a product, sell it. And yeah, he's running a very successful uh business now as well.

SPEAKER_04 8:48

So one thing you learned at the time was delayed gratification, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Work now and work very, very hard.

SPEAKER_05 8:54

And but also how to pivot like every single direction you just was going from sex toys to get your hands dirty dirty on the bricks, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:05

So this was your first business where you actually made money, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:08

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um yeah, more traditional, like you're actually selling a product, like a decent product. Um, but you're also learning how to, you know, we'd go to some of the local uh shops that were selling like log stoves and we'd go in there, try and pitch them. And you know, it's quite uh yeah, scary thing to do as like a 16-year-old, 17-year-old kid. Like you're just going in there trying to pitch to these, you know, old men, you know. Um so yeah, learning a lot about that. And then uh yeah, I decided to, yeah, as I said, I I was focused on my studies then, so I went to college. And then yeah.

SPEAKER_05 9:42

What did you study?

SPEAKER_01 9:43

This was uh college, sixth form, not university yet. This was college, so like math, physics, uh things like that, chemistry. Yeah. So I studied that and then yeah, I was lucky enough to get into Oxford, so I went to Oxford to study engineering, which was great, like the best, yeah, one of the best experiences ever, especially for me, because I I didn't know what I wanted to do. All I knew is that all I knew is that I liked maths and I liked physics. I didn't even know what an engineer was. Like I, you know, I came from quite a simple uh you know village background. When we thought of engineers, we thought of like a car mechanic. You know, like I didn't know what engineering was at all. As soon as I heard about it, it was like, oh yeah, it's like maths and physics but applied in the real world. I was like, okay, that sounds amazing. Um so very, very lucky to get into there because the degree at Oxford is like general engineering, like it's not specific, it's not tied to software or mechanical or electronics. The first two years completely general. So you just got to like learn like a such a broad skill set of uh engineering disciplines. So like pre-AI, this was in this is what I used to say was important, like building a startup was that you even if you wasn't an expert in every field, you at least knew something, which meant you could then focus your efforts on like solving a problem in that in that specific space. So the the degree there was amazing because you you just got such a broad uh exposure to all these different engineering disciplines, which meant when you came across a problem during product development, you could you at least knew where to look, right? You might not know how to solve it yet, but you could know where to look, which nowadays, of course, is somewhat easier because you've got AI, like you've got an expert um pretty much on tap now. So maybe the advantage is slightly less uh less good nowadays, but yeah, back then it was really important. I was actually going down much more of a software path. So at uni, I also started a company called the Oxford Bubble, um, which was yeah, basically like a discount app. So I started it with my friend. Uh, you know, we just wanted to learn about entrepreneurship, like how to build something. So it's discount app. So it was an iOS app. Like I was like the guy building the app, he was the the business guy, and it was yeah, we again like you build the product, but then you realize that you have to actually uh promote it, you have to market it. So we did we hosted this like promotion event at one of the clubs, or wearing like Oxford bubble t-shirts that we use the iron to like you know transfer all these uh logos onto the t-shirt, and then um yeah, I did this promotion at a club, and then you know, we had again like door-to-door sales, like we we put on a suit and we literally walk around to like these hairdressers, like we went to Nando's, like all these different places trying to convince them to give us a discount for the app, right? And it's chicken and egg because it's like okay, how many people are using your app? It's like, well, there's a few. Um, but yeah, it was just like so nerve-wracking. You have to like push yourself. It's like, right, you've just got to keep walking around to these businesses, and you know, it's so awkward. You walk in there, it's like, is the owner here, please? I'd like to. And they're like, Who who do you who are you and your what do you want? I'm like, I just want to talk to them about my my app. Um, so yeah, like biggest achievement was like we got we got wingit, I think it was Wingit Thursdays or Wingit Tuesdays or something with Nando's, um, which was Nando's is like a fast food chain, or what is it? Yeah, it's like uh yeah, chicken okay, like spicy chicken shop. Yeah, everybody loves it. Like Nando's in the UK is like, yeah, everybody's like absolutely loves it. So we got Wingit Thursdays or whatever it was called. Um, yeah, and uh again, they're not very successful. It's like, but you you're learning all these different skills. So, you know, as I said, I was going down a software route, like my third and fourth year at uni. I was I was choosing um more software-oriented things like robotics, computer vision, AI, uh, you know, machine learning, those types of things. Like, that's where I saw um you know, it's where you hear about all these startups, right? You hear it's all about software and all these things happening. So I was like, right, I'm gonna go down that route. There was a slight uh detour where I uh went to work for BP for a summer, like big company stuff. Like, you know, Oxford, everybody's trying to get internships of these big companies, so you kind of get wrapped up into it, despite all the entrepreneurial stuff I did as a kid. Yeah, uh, you get wrapped up in this. Oh, I need to go and get a big internship at a big company. Yeah, get a name on the CV. Yeah, get it on the CV. And and BP uh was sponsoring me for some for some reason I can't remember what, but they yeah, I applied to do an internship there. Went to work for them, and um, yeah, it was just really not for me. Like for the first day I got there, literally the day one I got there, uh, they sent me up to Scotland uh and I and I had to um like shadow uh a guy. Like he he he was like um he was kind of like a technician style engineer, and they they were like, right, you're gonna shadow him. Uh and I literally was in the car with him, just driving around to all these um, you know, oil rig places and just listening to what he was what he was doing. And it was literally reminding me of like being a kid, like driving around in my dad's van. Not that I did whatever I was like re you know, I was like, you know, third year at uni, I was like ready to like, you know, make a dent in the world, like you know, build things, engineer things. I was like, yeah, I'm gonna build oil rigs, like, yeah, let's go. And I was like shadowing this guy, and I was like, I just can't do this. Like I was calling HR like the whole day, being like, you have to get me some, like, you have to get me somewhere else. Like, I can't, I just can't stay here. Um, so anyway, a couple of days later, they moved me to uh they moved me to another um oil place, uh, which the yeah, the boss was away, weirdly. Like the manager of the place was away. And um, for some reason, I thought it would be a good idea to take his office. Like it's really weird in hindsight now, but I literally moved into the boss's office, like the manager's office of this this oil station. Um, and none of the other people knew what was going on either, because like the HR just dumped me on them, right? So they were like, Oh yeah, maybe you can work on this. Like, we got this sensor to put on the main oil pipeline, no worries. So I went full like startup mode. Like, I'm gonna get this sensor on this pipeline, like, and it's gonna happen by next week. Like, let's go. So I was like contacting all these people, using the whole BP uh name tag to like, you know, you get in touch with people. Uh so I spent a week and I had a guy come in to install this sensor on the on the main pipeline coming into this place the next week. And then the manager came back on the Monday and he's in his office and and he and he calls me for a meeting, and I walk in there and he's and he's and I'm like, oh, funnily enough, I've been using your office for the last week. And he's like, what? And I'm like, oh yeah. Um, well, I mean, you know, I don't I didn't have anywhere else to say. I just you know, I was just using it, and and he and I was like, Oh yeah, and I you know I've done all this stuff. I've got a guy coming, like installing this uh sensor on the pipeline next week. And he's like, What? This is post like BP, you know, had all these like issues and you know with the oil wigs and stuff, like everything was like on lockdown, you have to do all these health and safety uh studies and things like this. And he was just like, We've gotta like stop, slow down, like you know, and that was there. That was like me being crushed. Like that was all my all my you know ambition was just crushed there. So as soon as that ended, the BP internship. There's nothing against BP, they're they're obviously a great company, but it just wasn't for me. Like big companies. Companies, yeah, corporate infrastructure. So as soon as that was over, I got back to you. I I just was like I was on a mission to like find all the startup events I could find, entrepreneurship events. I think there was something called the Oxford Entrepreneurs Society, which was great. We had a great talker there called Jordan, uh, who who just like so inspirational, like got us into all these startup stuff. And he introduced me to um EF, which is entrepreneurs first. He was like, Oh yeah, entrepreneurs first have a thing in London. Um, it was a very new thing back then. They were a new uh startup accelerator investing in people pre-idea and pre-team. Um so purely based on technical ability. Actually, they they also had non-technicals as well, but it was purely based on you know what they saw in you as opposed to a team, which was very strange at the time. Um, you know, usually, you know, like YC and things like that, they'll they'll they need you to have a co-founder already. You've already got an idea, maybe even some traction. Uh so I went to meet them. It was very fortunate to get into that. Uh yeah, super lucky and got into entrepreneurs first, uh, which was just like my big break. Then I was like, finally, like I've you know, I've got back to my my my calling in life, right? Um, so entrepreneurs first, and then this is kind of where the story of uh moving to China kind of started. I was building a solar-powered laptop for developing countries, um, which was also funny because this is this was my bottom choice uh for my fourth year project at uni. Again, I said I was gonna build software, yeah. So my fifth choice on my project list was a solar powered computer. It's like I didn't want to do it. I was like, okay, I'm not gonna get that. It's like my fifth choice. I'll I'll definitely get some of these other ones. And I got it, and I was like, oh, for God's sake, how am I gonna move this into like a software project? Like I was thinking I'm gonna build some algorithm for like you know, calculating some stuff. Uh but I was like, I was re I was hitting um, you know, roadblocks because I I didn't have anything for the software to run on. So I was like, right, I need to build some hard, I need to build a laptop because I need that to run my software, right? So uh and this is where I I I fell in love with hardware because I was, you know, I was literally like designing uh circuit boards, I was like hand etching these circuit boards in the in the lab, uh hand soldering all the components on, and then I was I was writing software that was talking to these components, and it was literally like reading the voltage of this supercapacitor or whatever it was. Uh, and I was showing it on the display, like I had a little graphical interface, and I was like, this is amazing. Like, I'm literally talking to a thing that I soldered onto a board. Like, this is this is insane. Yeah. So I was like, that's when I just fell in love with hardware, and I was like, this is what I want to build. Like, I want to build physical things. Like, yeah, I still want to write some firmware, software stuff, but uh it's all about the physical world, basically. So anyway, fell in love with hardware, and then I was at an unofficial drinks event for EF. I think it was in January time, uh something like that. And I wasn't even gonna go. I was like, oh, I've got to go all the way to London, like maybe I won't go. And then I was like, right, I'm just gonna go. Uh and the first guy I met there, he was like, Oh, so what are you building? I'm like, Oh, a solar-powered uh laptop. And he's like, Oh, really? You should uh you should Kickstarter that. And I'm like, what's Kickstarter? Like, I was just like, you know, I was just a tech nerd back then. I just had no idea about any of this stuff. So um, and anyway, we literally started working together the day after. Like, he was literally like, yeah, that's cool. Like, like, let's build it. So we came up to Oxford, like we were in the lab, like building this thing. So we we actually ended up turning it into a uh DIY laptop. So it was a solar powered thing originally. It was like that that's stupid, like no one's gonna buy a solar powered laptop. Um, so we turned it into a DIY laptop, which was basically we saw this Reddit post of someone like building a Raspberry Pi laptop out of a suitcase. It was like building, I don't do you guys know the Raspberry Pi? No, it's like a small mini computer like developed in Cambridge to like teach people about physical computing again, you know, get people in the habit of like you know, coding and building things. Um, so we found this slight sort of niche in the market with this laptop. We decided to make a DIY laptop. Yeah, we we literally started working together. Uh EF started officially in like June 2014. Uh, we were building hardware though, so it's like we were kind of like, you know, most of the stuff is all about software, right? So every week we're coming in with these like amazing what we thought was amazing progresses for our hardware, and they're just like, oh yeah, yeah, whatever, yeah. Um, and we're just like fueled by like you. know, fury trying to like impress them. You know, it was just like two guys like trying to impress these people. We we continued with it. Uh I moved to I moved to London. Um in yeah as soon as I finished my last exam at Oxford, I I moved to London. Uh I moved onto his living room floor. So I I just yeah I was just like right yeah let's go. Let's build a workshop. Like we built a table. That's the first thing we did as soon as I moved in built this nice uh wooden desk. Uh and we used that wooden desk for everything. Like I'd build all I'd design all the stuff on there. I'd build all the PCBs and then we built a 3D printer because we needed to build prototypes like prototyping plastic back in those days was very expensive. But luckily it was it was when 3D printing was becoming you know a thing. Like everybody was talking about 3D printing uh which which worked to our advances like we didn't really think about it at the time but we we were just like right we need to build a 3D printer okay let's build a 3D printer we'll use the 3D printer to print the laptops on and but then you know we started posting online about this. You printed the laptop yeah yeah so we printed the the all the parts for the laptop on that so we'd design it we'd you'd get the printer uh going it took like 36 hours per piece uh and this was when 3D printers weren't you know we didn't have um you know we didn't have things like bamboo labs printers back then this was like the early days of 3D printing so things would go wrong all the time so you literally waited 36 hours for this part I mean hour 35 literally yeah hour 35 it would just start spaghetti messing all this so we actually got the you know we'd we we'd have this sense like we'd we'd be in the living room we'd hear a noise and we'd we'd all run over to the printer like what's going on I'm sleeping next to this thing at night just like this you know hearing this word of this printer and you're just constantly like thinking about this printer like oh my god that that it has to print like so we even tried to like when we'd get a failure we even tried to like 3D printers run from G code so we we'd try and like uh go back to the G code and find the exact you know we we'd be moving the nozzle heads try and find the exact place where it failed so we could try and restart the print again but yeah it was it was a nightmare um really really difficult how long did it take for you to just develop the the the whole laptop in the so we started in June um and we launched the Kickstarter in uh October yeah so we yeah we we did basically that living room was just everything it was like where I slept where I did all the engineering where we 3D printed the laptops where we shot the whole video for the for the entire uh thing we set up this big white paper in there and we sat in front of the camera we got so many funny uh outtakes from that actually but we sat there just filming the entire Kickstarter video all of the uh sort of b-roll shots like we developed all these robotics and all this other stuff that people could you know imagine what they could build with this thing when it was done uh did the whole thing from there all the advertising Facebook creative like we we we were building a Facebook community um with like a five pound a day advertising budget so we're like testing which which one works well and you know people who work in advertising you know they always tell you like you'll you'll find something that works and no matter what you do after that you will never you'll never beat the thing that just resonates with people so much. So we we capitalized on the the 3D printing industry that was growing massively at the time everybody was you know talking about 3D printing so we were like 3D printed laptop okay great everyone was like amazing and Raspberry Pi as well was also uh getting really really popular at the time so uh we leveraged that built a community um and then yeah we we launched in October we raised like I think it was over 200 000 uh for this DIY laptop which you know isn't like a you know all out success but it you know it was pretty good but we we knew that uh and this is always the case with crowdfunding especially nowadays more than ever but we knew that you could never build the product for that much much money there's just no way you could build uh you know do all the tooling do all the production and also yeah pay for the production and all the logistics everything like that for for$200,000 there's just no way.

SPEAKER_05 26:13

So how much would you like realistically have to get until you guys okay now this is something that we can work with.

SPEAKER_01 26:21

You mean on crowdfunding? Yeah yeah uh well it's difficult because nowadays like obviously we bootstrapped our campaign like we didn't we didn't have a budget like we did everything with you know with uh a Facebook community and a good story nowadays Kickstarter has become much more of a you know a business in itself like the whole launch side of Kickstarter like you're paying quite a lot of money just to launch products on there. Obviously there's some you know people do it with their you know their own brand their own story you've still got to bring that to the table but you're also paying a lot of money just to uh stand out in the crowd so even you know even if you raise I mean you've seen the stories right people raising millions of dollars and then still failing to ship the product uh so what's uh what's the advantage of like why do people still do it on Kickstarter? You know like we also had podcast guests who raised 1.5 million for their products yeah does it actually help or is it just some kind of advertising or promotion massive advertising massive promotion it gives you a a step up on the ladder like before you even start and and even like you know we I call it internal PR on the China side as well you you've also got to get the support of the factories. If you've already got a campaign you've already sold a thousand units it's much easier sell to the factory right um because you've actually got customers so that it also helps you to identify which market you would go to right where yeah it's product market fit as well you prove that people are willing to buy a thing before you spend a a load of money actually designing it and you know and also where to launch a product right like which like which market which market basically yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but it's many advantages no success guarantee for itself well you've got to then make the thing right so it's like how how close are you to to you know when we did it we so we were very young and naive we didn't know how to build a product like we had no clue how to build a laptop like I think EF even knew that as well they're like why are you you know why are you building hardware for how are you even going to do that um but like we were naive enough to ignore that as a problem and just knew that we would figure it out at some point right so um but we knew that$2000 and we were in EF right we were we were on a trajectory for like you know VC funding and all this sort of stuff that's what the whole system is set up to do right they have a demo day where you you know you go and pitch to investors and that's the whole thing. So we knew that that wasn't going to be uh enough money and frankly we'd probably spent all that money within about four months of uh finishing that crowdfunding campaign because we we knew we had to build a software component to the business we had to yeah we basically had to build a company right it's not just uh it's not just a hardware product so there's two paths you can take with Kickstarter or indie we we actually did indiegogo for for some other reason but uh there's two paths you can take one is you're a bootstrapped hardware you know solo hardware founder or maybe there's two of you most importantly they both need to be hardware like all of your resources need to be on hardware because the say if you have a sales or a non-technical co-founder they're gonna go insane whilst they wait for you to ship the products right they're gonna sell things that they shouldn't be selling because they've got nothing to sell yet. So you can either bootstrap it and you're both just like you know maybe you're you're using upwork freelancers or and you're basically yeah just doing everything you know you move into China you're doing everything yourself to get the product to market turn a profit on the money that you make the other option is you basically have a vision for the company you're using the Kickstarter as a stepping stone you've got a product roadmap you've got a vision you're telling a story you're raising investment uh and you go to down that down that path that's the path that we took yeah and how did it go then after you raised the 200 000 and yeah so we we raised like um we raised I think a hundred thousand pound sort of pre-seed um pretty quickly after that um yes we raised raised a hundred thousand pound pre-seed we started hiring software developers to work on the content um but did you have to did you have to pitch two investors yourself again or after the crowdfunding platform basically the investors came to you no no we were pitching yeah pitching like based on who jesse knew who who EF had introduced us to we were pitching yeah full on pitching and it's funny actually we used to we used to show up to these uh investor meetings uh and jesse's like such a good salesman and uh we used to show up this laptop this 3D printed laptop and it didn't turn on like it didn't it didn't work at all and we'd show up with it we'd open the lid and and Jesse knew just how to open it so it felt like very smooth like because all the lid was it the hinge was just like held together with it was just like a a met piece of metal basically there was no friction to it and he he'd open it up like that like and it and he would like use it like this. Not one point did the investor be like oh can you turn it on like can I can I actually use it. It's just because he was just pitching so well that nobody ever asked us to turn it on. Whole things held together with blue tack and all sorts of stuff. So yeah we'd go we'd go to these investor meetings and do this whole pitch and you know convince people that we knew how you know the the unit economics the tooling part we we convinced them that we knew what we were doing which you know we kind of did but the you know there was still a lot to learn right so what was your vision about uh behind it we knew that the we needed to become like a an ed tech company uh ed tech again was very big at the time lots of investment going into ed tech uh you know trying to fix the uh broken education system you know you know sort of infuse more uh physical computing like STEM science technology engineering mathematics they changed it to steam they added art to it so we knew we had to go down that route uh because that was much more investable business than the kind of maker industry that we're in so yeah that was the vision is to build this education platform for physical computing we even had some of those uh we'd done some UI stuff on the original crowdfunding campaign we wanted to basically uh teach people uh how to build things how to make things sort of instill the same you know what I learned at uni when I when I started building my own thing I was like actually this is way cooler than developing software right software's cool as well but yeah it's not it's not quite got this you know building something with your hands and having something you can take to somebody and show something that's cool is cooler than than you know compiling something just having something on a page right so we wanted to basically uh get people excited about building things again uh and teaching them you know real skills you know because all the school systems are all trying to infuse this into the into the curriculum and really struggling right so it's not an easy thing to do so so that was the vision and uh yeah it was very very difficult the first year because like obviously that you know you're trying to build this company they're they're building all this software and they're trying to do all the marketing but there's no product yet there's no revenue right so you know Jesse's like a sales guy at heart he's trying to like pitch the company sell but he's got nothing to sell right so that's that that falls onto me that was my job is to actually get it to to market basically so it was very very difficult time you're constantly like looking at your bank balance like how we're gonna get through this like it's just insane. And when would uh when was that point in time when you said okay now we have to go to China yeah so we were I mean we soon we had this but before we launched the campaign we're like oh we're gonna do the PCBs in Eastern Europe we're gonna 3D print the the plastics and you know we we didn't really have a good plan but I think as soon as we like as soon as it was real and we launched the campaign we're like yeah we need to we probably need to go to China so we got hooked up uh with some uh guy that was in this uh make a 3D printer industry he's called Rongshan he took us over to China in January 2015 um we met this factory they were building 3D printers at the time um they were called zealful and uh it was then that we realized that okay we we have to kind of do this in China like there's no other way uh we have to do injection molded plastics like we can't 3D print this thing that's just insane like we had a thousand to build or something of that order so um so but I still didn't really make the decision that I had to be in China that was just a thought that didn't cross our mind. So I was developing the product from the UK you know we had an office in London after we moved out of his living room uh because we had to like hire people we couldn't like work out his living room anymore so you know it's I was still sleeping on the floor in there where we couldn't have yeah we couldn't have people around there so so I was developing the product from the UK I I you know I came to China once uh I think I came maybe another time yeah things were just going too slowly you you'd send something off to to the factory obviously due to the time difference you only got a certain window every day to actually communicate with them uh you'd get prototypes back you you know they wouldn't work because the factory didn't really know how to test them it was very custom everything was custom it was fully custom it wasn't like any other laptop everything was uh custom design so you get the prototype back they don't work and you're like what do I do now like I've just spent a week waiting for this uh thing to come back so anyway it was a nightmare and I think it was June it was June 2015 we were supposed to ship in May 2015 so like this is when you start getting all the people being like okay where's my product like what's going on like we had a rule that we would update very frequently though and this is like advice to anybody doing a crowdfunding campaign send an update out every two weeks or you know as as much as you can like even if you think you don't have an update send an update and be absolutely meticulous about that because at least if you're communicating to people and you're bringing them along the story you know people who invest in crowdfunding they they they like the story right they like to be an innovator early adopter it's part of the thing so update them frequently so we we were we were religious about that but obviously like you know you're running out of money you know you've got all these customers on your back it was June 2015 we had a nightmare of a day I can't remember exactly what went wrong but it was just one of those days where everything was going wrong like you know money issues customers complaining uh investors being like what's your plan like why's the product not out yet and I'm there at the office Friday night uh like furiously trying to design this PCB battery PCB that you know had tons of issues and uh my co-founder calls me up and I'm like oh god it's Jesse like what the hell I don't even want to answer it but he calls me up and he's like you know you're going to China on Monday I'm like yeah and he's like you shouldn't come back I'm just like and I just all my stress just like went away at that point. I was like that's the solution like why is it it's so obvious you know if I just move myself into the factory all of my problems go away because I can just immediately solve things as and when they happen so I was like yeah that that's the that's the solution and from that point I was just all my stress went away because I I just knew it was going to happen if I did that. I knew yeah so on Monday I packed my bags I still have an email actually from a guy sent I was like oh I'm just popping over to China I'll be I'll be back in a couple months like just yeah I gotta like ship this product like no no problem we thought we were way closer than we were uh in reality obviously uh again naivety like we were just yeah we thought we're two months away and uh Jesse takes me to the train station and he's like he's like all right well I'll see you in about six to eight weeks then and he's looking at me like they're staring at me and I'm like yeah seriously three weeks and and he's just thinking like if you don't fucking ship this thing in six to eight weeks like we're you know we're screwed like we're running out of money I can't I can't I can't do this any longer without anything to sell you know so I go to China um and obviously then things really kicked into overdrive like I was like yeah I was going visiting suppliers I was getting all the information I need you know you you're you're basically a 30 minute drive away from the guy that's been doing something for the last 30 40 years right he's been doing that specific thing and all the knowledge that you need is in that guy's brain you just go there and he just tells you everything you need to know all the stuff that you need to know how did you find them the the suppliers yeah just through like you just find them on Alibaba or yeah I mean the typical the typical routes or the factory might introduce me to them um but you yeah you just you're so close to the world's uh electronic supply chain that you you can just move at a pace that you just can't do anywhere else um but but you just said that you can you can use all this knowledge but how do you communicate with them did you speak Chinese at the time no no so how did you pick their brains well this is the thing about being in the same room as them you can just literally show them something I remember one time I was trying to explain this cable that we wanted and we spent weeks in the UK like trying to explain to them the cable that we want we wanted this HDMI cable we want it to be really nice. So we got so so annoyed so I ran into the other room I got another cable I was like this cable this cable like just make this like this but also like this and he was like okay I got it and then he went off and that was it it was done like it's basically the same how people foreign as Law it's order in restaurants like that. Yeah so how many mistakes did they do on along the way well there's yeah a lot of mistakes um but that's not necessarily their fault that was probably a lack of engineering rigor from my standpoint right it's like you you know you design you you're up all night designing things you you you know it's not like you've got ai now you've got an expert to help you do all this stuff like back then you had to read data sheets and you had to go to TI's website and find you know an application note that described the problem that you were having and you know it was just so much effort especially when you you didn't know anything like you got to figure out how injection molds work and why you need draft angle and why you need all these things like you just nothing would substitute just you know 16 hour days just at your laptop trying to figure all this stuff out right um yeah so there's loads of things went wrong but you know the thing about uh building hardware is that the you know the speed at which you can solve those problems is the speed at which you basically ship the product like and that's why being remote and trying to do something from you know whether it's the UK or US like you're literally solving things you know you're taking even if it's a day right even if you you're very good at your emails you're you're responding you know on a daily basis you know maybe even having a call with the factory you're trying to figure out that day is for me is like a five minute thing you know it's like 10 minutes I'm there I'm like literally I know about the problem before the factory even knows about the problem because I can see I can see the guy's face I can see him like yeah I see him like trying to do something I and I see there's a there's a clearly a big mistake in the design or or something. So I'm already solving it and it's 10 minutes and it's done. Doing that remotely is very difficult. It's possible uh and with certain product categories it it's easier because you're you're basically relying on the factory you're you're pushing as much work onto the factory as possible and then if you're very rigorous about your requirements and what you expect them to do if something goes wrong or what you expect them to test, you can do it remotely. But if you're building very new types of products like you know robotics or AI wearables or anything that requires any kind of customization you start to hit those barriers with a with a normal factory because they just don't have the technical it it's not even necessarily they don't they couldn't do it it's that their their whole business model is focused on mass production right so you're always being deprioritized for the projects that are actually going into production.

SPEAKER_05 42:36

So your product was also kind of new then how did it go in the beginning like you you were on the factory floor all day long or yeah let's go one step back.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

I also want to know you arrived at the airport in Shenzhen right or did you fly to Hong Kong or uh Hong Kong yeah with your backpack yeah what happened next I think the the factory boss yeah picked me up picked me up in his car he he didn't speak any any English uh just drove me to the factory just like was like okay you can sit here like I just like I was like right I'm gonna put my desk here and like literally in the assembly room I just put my desk in the assembly room takes me to the dorm rooms the factory dorm room where all the factory workers stay I mean God knows why he put me there now like I I don't think they had very money much money when we when we showed up they were kind of desperate for for like uh a say like a a foreign savior that would come in and like give them business but you put me in the factory dorms in the bunk beds like I used to like wash my clothes in a bucket like it was like really like raw like rural China uh factory live in basically so uh they took me to you know they'd take me to like lunch at these like Chinese places I mean that I'm a British guy like it you know it's quite a culture shock to me to like go to all these places but finally decent food right yeah finally decent food I'm still 10 years later I'm still struggling with that problem yeah not that Chinese food isn't decent but where I where I tend to live Is near the factory, so I've actually gone further away from the center to be close to the factory, so I'm always kind of struggling for yeah, nice western stuff.

SPEAKER_04 44:08

Um this was actually a joke. I said, like you move from the UK to China and to Chinese countries, and then you finally get decent food.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Oh, right. Okay, yeah, bad joke, like we German German humor. Yeah, German humour, yeah. Okay, yeah. British food's great. What are you talking about? Okay, we have fish and chips and beans and stuff, beans on toast, classic, delicious.

SPEAKER_04 44:33

And then you got the name Doo Woody. Yeah, yeah. Do the invincible.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Yeah, yeah. So uh yeah, the factory boss. Uh I spent a lot of time with him. Like, so I was I basically lived in the factory, right? Like he, I, you know, this is when I started smoking cigarettes as well. Because like you go to the the boss, the Lauban's office, you're drinking tea around the table, and he's smoking cigarettes. You know, at the beginning I was like, I don't really want to smoke, but then eventually you're just like, give me that cigarette. Like I need to, I need I need some some like glimmer of something my day right now. Because I'm just all I'm doing is like staring at you know, problems constantly. Well, you're quitting now, right? Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I only smoked for a year, but I smoked a lot of cigarettes in that year. The most like most we ever smoked was 180 in a day. Um what? Yeah, I know. It's bad. And I don't even so me, yeah, the a guy came over from the UK to help me with the uh we're doing the firmware for the the circuit boards. He came over and we I remember we we went to the shop at like 5 p.m. We bought one of those bricks of um uh cigarettes, Chinese cigarettes, and we did it, we pulled in all night trying to trying to fix this again. No G no GBT guys, no, no AI. Like it was it was so difficult to figure out how to write firmware. Like software back then was okay, you could go online, but firmware is like a totally different beast. Like you, you know, you're having to, yeah, it was a nightmare. You just like compile in, testing, compiling, testing until it worked, basically. So we pulled this all night to try and get the product uh working, and uh it got to like 4 pm the next day, and I was like, Where's all those cigarettes gone? Can you and I was like, I was like, there's one pack left. How have we smoked 180 cigarettes in a day? And it's just like insane. Like, yeah, and this was in the assembly line as well. We were in the factory production line like room, like smoking cigarettes completely in the zone and in the reverberal. It's insane, yeah. So thankfully I don't uh do that anymore, but uh yeah, the the name was came about because I you know I'd go to his room, uh the boss's room, we'd drink tea. Um, you know, I'd try it as like a respite every day. And you know, I I wanted to get a Chinese name. That was like the cool thing to do. And you know, he thought about it for quite a long time, and then yeah, eventually, yeah, dual D uh, because my my second name is Dun Woody, right?

SPEAKER_04 46:54

So do is the yeah, the most British name I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

So I used to, it's really funny. I used to, I also liked, you know, the zong, you know, because the the Lao Bands or he was called Hu Zong. So I wanted I wanted the Lao Bang bit on the end of it as well. So I was like, okay, but I also wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be like, you know, I liked the the fact that all the engine, you know, at Cheng Gong, I liked like the gong side of things because it's like, yeah, you're a you know, you're a worker, you're like you're on the front lines doing stuff. So so I was like, do dee zong gong. So I added that to my name, and and the funniest thing about it is I I'd send it on Slack to the team in the UK, knowing that the translation on Google was like the invincible chief engineer, and I was just like, that is epic. So they'd like it's like, yeah, that's that's a cool name, but yeah, of course, now like when when anybody um when I tell someone about my name, they always kind of laugh. They're just like, okay, that's I yeah, it's definitely a foreigner's name. Um, but yeah, I like it.

SPEAKER_04 47:52

But it's it's a good thing, yeah. Yeah, yeah, and then uh you like you're talking a lot. We were talking about it already, about the speed that uh the the production and problem solving is uh possible here. So do you think it is like remote hardware is still possible, or is it um you lose your your advantage to people like you or or people who have people uh on the ground here?

SPEAKER_01 48:16

It's not dead, uh, and people people still do it. And there's there's especially in the earlier stages of product development, we call you know, like ideation, like you know, even finding the problem that you want to solve. Like having engineers in the region that you intend to sell the product is very valuable. Like this is what we did at Pytot, right? We were building in the UK, we were close to the customers, we were going to events, we were getting feedback, uh, taking the product to schools, like literally teaching people what we were gonna do with the product, right? So, you know, in that early day, like the earlier stages, uh, it's very valuable to have um a team that's doing this like close to the problem, close to the customer, close to the product, because you can iterate much faster and you can make sure all that feedback goes into the you know the the concept that you that you eventually uh try and build. But as soon as you go out of that phase and you're into the sort of engineering development phase where you're where you you know what your feature set's gonna be, or maybe it's changing like loosely over time, but it it's you kind of know what you're gonna build. Um being close to where it's actually gonna be produced is obviously you know, the advantages are just huge. Um the disadvantages you've got to have someone over here, right? Yeah, you either have to have a co-founder willing to move over here, you have to find somebody that is willing to do it for you. But getting the manufacturing uh teams and the design for like DFM teams, design for manufacturing teams involved very early on just saves you so much pain later on. Uh, whereas sometimes if we develop things in the West, and I and I've done this before too, you're developing it from the UK, you're like, oh no, my way is better. Like, I know what I'm doing, I'm reading all these things. I'm I'm an engineer, you know, I know what I'm doing. But you you get so much knowledge by speaking to the guys that are actually going to produce the product, they'll tell you things that you need to be aware of that you just would never have thought about before. So being close to that is is massively advantageous. Being close to the supply chain, as I said before, yeah. If you don't know how to do something, I'm a 30-minute drive away from an expert that's been doing this for four years. So I can just go and talk to them and now you speak Chinese. I do, not as well as you, but um, yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_05 50:36

And then the factories help you also to get the connections with all the uh supply chains you have.

SPEAKER_01 50:41

Yeah, yeah. So the factory, if you find like our factory back in the day, they were very small, they would they would help us a lot. Uh, I was still the one doing all the supply chain, like figuring, like purchasing all the stuff and everything, but they they would help a lot with connections, you know, they all have connections with people. And the most amazing things about about Shenzhen, and we're literally doing this last week with another project. Like, you go and visit one supplier and you're talking, you're figuring out stuff, you're figuring out all the issues, and then you're like, okay, here's the list of things we need to solve now. We need to lock down these components. I'm like, right, where's your camera supplier? And he's like, Oh, he's like 30 minutes away over there. So I was like, right, let's get in the car and go. So we we go from him to the camera supplier, we start speaking to him, and then we're like, right, where's the FPCBA supplier? And we're like, okay, we'll just go to them. And you you basically just sort of spread out to all these suppliers, and you just like you're figuring out all these things as you go. And imagine doing you know, you can't do that on Alibaba, like no, no, no, you can't do that over email. Writing emails, yeah, it's crazy. And the amount you can do in such a short time is just insane. And you're actually getting like front, like first hand knowledge as well. It's not just like GPT slot that's you know giving you all this like you know, expert advice on how to make something, you actually talk to a guy who does it, right? So uh and I just I just can't imagine not having that. That's why I'm still here. Like, how do I make a product if I don't if I don't have access to it?

SPEAKER_05 52:03

And you don't necessarily need to go there yourself, right? You can just basically order those stuff that you need for some specific parts as well.

SPEAKER_01 52:10

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's um, yeah, one of the other advantages of of Shenzhen is that you know we have uh a powerway, the the scooter, the scooter man. Uh so they can they can get you anything you need anywhere in Shenzhen within 30 to 60 minutes, right? So you you know, again, like instead of what we used to do is you know, we have a problem like we used to yeah, so I'll tell you how it used to be. Like when I when I first built the the Pytop laptop, you know, we were right close to starting the production, but you know, when you actually, and this is what a lot of people kind of they know it, but they forget that every single component needs to be done before you go into production. Like you can't just you know, even a tiny little screw or something like it, everything has to be done. So it was like last minute, we're trying to produce these things to ship to the backers, uh, and we needed the you know, these little um mechanical spacer things. So I was like, right, let's go to Hua Chiang Bay. So I took the this team of me to Hua Chiang Bay, and again, like the story of like going from here to here to here for the suppliers. You go to Hua Chiang Bay, you find a component, you're like, Oh, that looks like something similar, but is it can you have you got one that's more like this? And she's like, Oh, I know a guy over there. So I'm eventually I'm like walking around Hua Chiang Bay with like five people around me, just like all helping me, like trying to find these these components. It was just amazing. It's like in my head, it was like one of those moot movie scenes where like you're walking, you know, pointing to all these things, and everybody's like doing all this stuff. But obviously, it was it was uh a lot less cool than than what it was in my head. But so that's how it used to be, like pre-uh PowerTway, the the Maitwan delivery guys. Now we you know we were doing a project uh last year, we're building a whole uh like e-mobility electronics system, uh, which we only had five weeks to do before a conference. So everything was like had to be like meticulously planned. But obviously, we made a lot of mistakes because we were we were going so fast. But this is what is amazing about Shenzhen because it's it doesn't matter if you make mistakes because we we chose the wrong component uh and we realized we read the data sheet then and we're like oh my god, this is completely wrong, like completely the wrong component, doesn't have the speed characteristics. But I go on Taobao, I find I search like we we first find the we actually used AI, we we used AI to find the the chip that we did need. Uh so it gave us some options for part numbers. So we read the data sheets were like, yeah, that that that that'll work. Went on Taobao, found a guy. Of course they're in Hua Chang Bay, they're in Shenzhen, because everything is in Shenzhen. So I message him on there. Uh, I'm like, can I send a power to it? He's like, yeah, sure. So I send a delivery guy, uh a scooter man to go and pick up the component. And literally within 45 minutes, we've got the component soldered on the board, like replace the one that was faulty, and we're there writing firmware again, like nothing happened. Like the mo, yeah. It was a motor controller encoder I see. Uh, and we're there writing firmware like nothing had happened. Like 45 minutes. And this was like 7 p.m. on a Wednesday or something, right? And we're there, you know, and we could literally finish testing the product that night and unblock everything else. We were there messaging the customer real time, being like, Oh yeah, we've messed up, the IC is wrong. Oh, it's fixed already. And they're just like, What? How is it fixed already? Like, what what what are you talking about? Um so yeah, nowadays, like that's just a massive unlock, like having that ability to pick things up within an uh and I've used it so many times. We've been in a factory, you know, fan controller, MOSFETs are the wrong spec. Um, I go out for dinner with the factory. I I organ, like I speak to my Hua Chang, Hua Chang Bay crew, uh, and they find me this component. Uh, I got a scooter man delivering it, and and the guys at the factory are like, oh, you're going home now. I'm like, no, I'm going back to the factory because I want to fix that problem. They're like, Yeah, but you need to wait till tomorrow because the component isn't here yet. I'm like, no, no, it's it's already done. And they're like, even the factory guys were like, like, holy shit, like you've already got the component there and literally fixed the problem that night, could ship the product out, done. Like, it's just, it's insane. Like the speed is just crazy. So anybody that is developing hardware out there and you haven't, you know, you haven't even been to Shenzhen to see this and sort of immerse yourself in the way that things happen here. You just have to get on a flight. Like just book a flight, get yourself over here. Even if you don't want to live here like me, um, you need to see it. You need to understand the speed. Uh, and there was a guy who posted recently online, um, he summed it up perfectly. It's the culture of now, he called it. It's like, we don't wait till tomorrow in Shenzhen or China more broadly, we don't wait till tomorrow. Like now. Like, I where is my where's my IT? And we I used to have this same um, you know, the the the kind of uh theme of our engineering team back in the day at PyTop was like, where's my fucking prototype? Like it's like, where's my fucking sample? Like I need my prototype here as soon as is humanly possible because I need to learn and I need to iterate it. So I'm like, I don't care how much it costs to like get it here tomorrow, like it needs to get here tomorrow. I don't want to sit around for four days designing something uh that I don't know is gonna work. Like this is you know, you want to pay for speed, right? And you can do that here. But yeah, the culture of now, uh, and this extends to like um, you know, going to view uh apartments and things like that. I was, I was uh, it was we were looking at apartments last year. Um, it was a Sunday night at 10 p.m. And we we we walk we drove past this uh estate agent and we went in and we were like, oh, can we see some apartments? It's Sunday night at 10 p.m. And he's like, Yeah, sure. No problem. For me, the same as a lot of people. It's insane. And we literally went, but even not even just his attitude, he's a salesman, you expect that, right? It's like, yeah, let's go. We went to this woman's house, and it's 10 p.m. on a Sunday. Our kids like you know, almost going to bed. She's like, Yeah, yeah, sure, come in. Yeah, of course. You know, you are looking for an apartment, you you come and see the apartment. Like, it's like it's insane. And like I saw three apartments that night at some at Sunday night. Yeah, um, and can you imagine doing that in in Europe?

SPEAKER_04 58:35

Like last time when when you moved, the Wi-Fi didn't work. You texted him, and it's like one point five minutes later.

SPEAKER_05 58:43

He didn't really, he didn't really answer me, but it just was it was just knocking on the door. Yeah, yeah. What did you do? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna install it now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:54

We we had the same thing happen the other day. I had friends over from the UK, uh startup founders were were were on the yeah, eating food and the electricity went out, and they were like, Okay, you know, you're gonna call someone to come and fix it. By the time they started walking downstairs, the guy was like already in the fuse box, like fixing it. And he's like, How did how did that guy arrive suddenly? I was like, Oh, he just lives in that cupboard over there, he just pops out as soon as there's a problem. Um, but it's insane. Like, yeah, the culture of now is just I think it just sums it up perfectly.

SPEAKER_04 59:24

Um so so going back to you uh living there in the dormitory. For me, I have no connection to hardware, never built hardware, but it sounds like a lot of pain, problems, and pitfalls. Yeah, yeah. What was the first time where you had this feeling of success? So I actually succeeded in doing something.

SPEAKER_01 59:48

I remember, yeah, one of the moments actually when I first came to China, we were trying to develop this uh circuit board. And you know, anybody who's ever done electronics engineering uh knows that when you design something, especially the first like time you do it, it never works the first time. And if it does, you haven't finished testing it yet. Like you've you've probably not finished testing, and it's probably not gonna work. You know, this happens, like I get this circuit board back, and it's this really it's quite a complicated part of the laptop. Like it converts the HDMI signal to the EDP signal for the screen. So it's quite, you know, there's a bit of black magic to it. It's high speed signals, it's you know, it's not the most easy thing to to design. Uh and it wasn't working. I was like, oh, for God's sake, it's not working. Like, where am I even gonna begin to figure out what's wrong with this board? So I'm there in the factory, like just frantically testing as much things as I can. And I remember I got it working at like I think it was 4 a.m. And it, you know, when you've when you've spent when you've literally like hit a brick wall, like so many times when you're trying to get something working, and you you lose all hope. Like you're just like, this is not gonna work. And I am I am, you know, I'm the worst engineer in the world. It's not gonna work. I'm gonna have to tell Jesse that you know we're gonna have to sack this off. It's nothing's ever gonna work, like you're gonna have to delay again. And then it started working at 4 a.m. And like honestly, I don't know if you guys like, you know, in in England we we like to play uh football, and you you know, when you score a goal and you're playing with your mates on a side and you score a goal and you just like you sort of put your hands in the air like this, and I literally did that. It's like on my own in the factory, and I ran around the I ran around the assembly line just screaming. I was like, It's just like yeah, on my own in a factory in the middle of China. All you heard was this this like scream from a guy like as it as it starts working, and it's there's just no feeling better than that. Uh and that's what I love about hardware.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:48

You feel like woody, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:50

That's that's yeah, that's uh summoning the the the invincible, yeah. Um, and it's just that's what's good about hardware is the lows are so so desperately low, but the the high that you get after it is just uh it's like nothing else. So yeah, like the loads of moments like that, like you know, things aren't working, then they start working.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:10

Um I remember that also from my time in software development. Like it you can really get lost in butt fixing, but then you realize fucked it's already like after midnight, and then I know this feeling that when it's finally working, it's yeah, it's insane.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:25

Yeah, so load loads of moments like that, yeah. Like with the you know, injection molding, things like that. Like I actually moved to the injection mold factory as well. Like, because I I you know I'd learned by this point that if I, you know, proximity, you know, is the key to speed. So as soon as we were having injection mold problems, like they, you know, you know, they would ship the plastic parts to our factory. Uh they would get there, we would do inspection on them, loads of issues, loads of problems. And you know, shipping them was pretty quick. But I was like, you know, it just took like four hours for these to get here. Like I need to, you know, I can't, I can't, I can't, you know, I need to so spoiled. Yeah, I was like, I need to, you know, I'm gonna just move there. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna pack my, you know, I had my screen in my hand, I had my laptop in my hand, I had my camera because I had to do a lot of like I had to document the journey back then because Jesse's like going crazy in London. Like, you need to I need I need stuff to like push out there and make people think that this is still a real thing. So I packed my stuff, went to the factory, and just lived there for a week until until it was uh until it was coming out correctly.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:28

But then you had a real thing, right? And it was a big success. Like uh the laptop and stuff.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:33

Yeah, we shipped it at the end of 2015, and that's when uh the company could really start. You know, anyone building hardware, like that is the thing everybody cares about. It's all you know, everybody comes to me, it's like, when can I ship the product? Because you've raised money, but until you start shipping that product, your pre-revenue, you you know, anything could happen to go wrong. So everything revolves around that first shipment. So when you start shipping that, and this is why speed is so important, because you're literally running out of money to get to that point, and you need to make sure you ship on time. So as soon as you ship the product, then Jesse could really start to like do his uh do what he needed to do, raise a bunch of money. So, like, yeah, over the years, like I mean, we grew the company to uh 100 people at its peak. Uh, we raised about 35 million dollars in in total over the years. Yeah, lots of ups, lots of downs. Uh, one of the biggest up from a hardware perspective was shipping, uh, we did a deployment to Argentina. So we got a big government contract for I think it was 10,000 uh laptops. So, you know, going from I think we did maybe 800 to 1,000 laptops for the crowdfunding. Oh, I think it's 1200 we made because we we we were selling uh more throughout that year as well, but we made 1200 laptops, but going from that to 10,000 units is a totally different ball game. Like all the stuff, I mean, even a thousand units is hard. Like all the stuff you could fumble your way through, like hand doing this, hand doing that to just to get it into production. At 10,000 units, that doesn't apply anymore. Like you have to change how you're doing things. We had to redesign the factory. We had to actually the first assembly lines we made were just tables that we bought from the market down the road. Like we bought these tables, put cloth on them, and set up a production line next to the uh SMT. Like we had a PCBA SMT line in there. We had to reinvent the whole factory and we brought the factory along with the journey, right? We we were, you know, we were basically the the key customer then. It was like 90% of their business. So we literally we did it twice. We we on the first uh way, we I've got these amazing photos again, like the culture of now. Like you go and speak to boss, like, right, we need to change the factory, we need to do it. By the time I've finished speaking, there's already a guy like with a sledgehammer, like knocking down walls, like literally destroying the whole factory. And I just walk out and I'm like, this is this is exactly why I love China. Like, you know, we discuss it and in Instead of like, you know, building regulations, like planning, you know, we don't need planning. Just get the guy with a sledgehammer, knock all those walls down. A guy will come and build uh some assembly lines. You know, I did do some planning. I planned out the assembly lines because we had a kind of modular product. So we wanted all the uh parts to be assembled in a certain order and then be sort of combined at the end. And then we did it again. So we were again scaling up. Uh, we actually moved the factory uh to across the road. We built a whole factory from scratch. So we we literally, it was so much fun because we we were even thinking about buying the factory at one point, which was a dumb, yeah, very dumb idea. Uh totally the wrong uh thing to do, but we just loved it. You know, we were just like we we loved the fact that we had this our own fact, our own factory in China. We got to build the whole thing, like we upgraded the whole thing. Uh we had our office in there, which was amazing. Because, and this is where the whole like having your engineers on the front line things come from. Like we were we were there. Like if there was a problem or we needed to see, we needed to uh improve some QC criteria on the line. We just walked out of our office and the production line was right there. People were making stuff. So we we brought engineers over from the UK, and for them it was just amazing. Like they just got to like, you know, come into like my world. Like I was, you know, I was a caveman back then, but um just trying to, yeah, uh, they got to come into this world and and see all these like bright green laptops coming coming off the production line and learning a lot. Like you could learn so much by being there as an engineer, you can grow so fast in China, yeah. Uh, because you can just learn all the all the skills you need to do to actually get something to production, which is what actually matters, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:07:44

So are they still in business? This factory?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:47

Uh that factory, they're not actually. We yeah, we left it uh we we reached our limit with them at one point. They were kind of worried about investing too much in the in the growth. Uh and we moved to another factory. Uh, we moved out of there, we moved to another factory, we moved the team, we're we're trying to grow the team. Um, so we moved to, you know, because you know, as much as as fun as it is for a British guy, you know, a British engineer moving to China, moving into the factory, if you're trying to hire like top engineering talent, you know, and you're located in a factory, like it doesn't, it's not, it's not got the cool factor that it has for the Chinese or for yeah, the Chinese engineers, yeah. Like they they walk into a factory, like some of them don't even show up to the interview because they they they look around, they're like, I don't want to work in a factory. Like, you know, I'm an engineer. Like, yeah, uh, so eventually we moved to Nanshan, uh, high tech park. Uh, we moved down there because we needed to to grow the team and hire, you know, a bunch of Chinese engineers. We also brought more engineers over from the UK. So, yeah, eventually we had to move out. But um, we changed factory, they were they had much better quality management systems. Like, again, as you scale up production, like what works in the early days with a small factory is you get like flexibility, like you get maximum flexibility. I can say something one like like the whole like destroying the walls with a sledgehammer. Like, we needed that maximum flexibility to iterate quickly, you know, change things the day before production was happening, change things even while the assembly line is is is operating, we're changing things, right? Big factories don't do that. You have to follow a process. You've got SOPs, you've got uh they have internal systems for like engineering change requests, ECRs, where you have to go, you have to follow a process to do changes like that. So, what works as a small startup with a small factory doesn't work at scale. Like you have to upgrade at some point, but you lose that flexibility. So doing new product development then becomes more slow because you don't have that flexibility that you had with the early factory. So, yeah, usually people work with a small factory and then they realize they need better quality, so they move to a big factory, they think it's gonna be all this amazing thing. They're like, Oh yeah, they yeah, you know, the big factory is gonna be amazing, but you just come across different problems. Like actually going to a bigger factory, you you actually need a bigger team, like because you have to fit into their system. Uh they won't they won't be flexible to your system, you know, they have their own system, so you need a whole team just to manage that. So, yeah, these are some of the challenges of scaling up uh hardware. Uh it's yeah, you have you you need different systems, right? Different factories, different processes. Uh so yeah, we moved to yeah, to to high tech park. We had a team of I think it was 25 uh people at the end, like 25 engineers. We had uh mechanical, electronics, firmware, quality control people, uh procurement people, everything. We we we ran our entire supply chain. So we didn't rely on a factory to buy all the individual stuff. We did everything. So we had maximum uh control over every single light item in our bomb list, uh, which is not necessarily the best strategy all the time because it's it's a lot of effort, and also you're all the liabilities on you, then like you have to make sure you control that whole process. We like ticks, we were a hardware company, we were we were developing very new products, uh, and we we were investing so much in that. Um, so we we liked it, but it's not necessarily the best strategy for most uh companies, it's very expensive. The other thing, of course, is once you actually ship the product out, so we built our fourth generation product, big, you know, ecosystem of products like robotics, electronics kits, laptops, computers, everything like this whole modular system, spent so much money developing it. And then once you ship it out, you don't need the team. You've just spent two, three, four years building this whole engineering team, and then you don't really need it anymore after that. So the engineering team just got smaller and smaller and smaller because the naturally the company's resources shift from product development to sales and marketing and content and in our case, curriculum, because it was an ed tech product. Yeah, developing hardware is is is hard and expensive for that reason because you need such a big team to do it. It's you know, and then you don't. So it's like, okay, you can outsource that, but then you've got the problems of outsourcing and uh you don't own your own IP and stuff like that. So it's it's really challenging, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:27

And then now you turned your vision on you have to be on the ground, you have to know the people, you have to understand them into a new business model, right? That's what you do with powerhouse, you support startups in in doing extra.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:39

Yeah, so similar to what I did for PyTot, where I moved to Shenzhen to to manage the whole system, uh, give us that like hardware capability. Uh, I now do that for other startups. So it's basically the same thing. Like we become an extension of their team. Uh we are Yeah, that's what I thought. Like we're we're their guys on the ground, like they trust us 100%. We've we've been there, we've done it. You know, we have this philosophy of being on the front lines. They know that they can trust us 100% more than they could even trust themselves, uh, you know, with the information. Like GPT. Or GBT, yeah. So they know they can trust us. Uh, so we basically do that all on the ground for them, uh, which is a really, yeah, it's been a really exciting model for me. Cause I get to do, you know, like I said at Pytop, you know, we I got to live my dream building this whole hardware team. But as soon as we launched the product, you don't necessarily need that anymore. So that's why I left in 2021 because I was in Shenzhen. I had a skeleton team left, like maybe two guys left. Uh, I was doing like content creation and all this other stuff that to help the business. But I was like, I'm in Shenzhen, like, what am I doing? Like, I need to build, I need to build hardware. Like, what am I doing in this place? So I left PyTov in 2021 to start a company called Motormaster. So we did uh brushless motor control and battery management systems for like e-mobility and and mass volume, consumer electronics, like massage guns and blenders and things like that, uh, which went well. Like, we did we built some really cool tech, we built a really good team, but we were partnered with a factory, and they had their own set of customers as well. We did a lot of the motor control technology stuff side of things, and every time they had a Western customer, I just saw the writing on the wall from the very outset. Like, I joined these meetings, they were like, Oh, can you join this meeting? A friendly foreign face there and stuff like that. So I joined these meetings and I'm listening to them talk, and I'm just like, this is just you were failed. This is gonna go so badly. Like, there's just no way this is gonna work. So, you know, I'd I'd I'd say, right, I'll be the guy on the ground, I'll be the guy in the factory, uh, you know, which helped them got a lot of clients because the client was like, Oh my god, there's a there's a white, like British guy in the factory, like amazing, like you know, this is amazing. I can talk to somebody. Yeah, um, so that's when I started to realize that even, I mean, this was kind of somewhat around AI. We we had translate, you know, we we've always had good translators, even the you know, the handheld translators. This is when I started to realize there was a there's a still a massive problem. Uh people were just even if they had a translator, they still couldn't communicate like the technical stuff. And I'd listen to these conversations, and sometimes the factory would be speaking English, they're speaking English, and I'd listen, and I'm like, no, he didn't mean that. He didn't mean that. And you're both you're both talking about something completely different because I understand the tech and I understand like I'm thinking about it from like the product level and what they're actually trying to do. I'm not just listening to the words, and and they're like, oh, okay, yeah. Um, so that's when I knew there's just still a massive communication issue, like even if they have translators and things like that. So I rebranded Motormaster to Powerhouse uh last February, uh just to photo like double down on this, basically. And now we we kind of call ourselves a fractional hardware CTO team. So, you know, you can have, you know, you can go from not having any hardware capability to having maximum, you know, like like what we had at PyTot hardware capability in the click of your fingers. And then as soon as you launch the product, you can not have that. And it's just it's so much more effective. And for me, it's great because I get to work on amazing, like first of first of a kind products like PyTot was, and I get to work on many of them. And when that one's finished, I I move on to the next one. And it's just like I get to do exactly what I'm good at and what I enjoy. So it's been really amazing. Like we're working on some really cool stuff. Uh, like I said, everything we tend to work on tends to be like very new stuff. Like people have tried to do it with a factory and they've failed because it's it's so difficult to get what you want here if the factory isn't set up for like very custom stuff. Uh, so just we've been very lucky in the projects we've got. We just they they're all just so cool. Like they're across like the robotic, like miniature robotics, uh large format displays, uh, AI wearables, uh, e-mobility products, like robotic e-mobility products. Just super cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:08

So, how do you decide on what kind of product you or a project you you'll want to be involved in? Is there something like requirements that you have for the team or for the idea? Like there's a problem.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:20

It's a good question, yeah. And I've spent uh the last few months thinking about that because it's like how do we yeah amplify what we do and work with the right types of people? Uh and we've been very lucky so far to find the right types of people, but usually it's you know, we like to work with it's kind of like vision meets execution, right? We like to work with founders that have a big vision, and this is why I love like SF and the US and everything like that. And I think Tuo has the SF S uh Shenzhen founders group, which is great because that dynamic, the the vision of SF combined with the execution capability of Shenzhen is just like, yeah, it's amazing. So um, you know, we like to work with founders with a big vision that they're usually like product people, they understand deeply the customer's problem, uh, and they can basically do everything on that side. You know, they can do the sales, the marketing, the customer research, the customer testing. They're just so obsessed with the product and they want to perfect it. Not not in a like perfectionist way, but from a solving the customer's problem way, right? And we become the executors of that vision in Shenzhen. That's like the perfect balance. And it just so happens that they tend to be world first products. Like most of the products we work on is world first, um, which is nice because we have we got, yeah, with PyTok, we got a Guinness World Record for the world world's first 3D printed laptop. Uh, like it was like we used to 3D print these laptops, and then in in 2017, uh, Guinness Booker Records came along. It's like, oh, do you want a Guinness World Record? Like, yeah, right. It sounds amazing, yeah. So we got that. Um, so yeah, it's like it's kind of fits into the whole uh story a little bit.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:57

So you don't necessarily need to be an engineer if you have a great idea and you know understand the problem, you can just exactly.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:02

I mean, it helps to be somewhat technical sometimes, or at least uh yeah, or sometimes like you know, you you come from a software background, you're a technical person, but you you know, a lot of people now are you know from the software background with all the AI stuff going on, they they want to build something physical, right? So we're we're sort of there's a new you know, hardware has been back now since like 2024. Like everybody's coming to Shenzhen. Loads of companies have even set up set up now to bring people over to Shenzhen. You know, you I think you guys are doing something like that, right? Yeah, bringing people to China, yeah. Yeah, we'll be able to do that. So it's it's crazy. Like everybody's wants to come and see for their for themselves, like see with their own eyes, like what Shenzhen is and what what it what it's capable of of doing. So going seeing the factories, meet you know, meeting the people that are on the front lines, actually doing the work. So yeah, it's really exciting. Really exciting.

SPEAKER_05 1:19:55

Especially the whole physical AI stuff is great, it's it's super hot right now. Like every everybody's in the US is basically super good in doing AI software, but then they want them to come here as a Shenzhen to combine the hardware and the AI to build some very cool products.

SPEAKER_01 1:20:11

Yeah, yeah. No, there's a lot of cool stuff. Uh, and yeah, they're all coming over here, and yeah, sometimes they want to stay here, sometimes they don't. Um, but you know, I think if you're trying to build very new types of stuff, you you need somebody, you know, on a day-to-day basis, like you know, go into factories, like you know, otherwise things are just gonna slow down. You you're gonna find out about problems much later than you than you could have done.

SPEAKER_04 1:20:35

So you have been here for a decade. What's the biggest difference of Shenzhen in 2015 and Shenzhen in 2026?

SPEAKER_01 1:20:42

Yeah, there's a few things. Um, one is DD and Maitwan. May Twan Scooter Man drivers, amazing. Like, that's uh obviously a massive game changer for us. But yeah, one of the things is like nowadays, and this is especially relevant to people building AI devices, especially things with cameras in them, you know, quite complex, you know, 4G, things like that, complex devices. You know, 10 years ago, you know, the factories would kind of like roll the red carpet out. You know, they bring you in, they'd want to tell you about all the stuff they're doing, they'd give you all the secrets to what they're doing. Nowadays, um, you know, the the companies in Shenzhen have so much IP, so much tech, so much in-house know-how and capability, especially in like cameras, AI, wearable stuff. Um, they're now like it's much more difficult to get them to uh commit resources to your project, right? They you go in there, you tell them about your product, everyone's nice to each other, nice and nice, but then they start asking about the business. They want to know what's your what's your launch plan, what's your strategy. 10 years ago, I mean, maybe I just was in didn't see it 10 years ago, but for me, 10 years ago, it was like I could go anywhere and everybody would just tell me everything I needed. Nowadays, it's like they want to know what the business model is, they want to know that you've got the the chops to actually sell it in the market, and and they're way more edgy about uh committing resources to your project. Um, so it's quite difficult now if you don't have the market traction. This is why I talked about internal PR, like the China PR side. Like you've got the PR on the market side. We need to do the same on the factory side. We need we need to get them motivated to actually give us the resources needed to develop the products. And this is especially hard with like, you know, high-tech products with cameras or uh microphones, like voice wearables, things like that, because you you just can't get access to the the data sheets for the chips, you can't get access to the architecture, they're not gonna give you a bomb list, they're not gonna give you uh the schematics. This is no way, not unless you pay a lot of money. Uh so they're very protective now and very, very savvy. And uh yeah, it means so part of my pitch to them when when we go and see them is that you know, I'm here, I'm gonna be because they've suffered the pain as well. They've had Western clients before where they're waiting days for an email. They're you know, they're trying to communicate with them, they're really struggling to communicate and and get the product like going in the right way. So my pitch to them is I'm here, I'm like 10 minutes from your office. Like if you have a problem, we can solve it very quickly. Uh, we can speak Chinese, like we can actually get things done. Like, I promise you, if we if you take on this project, we're gonna move at the same pace as Shenzhen. You're not gonna be waiting for people to give you information, you're not gonna be trying to explain your perspective. I understand your perspective. So that's part of the pitch, and it and it works quite well, I think. It's difficult. It's difficult to get their support for sure.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:33

Yeah, one very important uh factor for your success is your team, right? You still we we work you work a lot with AI, I guess. Um, but but you still need these people, you need the engineers. This is also kind of a pain point, right? To find find good people here in China.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:49

Yeah, hiring is is really challenging, yeah. So we we have a mix of like uh we bring uh like foreign engineers to China, but that's difficult for many reasons. Like people don't necessarily want to move to China, they you know they've got a thing going at home, they don't want to move. But hiring Chinese engineers is difficult, especially like for us, we you know, even though I speak Chinese and a couple of teams speak Chinese, you still kind of want them to speak English because we interact with engineers all over the world. And finding an engineer that can both speak very good English and do the like the technical work uh is very challenging because they they basically have to make a decision, right? They either, you know, spend their time learning English or they spend their time uh doing the engineering. And you know, in Shenzhen, it's not it's not like in Europe where you you know you're working nine to five and then you've got you know five hours in the evening to learn English or on the weekends. People, it's nine, nine, six. People are are in the office the whole day, they're working six days a week. They don't have the luxury of like learning English um that well. So finding someone that has both of those things, like the Venn diagram of both of those things, like that little slither in the middle, is so difficult. Like I was looking for our lead mechanical engineer last year, and it it was like literally took three months. I was like interviewing constantly, paying loads of money on LinkedIn. Uh, I was on the boss app in China, and it was just so, so difficult because it was really funny. Like, you'd message them being like, Do you speak English? Like, yeah, yeah, no problem. And they'd expect, they'd expect that um a HR person would come on the call, the the thing would pop up, and it was my face there, and they'd just like they'd look at me and be like, Oh, I uh yeah, I didn't I didn't realize that it would be an English man on the call, and he's like, and I tried to speak English to him, and it's just yeah, not a single word, yeah. So it was so that happened a lot. Um, it was really uh really difficult. Yeah, frustrating. So hiring, so I think hiring for for anyone, hiring is a is a difficult thing, but I think for us in China it it's a particularly uh difficult thing to get right, yeah. So that's a constant, constant battle that we that we have, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:02

And the competition is fierce. I mean, you have Huawei, you have Tense and you have all the big companies here, and people in China still like to work for this corporation.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:10

Yeah, the culture in China is still, I think it's probably slowly changing, but the culture, especially, you know, five, ten years ago when I was building Pytops engineering team, like people still want to work for big companies. Like in the UK, like people think it's cool to go and work for a startup that has no money and you know live on you, sleep on the floor and do all this like we do. It's like, oh yeah, that's a cool story. Um, you know, go get them and stuff. But in China, it's just not like they're just like, why would I do that? Like, I'm gonna go and work for a big company, I'm gonna get that on my CV. Uh, and I think everywhere in the world, people people have the same feeling sometimes. Like, it's nice to get those big names on your CV, but in China, especially, like, you know, pitching to these uh Chinese uh guys or girls to come and work for your startup, they're asking it a lot of questions, like, you know, what's your plan? What's you know, how are you gonna make money? Like, you know, they're really diligent about it all before they'll uh commit to coming to work with you. So yeah, this is what I was saying before about you know, speaking, because sometimes we hire people that don't speak English just because we we have to, but you know, trying to my Chinese is good for like the pragmatic side, like give dealing with factories, technical stuff. But when it comes to like vision and like trying to excite people, it just it just falls down completely. So I'm there trying to interview this guy the other week, I'm trying to explain fractional hardware CTO, like we're working with all these amazing startups. Uh I just couldn't do it. I was like, you know what? Here's the salary. Do you want to come and work for me about this? Like, I can't, I just can't do this. Uh so he did come and work for us, but um, but I think that was more because he knew one of the guys that we'd already hired, so he he kind of knew, but yeah, constant struggle. Uh, I think everything in China for us, like doing you know, you guys are building a business here as well, like everything's just 10 times harder, right? Okay, we've got the access to scooter men and all this.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:22

But you would still wouldn't go would not go back to BP, right? I guess.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:26

Oh no, I definitely wouldn't wouldn't go back there. But yeah, I'm gonna be here for a while, I think. There's still a lot of uh lot of stuff we've got to do here. I like the you know, I like the UK, uh, I like um go all my family's there, so obviously going back is is nice, but I get bored very quickly in the UK. Yeah, like I was there for three weeks you went back yeah, three weeks uh at Christmas, and it was just you wake up, you know, it gets to like 4 p.m. It's already dark outside, and you're just like, oh my god, I haven't done anything yet. Like, what's going on? I can't get any work done. So you get back to China and you soon you get back into the flow again, and it's um yeah, so I I don't think I could move back. Uh I'd like to spend more time there, but yeah. Summer, summer's okay. Summers are nice in the UK, yeah. Which I forgot actually, because I didn't go back for so long, like when I was in China. I didn't go back for for a summer for eight years or something or seven years, and then I went back in after COVID. Yeah, I was like, oh my god, it's actually nice. Actually, quite nice.

SPEAKER_04 1:29:25

Yeah, the biggest problem with Christmas, it's it's the winter, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's it's horrible, yeah. Um, yeah. So uh and um so you met your business partners on a networking event. We both met on a networking event, yeah. And now you we also met on a networking event of uh tour robotics, right? Oh, we did, yeah. And and you do your own like hardware beers. It's like so for me, like going to these networking events is also something that I would um recommend to everyone listening to this. Wherever you are, go to this networking event. Like we had one uh um two days ago, and it was unbelievable how many amazing people you meet there.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:04

Crazy, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so people wanting to come over to China, like WeChat. You know, if you haven't got WeChat, you have to get WeChat. Like WeChat, the whole of China runs on WeChat. Like, get yourself in all these groups, you know. Hardware Bears is one. There's also a bunch of other ones, like Two O's, uh, you know, founder group, which is huge now. It's grown so much over the last few months. Uh, get yourself in all these groups, like organize factory tours. Um, you know, go and meet all these people that live here or want to or want to move here. You just get access to so much information. Um, so yeah, uh, yeah.

unknown 1:30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:30:41

Get a beer together with these guys. Get a beer. Yeah, that's uh send their stories, yeah, yeah, listen to them, yeah, and experience and learn.

SPEAKER_04 1:30:49

That's how we close the loop. So I always think the people I admire the most are engineers with uh business mindset. Yeah, these are the most successful people that I'm um I so regret that I that I'm so bad at math. Because these are the people that changed the world, literally. Maybe, yeah. Just being an engineer, it's okay, then you work for BP or whatever. But an engineer with a business mindset, would he invent it?

SPEAKER_01 1:31:20

More engineer than business, but yeah, it's a it's a it's a learning.

SPEAKER_05 1:31:24

Yeah, but you had the MBA on the on the go, basically.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:27

Yeah, yeah, with yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, real world, real world learning is the theme. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much, Ryan.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:35

It's just uh amazing masterclass in uh entrepreneurship in Shenzhen. Yeah, thank you guys so much. Appreciate it.