Hey I'm down here in San Francisco visiting my friend Jon who is the founder of a new
start-up called Motus.
Actually I'm down here to pick up a prototype so I can test it out myself.
I thought it might be nice for us to go in and chat with him a little bit about his product
as well.
Let's go.
[knock, knock]
Hey Jon. Hi Zeene.
How's it going? How are you?
Welcome. Come on in. Yeah.
So we're in the offices of Motus with my friend Jon and Jon you're about to launch
your first product ever.
And is it an action camera?
That's correct Zeene.
Today's action cameras all have wide angle lenses which is great for getting your perspective
or your point of view, usually with a helmet or chest mount.
However, our camera is a little bit different.
It's a system that you wear a tag and it locates and follows and tracks you and it
films you from a third person perspective much like a Hollywood movie or all television
productions.
So what got you into the whole action video photography category?
Well, I was born in Northern Sweden so I was always a big skier and then that evolved into
snowboarding and windsurfing and mountain biking and then I moved to California so surfing
and skateboarding and BMX riding kind of came naturally.
So me and my friends we were always trying to film each other doing action sports and
my friends are just terrible camera operators.
[Zeene laughs] I was always out of focus or even out of the frame or even not filmed at
all.
That's a bad thing!
Yeah.
Just a couple of weekends ago I was at Kirkwood with my sister and she was supposed to film
me jumping off a cornice.
She missed me completely and all I heard was some oohs and aahs from the chairlift.
And then another example as you can see my friend Tony a few years ago at Kirkwood trying
to shoot me with a little mini-camcorder, and as you can see he's trying to adjust
the zoom and it just came out terrible.
Oh no.
So these kinds of problems have plagued me all my life and there is no existing solution
that can help you film yourself when you're doing these action sports.
In the action photography market, there are a lot of solutions out there.
Yes.
I think Go Pro really opened up the market to many types of different, inexpensive means
of shooting first person viewpoint.
Drones for example is a really popular solution right now.
What makes your product better?
Well, let's first put the market into perspective.
99.9% of it is rugged action cameras with wide angle lenses.
Drones have recently come on the scene and they use GPS technology for locating.
And in addition there's a couple of other solutions like the Solo Shot that use GPS
combined with a camera whether it's a DSLR or another type of camera mounted on a tripod.
The issue with GPS locating is that best case scenario the accuracy is something like five
meters and locating is very slow; there's a lot of latency in locating and the satellites
pinging each other.
So this means if you're shooting a tennis court, for example, and the court is only
eight meters in length on one side so how is it going to locate you on the court when
the accuracy is the size of the court?
Then you're camera really is targeted more at this fixed environment?
Exactly.
Kind of smaller environments where you mount the camera on the perimeter pointing to where
the action is so an example would be like a skate park or a tennis court.
So Jon you've been at this for about two years now right?
Almost three years Zeene.
Wow, that's a long time.
I'm really old.
[laughter] So what's the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur?
Um, well I guess it's that nobody really tells you what to do.
There's no real playbook for being an entrepreneur.
It's very different company to company, product to product.
That being said, at least I'm here in the Silicon Valley where there's lots of networking
opportunities to meet entrepreneurs from, in the same space, and similar companies that
are hardware companies, and there's a giant ecosystem of support from, whether it's
investors, or start-up lawyers, or consultants and Executives-In-Residence that you can talk
to that can help guide your way.
So I know that the financing piece is always tough.
And you and I have personally have talked a lot about some interesting stories that
you've had related to trying to come up with funding for your company.
What were some of the things that you looked at doing?
So there's many routes of financing for start-ups in the Valley.
You know most people start with some kind of bootstrapping from their savings and a
kind of a friends and family round.
And then the next thing you would do would be like a proper seed round which might be
like five hundred K to a million plus.
And then you get into the venture financing through the traditional venture capital firms
that might do a series A or a series B. And then there's you know private equity and
other routes like taking the company public obviously is one of them as well.
You know financing is especially challenging for hardware companies because they consume,
they consume a lot of capital to bring a product to market.
So for example with my product, just the plastic molding tools that the ABS plastic gets injected
into probably costs in the neighborhood of seventy thousand dollars just for the first
iteration of the product.
Wow, that's a lot of money.
Yeah.
And the more you sell, the higher your Bill of Material is and for a start-up company,
your Contract Manufacturer is not going to lend you that money.
No. [laughs] They want it up front, you know a few months before you get the money from
your customers.
Interesting.
So one thing that's emerged that's really great for hardware companies is crowdfunding,
platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, where people view a campaign and people pre-order
your product, so essentially they pay for it, for delivery in a few months time, and
you spend that money on your Bill of Materials and some of these fixed costs that you need
to get your product to market.
We've talked before in the past about pitch events.
They sound really interesting.
Can you tell me a little bit more about them?
Sure.
So a pitch event is an event where there's an audience and then there's a panel and
you get up in front of the audience and the panel and you pitch your company.
And the format really varies, it could be a one minute long lightning pitch with no
visual aids or it could be like a five minute long slide deck or even a live demo component,
and you're pitching to a panel which is usually composed of a few angel investors,
maybe a VC or a corporate lawyer, sorry a start-up lawyer, or an entrepreneur.
There's five or six people.
And then there's usually like a Q&A session from the panel afterwards and then either
the panel or the audience will vote on the winner of the pitch event that night.
And usually there's a handful of, between four and a dozen companies presenting.
Cool.
So do you get funding that night?
I've never been to a pitch event where anyone's ever gotten funded, but I've heard that
it does happen.
Oh, really?
Yes, well, there's a lot of due diligence…is it frequently, or?
No, no I think very infrequently.
There's a lot of due diligence and follow-up.
But it's a good way to practice your pitch and get an introduction to investors who may
know other investors that are looking for that specific type of investment.
What was the development process like for you?
Um, long…it was long.
[laughter] Three years.
Yes.
Well, first, you know, I knew what I wanted to do and I started researching the different
technologies available to do this.
And then I chose the one that seemed the best for my purposes which happened to be using,
you know, RF waves for locating.
Then I immediately wrote the patent on using RF to locate for the purpose of pointing a
camera.
And that patent got issued a year ago or something like that.
And then I began researching the different components or specific ICs that we can use
to do this.
It's a fairly long process and then, you know, you do a number of different prototypes
because different iterations and…we evolved from having, we were initially going to do
a product with an integrated camera but then with the iPhone 6S the picture quality was
so good, that we decided to speed our time to market by using an iPhone that you can
drop into our pan-and-tilt cradle, and that will save us, you know, years worth of headaches
developing our own camera.
What's the biggest con of doing business in the Valley?
Definitely has to be the wage inflation and the high rates that you have to pay for development
work whether it's software or hardware or even, you know, lawyer's fees.
Generally, just because of the…not because there's so many start-ups necessarily but
just, you know, Google and Facebook and Apple hiring everybody in the Valley basically.
The big sucking sound from all the hiring happening?
Exactly.
And I think there's a lot of start-ups up here, as well?
There is.
There's a lot in the SOMA district of San Francisco which is just north of us here in
Portrero Hill.
Portrero Hill is getting pretty popular, but the really hot area is the Dogpatch next door
on the bayfront.
So I noticed driving in that you guys have a skate park next door.
Yes, Zeene, we located intentionally next to the skate park — oh — just because
it helps us with our product development.
We can make a tweak to the firmware and test it immediately that day and that can really,
you know, speed the time to market.
Cool, can we go out and test the Motus right now?
Sure, let's go.
OK.
Alright, so I'm out in skate park here with Chio, who is our Embedded Systems Engineer,
and Chio is going to talk about the system in a little bit more detail but there's
really three components to it.
Here's the camera module which is essentially a pan-and-tilt platform and the iPhone goes
into this clamp which we'll show you later.
This is the anchor.
The anchor is mounted on either side of the camera module facing into the environment
that you're filming.
And finally, Chio is holding the tag that's worn on a lanyard around your neck.
So once you have your iPhone app set up, all you do is put your phone on the Motus clamp,
you turn on the unit, and this will start tracking you and following you and record
you, as well.
OK, so we've got the camera module over there and we're going to mount the anchor
about fifteen feet away facing into the environment that we're filming.
This. and we'll turn it on, and we're ready to go.
OK, so this is the tag and I'm going to wear this on a lanyard around my neck.
But first, I'm going to turn it on, and this initializes all the onboard sensors which
includes an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, and an altimeter.
And then once it's initialized, I'll put it around my neck.
It's got this very comfortable neoprene strap that holds it in place, and we are ready
to skate.
Let's see the Motus in action.
Here's Jon taking a loop around the bowl.
The pan-and-tilt platform easily tracks his movements.
And outputs a perfect video.
The Motus smart app overlays some statistics in the upper right that can be used for tracking
sports training.
I thought I'd give it a try too.
Ah, yeah, I'm a bit of a newb.
That was a really cool demo!
Thanks.
Yeah, and you were showing me a little bit the iPhone app.
So it's a smart app right?
Yes.
What are some of its capabilities?
Well, the smart features are, you know the tag has these sensors in it and it sends back
data live to the iPhone like your spin rate from the gyroscope and your g-force or acceleration
from the accelerometer, plus we locate you obviously so we now where you are so we can
calculate your velocity.
So the smart record features are, we can take these metrics and use any of them to start
recording.
The simplest thing that we do that's really useful is, only film, only record me if I'm
moving.
So we make a real, like, activate record when I'm moving faster than six miles an hour,
and that way you know you don't get the footage of me standing around in the park
talking to you, you get the footageof me when I'm moving.
So as a result you get better footage and less of it, and that means less time spent
editing.
And you know what that's all about!
Oh absolutely, I love editing less! [laughter] Any parting words for wanna be entrepreneurs?
Sure.
Yeah, I think that the more time spent planning and doing research in the earlier stages will
definitely pay off.
And one mistake I made, I would encourage you to find a co-founder early with a complementary
skill set to your own.
So for example, if you have a business or finance background, find somebody with a strong
engineering or technology background or a software background depending on what type
of a start-up it is.
So that would be my advice.
OK, great.
Awesome, OK.
It's around noon, we're starved, we're going to head out to lunch now.
And, this is Zeene and, Jon from Motus, we're going to head out.
See ya later.
Peace out, geeksters!
Oh, Zeene, please don't say that.
Chio, what would the under-30 set think of the "peace out geeksters?"
Uh, what is a geekster?
It's a made-up word.
Well, Chio, you are a geekster.
[laughter] It's a geek hipster.
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