Smart Glasses, AI, and AR: Inside Brilliant Labs with Bobak Tavangar

Bobak Tavangar, CEO of Brilliant Labs, shares his journey of building a company at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence (AI) and augmented reality (AR). Brilliant Labs develops AI agents and smart glasses that merge AR and AI into a lightweight, user-friendly device. Bobak discusses challenges and surprises along the way, reflecting on the importance of data, ethical considerations, and the value of AI that understands individuals deeply. He emphasizes the need for a strong user experience (UX) and the existential purpose of the device, and shares metrics they’ve achieved in sales and community engagement on Discord. Bobak also offers advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and shares a compelling case for optimism about the future of AI.

Bobak Quotes
📈 We've more than sold out everything we bought to sell.
🔒 We won't even be able to have access to your data...it's for your eyes only.
🤖 We had this vision for Frame and the hardware that we do to be like a Raspberry Pi for AI, that we wanted it to be the first time that anyone with a crazy idea could count on the fact that there's a way it could be embodied.
🗺️ If we focus on purpose, if we focus on first principles, then you're gonna get closer to Mordor.

Resources
Podcast Feedback
Podcast Guest
brilliantlabs.xyz
IG @BrilliantLabsAR
TikTok @BrilliantLabsAR
X @BrilliantLabsAR

About Bobak
Bobak Tavangar is the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant Labs, a company creating an open-source AR glasses hardware platform and pairing that with powerful generative AI models to help you engage with the real world. Bobak studied at George Washington and Georgetown universities before completing a graduate degree at Cambridge University. Bobak is a serial entrepreneur with a core theme running through his entrepreneurial experiences: how to create better ways for people to find and utilize information based on the context of where they are and what’s around them.

Connect w/ Bobak: LinkedIn

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Episode Context
• 3:11 Exploring AI Agents and Devices
• 6:57 Differentiating Brilliant Labs Products
• 8:52 The Hardware and AI Agent, Noa, of Brilliant Labs
• 10:25 Open Source and Open Platform Approach
• 11:42 Monetization Models and Subscription Services
• 13:20 Considerations for Data Privacy and Ethics
• 14:03 Price Point and Subscription Model
• 15:12 Target Buyer Persona and Use Cases
• 18:16 Data Privacy and Security Measures
• 20:17 Success Metrics and Performance
• 21:36 Buyer Persona and Community Engagement
• 23:39 Community Building and Developer Engagement
• 25:09 Surprises and Challenges Along the Way
• 26:55 Growth and Capacity
• 28:56 The Future of AI and AR
• 31:52 Bobak's Career Path and Starting the Company
• 37:02 Building the Team and Raising Capital
• 39:09 Qualities of Future Team Members
• 44:08 Deep Intensity and Purpose
• 45:36 Bobak's Advice for Entrepreneurs
• 49:11 Founder Market Fit and Venture Funding
• 49:25 The Case for Optimism and Possibilities of AI
• 52:26 Future Guest Nominations

Transcript

0:00

Hi, my name is Joan Palmiter Bajorek. I'm on a mission to decrease fluffy hype and talk about the people actually building in AI. Anyone can build in AI, including you. Whether you're terrified or excited, there's been no better time than today to dive in. Now is the time to be curious and future-proof your career, and ultimately, your income. This podcast isn't about white dudes patting themselves on the back. This is about you and me. and all the paths into cool projects around the world. So what's next on Your AI Roadmap? Let's figure it out together. You ready? This is Your AI Roadmap, the podcast. Hey everyone, as we near the end of season one, we are gearing up for season two, already recording some amazing stuff. I literally have chills hearing the stories of some of our guests. Here's the thing, we wanna make it even better. We want constructive feedback. You have phenomenal ideas that I know can take this podcast to the next level. If you wanna share some of that constructive feedback, just takes a few seconds, I swear. Go to yourairoadmap .com/podcastfeedback podcast feedback, share your thoughts. Maybe you'll get a shout out. Seriously, but if you've listened to this, you know that I love data. I crave knowing more, being curious, getting better together. I can't wait to hear from you. My team will read every single one, Excited to hear from you. Woohoo! Hey folks, a little intro about this podcast episode. So I speak with Bobak, the CEO of Brilliant Labs. I saw on LinkedIn and I saw their product and I was like, wow, those are beautiful glasses. And then I was like, they're augmented reality. And then I was like, my gosh, like the price point is so accessible and they are really working on this whole ecosystem of how one can customize. in this field and I was just like, wow, they think in totally different ways. Reached out to their team, they're like, heck yeah, let's do this. And I got to hear how he thinks about his startup and learned some really cool nitty gritties and wild metrics of their successes already as a young startup. The thing about this episode, maybe this is just me, is like how philosophical and how directly connected this CEO is. with the philosophical side of building a startup, of how it's gonna be used, how his work directly connects to the future of our field. And it is the first episode of me talking with a founder in hardware. I'm like kind of embarrassed. We gotta get more on season two. I have so many friends in software and AI, so it's really exciting to talk about a physical product. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Hello hello! Hi, my name is Bobak and I'm the CEO of Brilliant Labs. Brilliant Labs, that's awesome. For those people who don't yet know about Brilliant Labs, what are you all working on? Yeah, Brilliant Labs is doing AI agents, we're doing smart glasses, and we're doing something called LifeGraph, which allows this AI agent to learn from how you use the device. So some pretty fun stuff. Okay, okay, agents, devices, do you want to break that down? I'd love to hear more. Yeah, so we started this journey a few years ago, and we kind of looked at the landscape of companies doing AR and working on AI, and we saw an opportunity to bring these two worlds together because we felt there was a certain maturity on both the hardware as well as the artificial intelligence side of things. And we kind of felt it in our bones that, you know, imminently, there's going to be a leap in computing and how that interweaves in moments of our daily lives, and that The most effective way to do that is to allow a deeply and increasingly personal AI to see the life that you see as you live it. And the best way to do that is to embed it in glasses. So that's literally seeing the world as you experience it. I love this one, especially I talked to so many, I think you might be my first hardware person on the podcast, but I love because I have, I'm in Seattle, right? B2B SaaS is my world, but the more we look at, especially NVIDIA or other like hardware's momentum is crucial to this whole picture, right? Like, and I think especially something like glasses, like augmented reality plays a huge part and yet I think has not. become as dominant in our field. Or I don't know if you'd agree with me, if that's my take on it. Can you tell me? Yeah, tell us about the forum. And I was gonna say, I mean, I think there's reasons for that too, you know, it's It's not because folks haven't tried or it's not because folks haven't tried many of the devices that have come on the market There's been a number of them. I Think it's the human factor stuff, you know, it either felt a bit too bulky or it was too expensive The battery life wasn't very long Or it just was designed in a way that was very off-putting to people who were looking at someone wearing it. So to us, it's very understandable why this has struggled to really take off. Hmm. So you really think it's that UX part of the puzzle? Is that what you're saying? I think if you get to the heart of it, it's the use case. It's the existential purpose of the device. Why ought this device exist as opposed to something else or just the litany of other screens that we all have in our lives? And I think that if that question of existential purpose can be definitively answered, you can work backward from there and that'll take you into selection of components. That'll take you into industrial design and... if you choose right, then it means from the first principle all the way on out, you could do a device that's light and beautiful and costs the right amount of money and still manages to be lightweight and open source and have all day battery. That's basically what we've done, but we're drinking our own Kool-Aid. all day battery? When am I gonna get my pair? Okay. April 15th, they're dropping? Okay, cool. Well, and this is being recorded in March, 2024, but the episode probably will drop this summer. Let's see. But that's actually one of the things when I saw your product online, I was like, A, I think this was created by a designer or like the design aspect of it is quite beautiful, I think. But also it looks. Or just again, with these different products that are coming out, my team looked up like, you know, the background of Google Glass, right? Apple, you know, ProVision, you know, meta products that are probably more VR than AR. There's kind of this history of what's going on here. Can you tell us kind of how you think about Brilliant Labs products differentiated in this? Or do you all do you think of yourselves as speaking to those other products? Or how do you how do you situate yourselves? We see it as a spectrum, certainly. So, you know, at one end of that spectrum, you have many of the devices you just mentioned, the Vision Pro, LumaDiQuest, Magic Leaps devices. They tend to try to put console-grade graphics in front of your eyes, immerse you in a graphical experience. And there's a lot on the engineering side required to do that, even moderately well. And that of course ends up driving the bulk and the expense and battery life tends to be less than two hours You've got a wire coming out of the back of the device So it means that your mobility is limited, but that's one end of the spectrum The other end of the spectrum is where we view ourselves and we're like at the bleeding edge of that other end so it's just unremarkably a pair of glasses and We can get your custom prescription bonded in there if that's something that you require The battery lasts all day And the use case is not, you know, console-grade graphics and immersion, but it's little dollops of generative AI that can help you translate a sign or a language. It can give you directions somewhere, or it can help you diagnose the rash that is on your hand and tell you an at-home remedy to treat it. All these little things that help you just live a better life. And because the battery lasts all day, it means that it's with you. for the moments when you need it. Yeah. I have done a little bit of research in the AR and VR field and devices dying in front of you, having being stuck to a cord where you like, really can't walk around the room. It feels like you're literally being controlled by, or there's some kind of surveillance feel as a user I've experienced. How, I want to, I guess, how did you all get to this type of device at the end of the day, as you look at different options? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, there's all these constraints, engineering and, you know, how do you design for that? But if you actually just take a bigger step back, we tried to think about it in terms of what we actually wanted in our lives because we have arguably too many screens already and we're spending too much time in those screens, especially, you know, off the backs of the pandemic, where we were probably all of us seated too long and spending too much time in those screens. So. We're kind of eager to get humanity back to a life where we are more active, where we're more social, where we are more present with our environment. It's healthier, both emotionally and physiologically. And so, you know, we thought about it that way, and we were basically thinking, what kind of device could bring the kind of use cases and, you know, what does the form factor need to feel like in order to facilitate that sort of experience. And so with that as the existential purpose, we worked backward and came up with a device that we just launched a few weeks ago. Yeah, cool. Well, and there's so many sub questions I have off of what you're saying, but you also mentioned, I think the hardware, the glasses themselves are a piece of the puzzle. It sounds like there's this kind of agent. Can you speak to the different parts of the product or product suite maybe? Yeah, so there's hardware, frame, and I've got a little frame here. This is the power dock, we call it Mr. Power, like Mr. Potato Head. Exactly, exactly. So Mr. Power's there when frame is trying to get across the finish line. And yeah, so there's hardware there. It's very lightweight, it's less than 40 grams. And you know, as I mentioned the battery lasts a while and it's basically an array of sensors audio visual There's an IMU which picks up your directionality and your motion your acceleration So it's a it's a fairly robust suite of data that the device is capturing and then sending over to our agent called Noa, N-O-A, and Noa's job is to take that package open it up understand your query, what you're looking for, what you're asking for, and the accompanying data, and then know which model or which AI service it should find the right answer for you. So that can be OpenAI stuff. It can be GBT-4. It could be perplexity for AI web search or the whisper model for live translation, stability for image generation. So regardless of what you're trying to ask for over a given day... you're just a human being having a human experience and just trying to think of the best questions. And Noa's job is to abstract away all the complexity of the model and just find the right answer, given your intentions, and then get that back to you as quickly as possible. So that's kind of end to end how it works. And then longer term, we also have some work happening that allows Noa to begin learning from how you use the device. and how you query these other models so that NOAA can deliver increasingly personal and even proactively so, personal responses to you. That's awesome. Well, I think that personalization, that contextual, I think more people are thinking about context and tokens these days, but context is, I think, one of the holy grails of the conversational AI sphere, at least. Well, and the use case you're giving is quite complete and multi-pronged. Is that all built out already? Is that part of your roadmap already? Or it's all? So yeah, it's all in place. Everything I just mentioned, not just the hardware, but of course, the agent side, and then these various services that we've done API integrations with. So all of that's in place and out of the box. Someone can put on frame, download our app, and just get up and running, querying any of these services. And then it's a bit of a Sisyphean task, but over the long run of the company, we're gonna continue doing API integrations with... as many of these services as we can, because there's so much bubbling and exciting innovation in the AI world, as you know. And we just think that hardware like this should be taking advantage of that, should be bringing that in front of the eye in the moments when it's just most useful. Maybe that's entertainment discovery or tourism, maybe that's productivity and sort of enterprise-related work, maybe that's industrial context. But either way, you know, and this dovetails with our open platform, we have this vision of, you know, being able to harness all the innovation happening in the generative AI world to be brought to bear on your live moment, no matter where you live in the world and what it is you're trying to do. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and tell us more. Gosh, all these API calls, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is expensive. It sounds like, but you're also future-proofing yourself for the modularity. I dig that. Yeah, can you tell us more about kind of open source, where you all are thinking in that realm? Yeah, so we go above and beyond where most other device makers go in that regard. So we open the underlying hardware design files. So that's schematics for electronics and then our PCB, even the components that we've selected as well and where we purchase those from. That is the CAD files. So the mechanical files that compose the enclosure and other mechanical elements of the device. So someone could conceivably look at the list of components and buy them, look at the CAD files and 3D print them, go to a shop to get the PCBs made, and then solder those components to a board, put it in the device, and hey, you got frame. You didn't need to pay us a dime. And that's, in our mind, totally okay. We, first of all, don't think that everyone's going to do that, but we do think that that's important. We think that... opening up hardware and of course the software which sits on top of it, it will allow for a level of experimentation and play that consumer electronics has never quite had and that this era of AI desperately needs computing to have. Because there's all this cool open source activity happening in the AI world, what if you could take that and deeply optimize down to like the schematic level? the individual registers on the camera if you wanted to, so that you had this tight end-to-end tie-in between powerful AI, your software stack in between, and then hardware that sits on the device. That's stuff that today only Apple can do, but we think that everyone should have that kind of depth of access. My brain was thinking all the different companies you could exit to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's wonderful. Well, and you mentioned that they're super lightweight. 40 grams, which is how many pounds roughly? not even a pound. 0.08, 0.09 roughly if you round it up. Okay, super, super lightweight. Can I hear about the rough price point? Is there like a range or do you know that yet? We do. So we sell it right now for $349 and that's including the shipping. So we think that's pretty price competitive, especially if you think about what things at the other end of the spectrum are typically priced at. And so as a startup, when our volumes are relatively low, we're still able to make pretty decent margins pricing it at a very, what we think, competitive price point for most of our customers. Absolutely. Well, I think that the other products we just talked about are in the 2 to 5k range depending on which model you get Does there also is there a monthly subscription model or is there other MRR going on that or is it just the initial price? There will be. So we will always offer a free tier for these AI services. But within a given day, if you hit a call limit, then you have the option to pay on a monthly basis, on a monthly recurring basis, in order to lift that ceiling and access a higher call limit. So that's part of the service that we try to provide is we integrate all of these models, we abstract away the complexity. of thinking about which model you need to use given your question. You just ask the question and Noa figures that out. But we also abstract away the billing's complexity. So it's just one recurring monthly charge and you get access to all of these models and more, as we keep adding them. And in terms of our business model, it also makes us more durable long term. It smooths out our cash flows and... it ensures that we have sort of that deepened revenue relationship with each customer as well. make sense. Definitely. Well, um, let's see, the other jokes I would make. Okay, so I will have to tell you, my friend, that I got Lasik, and it's been one of the best things of my life. Thank you. Thank you. I, you know, played soccer and you have to like windshield wiper, glasses. I complained. I complained. I complained. I wore glasses from the age of five. Why would, I mean, you talked about kind of what's the value add, right? What's the impact to people? For those people like me who are like, I finally got rid of flood glasses in my life. Like, wait a minute, you're telling me, you know, maybe I'm not your buyer. That may absolutely be the case. But when you think about people who, they're on that precipice of value add, they really have to be convinced. What might you say to them? Am I absolutely not your buyer persona because of that factor? Like, how do you think about that? That comes up, you know, LASIK and people who are just not a fan of wearing glasses, perhaps. You know, and of course, it should be just at least made, you know, clear or clarified that the default frame does not have any prescription. There's no sort of prescription power in there, and so it's just a clear optical lens. You know, I'd say if the benefits of integrating generative don't outweigh the new hardware that you need to wear on a daily basis, or really whatever you need to wear it, it's totally each customer's call, then yeah, it's probably not the customer for these glasses. Now most of the world does wear glasses and that's increasingly so. Unfortunately, younger and younger years. I think because of the prevalence of screens and how it makes its way into education, more folks are wearing glasses earlier. So we do see that market increasing in size. And we're pretty bullish on glasses as a fashion statement, as a really interesting accessory to augment how we show up in the world. So we don't see that going away anytime soon, but absolutely. Like there's a lot of folks like yourself. if you had a certain age, I'm sure they're coming back for me. But, Oh, and that's so interesting. Do you also see kind of children, small humans as a use case as well? Do you already have products of that size? We don't, no, we don't. Kids are not on the roadmap right now. I think we wanna understand more about the ethics of that. I have two kids myself and I don't let them use any smartphones, tablets, and so I wouldn't wanna be giving another screen in front of a child's eyes. Of course, our devices are designed to have a very sparse, non-intrusive UX. And so it's not something that would just hoover up a kid's attention, let alone, you know, sell off their data to someone, you know, disreputable. So we do have that going for us, but even still I think we would need to wrap our minds and hearts around the ethics of having kids use a device like this. So right now it's optimized for adults. That makes sense. Well, and relate to the fashion statement, I think the ones you just showed were black. Do they come in different colors? They do, yeah, so there's black, there's a cool gray, and then a transparent model that we call H2O. H2O. OK, cool, cool. Well, and I think speaking to that kind of protecting or thinking about data, especially this is such rich multimodal data. Like, you know, I'm like, woohoo, data. When you think about kind of bad players in this game, and I'm certainly not saying that you're those, but when you think about, I mean, Or you could just go down this path on the bad side of surveillance being used as a control tool or data being sold to the wrong parties. For those people who have those fears right now, they're like, oh my gosh, do we need legislation? This whole negative spiral that goes. Could you speak to a little bit about how you all are thinking about that maybe? Yeah, for sure. So these devices are going to capture a lot of very sensitive data, probably the most sensitive data of your life. They're going to capture your life. And so I think it does require a lot of consideration in terms of which company you want to allow in front of your eyes. Because that's, you know, this is going to be real estate that almost every large tech company is going to start to try to grab. and convince you of. So that requires a lot of careful consideration and it's not just a product feature and price point consideration. It's, you know, there's other stuff, like you just mentioned. How was that data used? What's the reputation there? So that's sort of one thought I have. The way that we think about this is our business model is never oriented around harvesting and selling your data. Some companies are, but that's not us. And so... When we get to a point where we want to spin up that sort of AI personalization service, we're going to be doing that on servers that are assigned to each customer, and we will be giving each customer the keys. So we won't even be able to have access to your data. You will be able to view your own data and prune that, edit that, remove things that you don't want in there, and it's for your eyes only. always under your control. No one can get access to that, not us or anyone else if you don't want them to. So that's how we think about, it's almost like the way that you would place your assets into a bank account to be custodian there for your access and control. That's exactly how we think we have the responsibility to care for this very, very precious data and give you full control over it. And so that's how we think about it. Most companies think about it that way, but that's how we see it. Yeah, no, I dig this path. I think I talked to a lot of my family members who are not in tech and they're like, oh, blah, it's free. Blah, blah, it's free. And I'm like, if it is free, you are the product. Again, we have had this conversation so many times and yet it just doesn't compute. You know, I think a lot of end users, anyway, they're not in tech, so as it goes. But I think really thinking about how we think about the future of monetization models, how we... There's so many choices that you as the creators of these products get. Okay, any metrics of success that you're really proud of that you'd like to share? We'll talk about your other broader career at another point, but yeah, related to Brilliant Labs. Sure, yeah, well, it's specific to Brilliant Labs. we announced Frames a couple weeks ago. I know this will probably maybe air in a couple of months from now, but we, you know, this is shortly after we've announced Frames and we've done no paid, you know, ads, you know, no paid marketing and we've more than sold out, you know, everything we bought to sell it's been, you know, we've caught a tiger by the tail and it's been a bit of a wild ride. So. You sold out your whole inventory for the year in a few months. Is that what you're saying? Okay bought a lot and we bought a lot. It wasn't like two units. Yeah. Do you, any chance you can share that number or the range of what that number is? It's in the millions, you know, we're keeping that tight to our chest, but it's, yeah. Certainly for an early-stage company like us, it's significant, it's really meaningful. Yeah, you know, it gives us a bit of that signal too, not only who is interested and price point sensitivity and all that good stuff, but just the fact that there is a bit of this zeitgeist moment that we're tapping into a moment here where the excitement around generative AI and the excitement around embodied AI, how hardware can allow you to bring generative AI into your life in a whole new way, that there's this fever pitch. And I think our timing's been good. I think the form factor's been right. And so we've tapped into something. So there's a lot of clear signal there beyond the financial metrics. Yeah, well, congratulations. That's a lot of love to say as much. When you think about that buyer persona, do you have a home like Mike, Tanya? Like, do you think about, you know, is it a singular person you think is your target buyer? Do you have a sense of that? I mean, we have a sense of what the data is telling us, but, you know, I can hear the whole marketing world sort of shaking their head at us when I say, we had an idea, but nothing fully formed. No. You know, we had an idea that they would be people who were more technical early adopters. didn't need to be developers, but certainly were not scared of early adopter technology, or being early adopters of technology. We knew there would be people mostly centered in the US, a bit in the EU and UK. Japan's actually been a large market for us too, so that's been cool. And we knew that they would be between the ages of 20 and 35 to 40. But all of that, there's a lot of different personas that fit within that pretty, you know, wide range. So no, the short answer is we kind of felt like there's more for us to learn at this early stage than there is for us to prejudge about who's going to buy it and who we want to buy it. And so we kept it pretty open. You know, there've been large enterprises, large industrial players, you know, fast moving consumer goods players, and then, of course, a lot of researchers. folks in university, indie hackers, middle school software developers, all kinds of folks who just have a crazy idea. And this is the first time that there's an open platform for them to take the open source model trained on their data that they could integrate with frame and like wear that around the world, suddenly have that as part of their life and like share that with their friends. And so it's, you know, we're at the stage where we really are conscious of the fact that we have more to learn than we have to sort of dictate. And so we've kept things pretty open with intention. Yeah, that's so cool. Well, and as I think about kind of the users, and I mean, I love your example with like cat and boba and then printing their own, like this is a very relatively technical user, but also thinking about, do you feel like people will productize things a la hugging face to like make their own thing that suddenly people want those models? Like, do you see that as a kind of community flywheel that's gonna happen or already happening? Absolutely. We're already seeing it in our Discord server. We have about 7,000 folks. Hopefully, by the time this airs in the summer, we'll have more than that. But it's a community of developers who are hacking and building, originally for our first product monocle, but our documentation is out for frame, and so they're already starting to build stuff for frame. And it's just this sort of bubbling creative community. around what we do and we love it. We feed off that energy for sure. And we do see, you know, almost like the way Raspberry Pi is sort of this go-to for all kinds of experimentation and computing, like you've got, whatever your idea is, whatever your proprietary data set or model or whatever you're trying to do, you know that you've got capable hardware in a Raspberry Pi. And so, We had this vision for frame and the hardware that we do to be like a Raspberry Pi for AI, that we wanted it to be the first time that anyone with a crazy idea could count on the fact that there's a way it could be embodied. There's a way it could find its way into your lived moment because that's how it sees the world through your eyes. So that's definitely part of our vision. Yeah. Wait, and did you say Raspberry Pi for AI? Have you like coined that? Is that your marketing team has approved? yeah, it's, uh, you know, I have to check with the team if it's approved, but, uh, I'll go ahead and make a decision. Uh, yeah, totally. Raspberry Pi for AIs internally. That's something that we kind of throw around all the time. Yeah. Are there kind of surprises or challenges you've met along the way that really came out of left field or, you know, surprise? There's one thing about ideating something, there's another thing to build it. Are the things that really shocked you or you'd like to share about surprises? Oh, surprises. I mean, there's a lot that's been very hard about making it, but surprises is a good question. pandemic was a surprise. We certainly did not expect that, but I think that came as a surprise to everyone, so not worth mentioning. Well, but did that affect the supply chain and especially as a hardware product? Yeah. that was a wild period because the pandemic happened and factories shut, and then it was sort of a game of whack-a-mole for a while where factories would open in one place, they'd stay closed in another place, and then maybe the one that was open would go into sort of like a partial, or like a phased open. So half the workforce would show up because of health and safety considerations. And then the other one would open up, but then their city would lock down. So it was hard to sort of get things moving, if you will, that drew out timelines. But then, like, there was this period where supply chains went nuts. You couldn't ship anything or get anything out of ports for weeks, for months. And that drove up costs across the board. Fuel prices were crazy. You know, they dropped initially and then they came back with a vengeance. And alongside that, components, we would have lead times out 52 weeks for like commodity stuff. You know, this is nothing specialized. So if you're a large company with an established procurement sort of department and relationships with these distributors and components, you can find creative ways to get to the top of the line or place million unit orders and have them prioritize that. But as a startup who doesn't have those volumes and relationships, all we have is the power of persuasion. And at that time, it didn't work very well. So that was difficult. Yeah, that was a surprise we didn't expect. But you know what, it helped us forecast and plan better. All these crises yield victories. And Part of the victory is growth in capacity, and our team grew immensely through that. I'm trying to think though, like to your question, are there surprises? No, no, it's such a good question. about their own journeys, and I think we all hit different hurdles or pivots that we, you know, you don't know what's gonna happen. So... You know, one surprise that we've kind of delighted in, we started the company with a crazy idea and a vision, and we think that we're a couple of smart people doing it, but there was so much that we didn't know. None of us had built AR devices before. None of us had done... hardware that is optimized or tuned to interface with AI models. The whole thesis was untested. So there were just so many things that were unknowns. And it's kind of like Frodo taking the ring to Mordor. Like we kind of felt that way when we embarked on the journey. But we kind of went with faith and with vision and like this childlike hope. in a better tomorrow, that like if we're successful here, it could just make the world a better place. And we genuinely were that optimistic and hopeful and you know people might even say naive but like we think there's beauty in that. We think we need more of that in this world and so we've been surprised that like Frodo keeps surviving and like getting closer to Mordor. Like we keep looking around they're like wow we survived the pandemic and like we did Monocle. people seemed to like it and we got some press around that and, oh, whoa, we did frame. That worked out. We figured out the form factor and the optics and how to make glasses. We didn't know how to make glasses. We just kind of figured it out. We always start with first principles. We're really big on physics and the first principles of the physics, but also the first principles of use case and the existential purpose. That theme keeps coming up here. And so it's kind of given us this well-honed sense at this point that there's a North Star here. Like, if we focus on purpose, if we focus on first principles, then like, you're gonna get closer to Mordor. Maybe that's actually, maybe that's the extent to the metaphor because we hope for not, we're not gonna wanna go to Mordor. So we just keep surviving. We keep shipping products and like, people keep taking notice. So it's going well. But that's been delightful. Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, and before I ask you but kind of more perfunctory your career stuff, which you're such a philosophical person for being a hard person. You know, when you look at, we're talking about the trees right now, right? We're talking about singular products. When we look at the forest and kind of the future of your part of the field and where this kind of product is pursuing, what... What do you think the next, or like the big part of this adventure is? We talked a little bit about context, but like, I try to talk about like five, 10 years and people are like try to talk about six months, but your part of the field. Where do you see it heading? Hmm. I think the foundation model, I can get a little bit technical here. It's not, I mean, it's not terribly technical. Yeah. I think the foundation model space is gonna become increasingly commoditized. I think folks at that layer are gonna be throwing more money at procuring data that can train the model for marginal sort of gain relative to what other models, both closed and open, will be able to do. And it'll become... a very expensive but just still very important, you know, lifelong task that those models have undertaken, that journey. But they'll be, I mean, they'll be the modern utilities. They'll be like our modern power companies or telcos. So that's a very valuable part of the stack. I think that amidst that commodification, it's going to be data. Like it's not going to be about the model, it's going to be about the data you have access to. That's going to be the big deal in this whole space. And for us, that's part of why we're in hardware, is not only do we believe that that's a meaningful way to shoehorn into one's life and make AI embodied for the first time in history, but for us to start gathering the most precious data of one's life, your life. like the body of data that we would be able to gather and custodian for you is your life's data. And so we think that's gonna become a very valuable asset, but of course, training an AI on that, we think that the greatest, where I think our field is headed and the greatest value to the individual there is gonna be an AI that understands you at times better than you understand yourself. And so we're excited to play a part in ushering that future in. It's almost like you're building your own therapist. If I can, yeah. Okay, I thought you were gonna pooh that idea. Okay, interesting. Well, yeah. so much of the world, you know, is in need of wise counsel at the right moments and mindfulness when we know when you're feeling you need it and, you know, good practice day in, day out. And yeah, I just think not everyone can afford great therapy, but everyone certainly needs that sort of parrot on the shoulder. that can help you live your day a little more mindfully. Hmm. I love the parrot. I'm culturally Catholic, so it's always angel and devil. Um, okay. Okay, cool. Well, I love hearing about that. And I certainly agree with you. I think, uh, data and models, um, serve a huge part in our future. Um, but, uh, for people who live, this podcast is called Your AI Roadmap. So it's not only about the products, which is phenomenal, but it's also people listening to this being like, he has the coolest job ever. Uh, how did he get here? How do I get into this Yeah. So could you tell us kind of about how your career path got you here? Yeah, I said boring earlier, but it's, I actually find this segment very interesting. If I'm listening to other people's lives, not my own, but you know, I, I'm, I'm your kind of prototypical generalist. So it's sort of unremarkable, my journey, I started out, you know, studying economics. did economics for my undergrad and grad school, did an internship at Microsoft. That was my first stint in technology. Probably at the worst time in Microsoft's history to be at Microsoft, but there's a lot of learning there. I got to see what Microsoft culture felt like at the time and how they thought about products. So I came out of that with still, despite where Microsoft was at that time, with this really... sort of firm sense of like the power of a technology company. And I started to think more deeply about, this was during grad school, I started to think more deeply about the things that amplify human potential and therefore the things I should commit my own life to. Because I really was excited about this idea that we human beings, not only can we, we can like spawn new life, like ourselves, like. To me still like I have two kids and it blows my mind that That that like new life can just be spawned that way and it's yeah. Anyway, that's like so magical but We can do something similar when it comes to products and experiences but especially those that amplify, you know the potential of our fellow species and So I zeroed in on three things one is faith but You know, you can't make a career out of that. I'm a Baha'i. So you come from a culturally Catholic background, you know, I'm a Baha'i, so the Baha'i faith, it's beautiful, there's no clergy. And so, you know, there's no clerical practice for me to go into as a Baha'i. And so that was, you know, aside from just trying to live my life to the best as a Baha'i, there's no career there. The second one I zeroed in on was education. That education can really tap into the potential of the human being. nurture certain qualities and help to amplify those in one's life. But for whatever reason, I just felt like I wouldn't make the most patient teacher in the world. And so I crossed that off. But the third one was technology. Technology can be this presence in one's life that allows you to kind of be this like human butterfly effect on the world where like you could have a thought or say or speak a word type a few lines of code. You can operationalize something in a simple way, locally, but you can have impact on billions of lives in milliseconds globally, that each one of us could have a butterfly effect, and it's because of technology. And so I was like, wow, that one. Like, I'd wet my appetite at Microsoft, and I just was fascinated by what... tech could do and over time started to appreciate that technology has started to feel more like an extension of our humanity, our thoughts and our actions and interactions, that these things help us, you know, they have values embedded within them. They're not amoral and you know, as such they are extensions of us out in the world. And so that also fascinates me. But anyway, I'm kind of digressing here. That's how I found my way into this. And at least in my case, I just had to start my own companies. And that was the way that I had to learn. I think everyone's different, but I've always been this way. I needed to sort of, when I arrive at the swimming pool, I need to just jump in the deep end and kind of figure out, you know, how to like make my way through the water from there. There's something about the risk of it that is motivating to me and fun and interesting. I just find the learning curve steep and that's what I really, really want out of my life's work. So, yeah, I had to just start my first company out of grad school. I was actually set to stay at the school I was at doing a PhD. I'd gotten into the program and found my advisor and I was set to matriculate the following fall and start my PhD. But at the last minute, I declined and started my first company instead. A couple of companies later, went to go work at Apple. Apple is an amazing company. I learned a lot. Not just about how Apple makes products and thinks about that, but how Apple manages the supply chain, which is sort of this unsung hero of the Apple story. Is how it does. supply chain and operations, but also like retail, you know, things like that. Like, how do you do a retail experience and design incentives for retail store managers and employees and, you know, make it all this harmonious win-win for both the company and the employees as well as the customers and really show product in the right light. So there was just so much good learning that I loved just soaking myself in at Apple. But maybe the most important thing is culture. Apple, sort of unlike Microsoft, Microsoft was culture on display, but it was because they had not intentionally considered what their culture should be and how that should manifest in teams and in products. But Apple thinks very deliberately about culture. They literally teach this course when you enter the company called What Makes Apple Apple? And it tries to distill some of the core elements of Apple's founding and who it is and why it exists and therefore how it thinks about what it does. And you know, the whole notion of a thousand no's for every one yes, focusing and simplifying, seeing around corners, all of this stuff is taught very intentionally within the company. And so that's when I switched on this little light within me as well and say, wow, a great company isn't just about what it does. And more importantly, it's probably about its culture. and the people it welcomes in its doors and how they create that culture. So I then left Apple and started Brilliant Labs, my current company. Well, and that's such an interesting segue. I mean, how do you think about culture? And I mean, we've spoken most of the time about product and building and that vision. But when did you start the company? This was circa was 2019, right before the pandemic. Wow, okay, so 2019 and how big is the team today? We're small, so we're six, seven people on the team. seven people, okay? Okay, I was not expecting, and what type of roles are those around you then? Yeah, so I'm the CEO of the company, so I kind of conduct the orchestra. One of my co-founders leads all of industrial design and mechanical engineering. So everything physical about the devices that we make. Another co-founder leads hardware engineering. And so that's electronics, that's firmware. We've got another member of the team that leads software engineering, both the mobile app client side as well as... the AI agent and API integrations. And then we have two other colleagues who manage operations and marketing. So I guess that's about six of us on the core team. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. Well and how did you, assemble the team get capital for or is it bootstrapped like from 2019? This is 2024 we're in, like, what are those steps that got you here? So we initially did not form an entity, did not raise capital. We got the founding team together, spent the time to build a relationship as co-founders. And part of that process wasn't just going and getting coffee together, but it was actually sort of sketches, 3D prints, design research. a lot of user interviews, debates about where the space is at and what the big ideas are, where we're going as an industry and how people are not yet served but trying to read those tea leaves. And so we spent a good eight months just doing that. Like there's a lot of deep thinking and research and prototyping and testing. And through that, we kind of learned what it was to communicate well together. to listen to each other. And then finally when we felt that there was the germ of an idea that we thought had legs and something had crystallized there, we knew we still had a lot of learning to do, a lot to learn, but there was the germ of something. We then formed the entity. We raised first capital from angel investors and some early stage VCs. And then we started the process of prototyping. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, and as you think about kind of, I often ask people, you know, how do people get into jobs like theirs, but from your point of view, it's probably more like who are the next hires or what do you look for in future team members? Do you use a certain skillset? Is there a certain ethos? Like when you think about those next, let's say 10, 20 team members. Yeah, we do, there's a few things that we've come to really appreciate, the sort of qualities that people have to have. Technical excellence has to be there, and that will vary based on what they do. We'll give you an example. We were hiring for a head of marketing role a little while back, and interviewing a bunch of candidates. The one that we ended up going with, and he's still currently our head of marketing, we chose him in part because he had a deeply technical skill to be able to... create flows using stability AI, stable diffusion, to create, to generate novel visual content. But then also he's got a background in CG and VFX. So he could also sort of do a lot with video and imagery that was shot. And so that kind of like core content, like technical content capability. we felt that was really important for our head of marketing to have. Because that would allow us to tighten the cycles of creativity on the marketing side to really have a lot tighter control and iteration in terms of our messaging and how we were showing that. Most folks with marketing, they'll maybe come with a more general sort of social media or like, you know, other kinds of background. But when it comes to actually making content, they have to farm that out. you know, freelancers or whatever. But we wanted to do the opposite. So that has to be there for everything. Someone needs to bring a core technical skill. But beyond that, that's sort of the necessary, but the sufficient piece are certain personal qualities, ways of thinking and communicating and just being as a person that jive well with how we work. One is humility. We really do feel that people should come to the table feeling very comfortable to voice an opinion, an idea, but that they have to be detached from that once they voice it. That where we end up as a team, regardless of what we're discussing, it's gonna be the process of how we talk, how we brainstorm and ideate that leads us to that spark of truth or that direction that we choose. And that in order for that to be a fruitful process, each person that shares an idea must share it with humility, that they must be detached from the idea once it's given to the group. Because the reality is that the great breakthrough things are never one person's idea. It's always a whole bunch of insights that are recombinated, that are refined to become something. And if we're all hanging on so tight onto our thing, then you're never going to be able to, you know, form a new alloy that ends up being what you choose. The component pieces will never fuse properly. And so it'll just undermine a team's ability to innovate and worse, you know, the team will start arguing with each other and, you know, get resentful and all that bad stuff. So humility, detachment from one's ideas, those are important. A really deep sense of purpose is another one. So we look for people that, like I mentioned existential purpose at the level of products before, but we look for people who seek for purpose in what they do, like both the company and why it exists, but also their role at the company and then like the individual task. Like why does this matter? We always want people to be asking that. There is, especially in a startup, there is no busy work. Every single thing that we contribute our time and energy to has to matter. And we need to know. what that is. We need to be able to ask ourselves, we need to be able to ask each other, and we need to be able to know. So, you're always seeking for purpose. That's a quality that we, you know, to the point where like, you know, you tell someone, hey, like get this done. And of course we value people getting it done, but we also want them to say like, yeah, great. You know, what's the angle here? Like, what are we after here? What's the objective? It's great because it means that we're always. understanding on a deeper level why we do things. So that's another thing. There's so many more but maybe just one more to offer is a deep comfort with ambiguity. So people need to, you know, startups are messy and people are always wearing multiple hats and things move very fast. So people need to feel deeply comfortable with that. They need to kind of needs to make them smile because you know... they need to roll up sleeves and just get stuff done amidst that. So we've encountered a lot of people who come from larger companies where you don't have that kind of messiness, where someone's role is very cleanly specified to them in like a bullet point job description and you've got your KPIs and your OKRs and you're meeting with your manager and you know, it's like it's as close to a gear and a machine as you can get. But startups can't do it. You can't function that way. startups are more like an amoeba, you know, like things are very organic and they slosh around and bump into each other. But it's a fun ride. And so we need people to feel a sense of opportunity, both for themselves, but also like for the organization amidst that ambiguity. So yeah, there's a lot of those sort of, you know, soft factors, those human qualities that we think really make people excellent. in a role like this, but it's not easy to hire for. Yeah, I hear like a deep intensity in the way you think about your company, your team, the ethos. I've heard Airbnb talk about their early stage. Like you had to say if you had a year left, to live, why you'd work at Airbnb, which I am like, that's drinking the Kool-Aid, you spend it with your family. Are you kidding me? Yeah, yeah. But does that resonate with you, the kind of deep intensity you feel about your company, the stage it's at, the team members that join? Does that resonate? Yes, the purpose, the intentionality, absolutely. Would I frame it like if you have one year left to live? I would... I'd probably be inclined to agree with you like, wow, she's got a year left. Please go be with your loved ones. But I think the spirit which underlies that question, I agree with. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, we don't know how long we'll be alive. And it could be a hundred years from now. It could be tomorrow. But we don't know. And so, like, in the time that we have left, however long that time is, if we're not spending it doing something which matters for humanity, then what are we really doing? Because the day that we die, we'll look back on how we spent our time. you know, that might just sit with us. It will, you know, we'll wonder why did I spend so much time going through motions when I didn't deeply believe in what I was doing or didn't really understand why. So it matters, at least to me it matters, and that's sort of how we try to craft the company as well. Yeah, yeah, I certainly get the sense of that. Well, and I think as people consider paths into entrepreneurship, and I think you're similar to me in this kind of risk taking or run at it, kind of jump into the deep end approach, not everyone feels that way. A lot of people are far more tentative at the side of the pool. In that spectrum. If people are considering paths into entrepreneurship, what advice might you give them about taking those different steps? Or I love this eight month of ideating and really crystallizing. Do you have any mantras or advice you give for folks considering that path? Yeah, no mantras, but the advice is definitely take that time. I mean, both to know the people better, who you are proposing to collaborate with as co-founders, as partners, that relationship is because it's going to be a lot of ups and a lot of downs. So those relationships are vital. But also just to understand more deeply the problem space. take a few beats to try to deepen understanding and really sharpen the why before just jumping headfirst into it and trying to think through those, you know, frankly very fundamental questions after you're already doing it because, you know, it'll be near impossible to have the head space to do the depth of thinking then than when you're at the outset. That's very important. But the other aspect is there's this notion of Founder market fit or founder product fit and I do think that's real It doesn't necessarily mean that the founders need to have 50 years of experience or 20 years of experience doing a widget before they start a company to make a widget It doesn't necessarily mean that because sometimes bringing new thinking and doing something in an unconventional new way like that's the genius, right? So Instead it's you know Are you collectively, do you have the technical skill set to be able to ask the right questions and engage in a path of learning? To be able to, from first principles, at least in our case, identify the right direction and execute. It's not knowing exactly what needs to be done and how to do it at the outset, but it's do you have the right mix of qualities and technical ability and culture, frankly, to engage in that process? So that's, yeah, I mean, that's sort of one bit of advice that I would give. The other advice, of course, is that not every company needs to be venture backed. That entrepreneurship is a very wide and can look many different ways. It's a diverse field. And if I can even call it a field, many people will not need outside capital. You're just like, you're just doing something that people find genuinely useful or meaningful that they're willing to pay for, up front. and you make enough margin from that to service your own costs and maybe even grow the business or at least sustain the business and it's a great livelihood for you and your family and your community but also you know you find great meaning in that, you find great purpose in that. I think that most entrepreneurship is of that kind. You know I come from a family of immigrants and most of the folks in my family certainly have engaged in that kind of entrepreneurship. and I think that's beautiful. I think there's the minority of companies that are just doing something where speed or scale or some function of the two demand the involvement of outside capital, which puts you on a different path. You're suddenly playing a different game and there's pros and cons to it. Your velocity is going to be more intense. The expectations on you as well. There's going to be multiple stakeholders looking over your shoulder and asking prying questions about the business There will be times when you'll need to kind of think through the lens of shareholders And appeasing those folks as much as you appease customers. Maybe not as much but They might want it as much but like, you know making sure that you're appeasing them in addition to your customers. I'll say that And and the fundraising process is a slog And everyone who's raised venture capital has felt that before so I guess yeah advice would be know at the outset Whether or not you're walking down path A or path B, you know the venture funded path or not and If you really don't need to raise capital for this business Please do not because giving away an arm and a leg to outside shareholders And having them sort of breathing down your neck for the remainder of the business's life. It is not fun Own as much of your business as you can, ideally 100%. And don't let other people tell you how to run that business. You know how to run that business. And that's frankly the ideal path of entrepreneurship. You are so succinct and I am bootstrapping myself. So I couldn't agree more. I get investors in my DMs and I have no interest. Thank you. It's not everyone's path. As you mentioned, there are many, many paths to it, but I dig it. Well, is there any last something that you'd like to mention before we close out? Um, yeah, I think, you know, just maybe on a more philosophical note, we're all living in this really amazing, beautiful time. I think there's a lot of fear in the air around AI and these new technologies, but I'm always trying to encourage people try to temper some of that fear with a bit of optimism as well. That there's important questions to consider without a doubt, but there's also a lot of bounding possibility to this new age. And, you know, just like, you know, when we were living in 2007 and 2008, and the iPhone had just launched, and most of us still own BlackBerrys, or we still own PalmPilots, or Nokia, you know, feature phones, and we didn't quite appreciate the moment that we were living in. And it's only, you know, however many years later that we're like, wow, that little iPhone of 2007, that thing really changed so many things. I think we're living in that, this is like 2007 all over again, but it's at an exponentially greater level. And I don't think, it's actually impossible for all of us to fathom that. It literally is impossible, but it is no less real. So I think it's worth taking stock of that and just appreciating how special that is, to be a human being alive at this moment and what the possibilities are for all of us in it. So that's the one thing that I maybe leave people with. I dig it. I dig it. Well, thank you. Well, if people want to hear more about you or follow up with you and the company, where should they go? Yeah, so you can check us out at brilliant.xyz. Brilliant is spelled the usual way,.xyz. That's our website. On socials, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, we're at Brilliant Labs AR, all one word. And then you can always find me on LinkedIn as well. So feel free to reach out. Awesome, we'll link those in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for your time and sharing your story and expertise. I'm excited to see where your company Thanks so much, Joan. Great to be here. Hey folks, jumping in to say that we have season two in the works, I bet you know some phenomenal guests. Maybe it's you, maybe it's your colleague. Maybe you have a mentor that you're like, my gosh, she needs to be featured, get her on the podcast. Because of the amount of interest around the world for this podcast, we would love your recommendations for podcast guests. we're looking for, senior level folks who are working in AI, who have great stories to share, please. We're looking for low ego, we're looking for curious and thoughtful and really inclusive. So if you know that awesome person or would like to nominate yourself, A -O, I'm down for that, please go to yourairoadmap.com / podcast guest. Again, that's yourairoadmap .com / podcastguest We would love to hear your ideas and constructive thoughts. Please do not put Mickey Mouse in. I cannot get Mickey Mouse nor does Mickey Mouse do AI projects to my knowledge unless you work at Disney and you're gonna tell me otherwise, which case I would love to hear it and again, love to learn and grow with you. Okay, jokes aside, can't wait to hear about some more guests and people in your network to share with our audience. Okay, thank you so much. Oh gosh, was that fun. Did you enjoy that episode as much as I did? Well, now be sure to check out our show notes for this episode that has tons of links and resources and our guest bio, etc. Go check it out. If you're ready to dive in to personalize your AI journey, download the free Your AI Roadmap workbook at yourairoadmap .com / workbook. Well, maybe you work at a company and you're like, hey, we want to grow in data and AI and I'd love to work with you. Please schedule an intro and sync with me at Clarity AI at hireclarity .ai. We'd love to talk to you about it. My team builds custom AI solutions, digital twins, optimizations, data, fun stuff for small and medium sized businesses. Our price points start at five, six, seven, eight figures, depends on your needs, depending on your time scales, et cetera. If you liked the podcast, please support us. Can you please rate, review, subscribe, send it to your friend, DM your boss, follow wherever you get your podcasts. I certainly learned something new and I hope you did too. Next episode drops soon. Can't wait to hear another amazing expert building in AI. Talk to you soon!