Speaker 2 (00:05.614)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

And everybody welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus with my usual suspect Grant Chappell. And today we've got a super exciting guest in Charles Brian Quinn. He's the CEO and founder of GreenZ. GreenZ has taken a super unique approach to autonomous mowing. I feel like whenever other people are zigging, they're zagging and they have a really cool approach. He's an exited founder. Charles, thanks for being on the show.

How's it going everybody?

Speaker 2 (00:33.686)
Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks, y'all.

Yeah, to kick things off, we'd love to just kind of get the origin story of, you you ran a company before this, you had an exit, and then you decided to jump into the autonomous mowing world. Sort of what was that journey and that path?

Yeah, so I am unique in that I joined a venture studio, which I would love to talk to you guys more about that model. And the real story is kind of funny. I love starting things. I've been starting businesses ever since I was little. And I was just serving on the board of a company I still owned. And I wanted to start a new company. So I came to my friend, my good friend and co-founder, David Cummings.

And I said to him, hey, I want to start a business. And I always have a list of 18 ideas, know, 17 of them, which are silly and stink, but, you know, maybe one good one. And so I came to him with this idea. It's this piece of software that I'd built repeatedly. I had previously done a professional services and it's the software that we built in my company and then company that we merged into. And it was sort of like traffic, air traffic control for, you know, professional services. And I never forget it. I was in the meeting with him and I said, here's, here's the one pager on it. Here's.

like you know the market and here's how we grow and it's growing market and he turns to me and he says it's a great idea but I the perfect idea for you outdoor robotics yeah and I was like I was yeah I was like huh

Speaker 3 (01:51.852)
How hard could these?

I said, first of all, you don't know anything, is my good friend David. And I said, you don't know anything about robotics. I was like, I don't know anything about robotics. And I was like, what, what do you like? Tell me more. You know, like I kind of laughed. I was like, this is interesting because he's done a lot of sales enablement and other things like that. And he said, you know, I know you, I know you love automating things. He's been in my house. I automate everything in my house. Love automation. He knows I love building software. That's my, my, my, my superpower and building teams that build software. He knows I love doing it in the physical world. A lot of the apps that we built in our.

you know.

previous company that I had owned was the Toto Toilet app, apps for Caterpillar, apps for the Navy, Whirlpool, things that like the app and something in the physical world, which I really love. I love when software can touch the physical world. So he knew I knew enough about that to be dangerous. And he said, look, we've made some investments in the green industry, which is the people who serve landscaping and lawn maintenance, and it's a massive industry.

massive market and he said, you know, I have this robot mower at home and I took it apart with my kid and there's no software on it. Meanwhile, I just got this Tesla and it's like getting better. He's like, how come there's no Tesla for mowers? And I was like, huh, that's a good question. Why is there none? Like, so that, that evening I went home and I think I stayed up all night researching Ross, the robotic operating system.

Speaker 3 (03:18.781)
He says, this is correct.

you know, I went and found, you know, all the Robo mowers and was like, maybe we build another Robo mower. And so I got obsessed, and I got so obsessed with it. I was like, well, we have to start a company in this space. And so what was interesting about the venture studio model is we decided to start a company, outdoor robotics, something in the green industry. That was it. And so we shook hands and started the company and I put in some money. put in some money and I can talk more about the venture studio model, but the Genesis was something to help.

in the green industry and something in outdoor robotics. And the reason is because the Venture Studio has three things that they believe in. The first is team. They believe in the founder and the ability for that founder to attract talent. They believe in not a meme, which means there's a lot of companies build things that are vitamins, that are very good. And 10 % better is something, but people don't buy 10 % better. They buy painkillers. If you have pain, you will buy it. And then as soon as you have it, there's no way you're

it up. So we talk about getting in the path to revenue, reducing labor costs, you know, other things like we knew it had to be that and then stream. So team stream not a meme. That's the you remember remember the things. And the stream would be it has to be in a giant market. It has to be in something that's growing like so that in five to ten years you'd be like, yeah that makes sense. And so you know outdoor robotics to us just felt like a big industry and in the green industry we knew the other thing we loved about is that people answer the phone like

I'm in software sales, and I know you guys are too professional services sales is very hard if you call somebody They're gonna be like it's another firm, but if you call some green industry they pick up the phone They're like hey, how's it going?

Speaker 3 (05:01.612)
Yeah, do you need your lawnmowed? That's the thing is that's they get all their customers is actually because their customers call them.

Totally. So you answer the phone, you're looking for things that are solutions. So anyway, I'll stop there because I could ramble forever. But the Genesis story is in Adventure Studio. And then what we did next was kind of fun. I I basically sat in a phone room and just called every commercial landscaper and they told me exactly what to build. So I'll stop there. sure.

This is great.

And so, Grant, Charles, starting in a startup studio, I know you've had this concept of a startup studio for Glassboard for a number of years. What's your perspective on that three-pronged approach?

Yeah, no, I think the crazy part is that it reaffirms my thesis that it's all about the right executive, right? So Charles, they bet on you before they even had an idea or a problem to solve. And that was the thesis of that studio. And then you guys found the right problem to solve and got the CEO excited about it, which I couldn't tell how excited you were telling that story. There's no hint that you might really be obsessed with this problem, which is what you want, which is so different in other studios that actually have companies come into them with a founder, with a problem to solve, with an idea.

Speaker 3 (06:09.09)
and they want to help someone go do it that wasn't able on their own to go raise capital. I just think that's such a backwards way of doing a studio and 80 % of the studios I talk to are that way. You apply, like if I had an idea and a small startup and I couldn't raise capital on my own, I'd apply to join the studio to go get help doing that. That doesn't make any sense to me because...

And for a little bit more insider baseball on sort of the person, if I can toot my horn and theirs as well, the actual thing they look for is someone who's had some success, but maybe has a chip on their shoulder, which is definitely me. I have had an exit, let's just say that if I ever get a boat, I'm going to name it Never Satisfied Two, because I think it's a great name for a boat.

I'm never satisfied. so it doesn't really matter what happens. I'm always going to be like, you know what, I wish we could have done that better. Right. And so I think that there's, there's, there's something that they look for in people that, you know, have had either success or mild form of it, or had a couple at bats and didn't, they actually have said, you know, like, we like people who've had some failure, like, yeah, next time are like, yeah, I know exactly how I'm going to do this next time. Like, we're going to go bigger.

So, you know, the difference for me was too, like I had an exit where I had, you know, the proceeds came to me, you know, like, you know, and that's great, right? Like, you know, everybody would want that. But, you know, I didn't have one where everybody won. I had to like go and give money to, you know, some of our top execs and stuff, whereas I can venture like everybody gets to win. Right. And so that was kind of interesting is that we got to try this. But yeah, there's there's other things they look for. The other fun one is that and they experiment with other entrepreneurs in the studio.

and I'll never forget it, they had a younger guy who didn't have a lot of experience and I hope I'm not speaking poorly, but when I started, I hired somebody pretty instantly. And I remember the guy was like, how did you do that? And I was like, what do you mean, hired somebody? I was like, I just wrote up an offer letter and I used the Atlanta Venture Studio letterhead. I just put their logo on the top and sent him an offer letter. And he's like, but yeah, but how? Do you have to? And I was like, you just do it.

Speaker 3 (08:13.198)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:21.186)
You know, and it was like interesting because he's like, well, what if he doesn't work out? And I was like, well, I was firing. Like, yeah, so it is interesting. Like you have to have have done some of this before, which I think was fun for me. Like to going into the studio, it's great because I had, you know, a salesperson, finance, marketing, you know, and some product dev, like a little bit of that. And so like as a CEO, that's awesome because, you know, I'm used to like, you know,

What do you mean you're gonna fire him?

Speaker 2 (08:46.7)
just having a team of like, let's go. Like, what is the next biggest challenge? Like, let's go fix that. Right. And, you know, like there was plenty of dumb stuff I could have done. could have like set up the LLC and figured out a name and a logo, but we did none of that. Like none of that. So we didn't have a name for the longest time.

was going to say, so tell us about that story. So you lock yourself in a room, and you just start calling every single landscaping company in the country. Or what was that process like? And I think this is really good anecdotal advice for founders.

It is, because no one chooses to do this first and they all should.

yeah. Yeah, and it's tough too that the best book I've read on it is The Mom Test, which outlines the best way to do customer discovery. We've all read Eric Reeves' Lean Startup and some of the customer discovery and how you do these landing pages and things. But at the end of the day, what we did was there was a room, was phone-sized, it literally was a phone booth. So the easiest way to do it would be like I just looked outside because landscaper trucks drive along.

You know, like, so I would see one and I just write that down. And so there was a bunch of them that were like that, and then you could just obviously Google for them. And so I would just call them. And the very first thing I think I said was I said, Hey, I'm a Georgia Tech student. lied. And I said, I'm researching robotics. You know, do you do you use it? what's you know, you know, stuff like that. And the other one I got better with, like open into questions, I'd be like, the thing that would get a callback, like if I did get a

Speaker 2 (10:13.9)
voicemail or the recessionists is I would say, and I narrowed down as I would say, you hey, I'm I'm researching robotics or starting company. did say finally I was starting company. I'm with a company that has robotics. We are doing it to reduce your overall cost of labor. If I said that thing, because that's what they would tell me that's big challenge. The problem statement, they would call me back instantly and be like, what do you got? They're like, I knew this was coming. They would say, do you have what it is? And I would be like, knew what was coming.

probably.

And they go, you put an autopilot on my existing mowers, right? And I go.

Yes, we are.

I sure might be.

Speaker 2 (10:51.424)
I was like, no, we're going to build a robot. But he's like, don't build a robot. He's like, I got this brand behind me. You can see some mowers behind me if you're on video, not on the podcast. I love this mower. My dealer helps me. have loaners. I have mechanics who know how to fix this. They're like, do not build another robot. They're like, I want my existing mower to have self-driving autopilot. Just do that. So that's one of the things that we wrote down. And that's where we are now. That's what we do. But that was illuminating.

Now, and again, for hard tech too, it's kind of interesting because at some point you can't do a lot of you know, landing pages, right? At some point the rubber meets the road, something. Yeah, you got to demo it. And so our early demos were kind of fun because we very mocked up everything. We retrofitted a mower and kind of had it half do what we wanted to.

You act the demo.

Speaker 3 (11:38.986)
And you have like a remote control on a guy a box behind it with cameras driving it like this is this is our AI his name is Kevin he's over there the truck but like you know exactly

Yeah. But your remote control, we did have it, you know, go out and go straight and do a turn and come back. And then everybody was like, this is amazing. Like, you know, what if I could, you know, draw the map by mowing it? And we're like, write that down. Yep. So, you know, they told us exactly what to do, but they had to see it. So, you know, the entire company was is a lot of like these tests of like, what do we have to see, to believe it, and we had to prove it. And you know, could we could we go to a manufacturer and then pitch this?

Right.

Speaker 3 (12:12.568)
You know, that's been a lot of it. What I'm hearing that's so powerful isn't that you set out to build this thing, that you were gonna go write code or build hardware, and you also didn't tell people what they wanted. You were experienced enough to ask one or two clever questions and then shut up, which even I don't have enough patience to do most of the time. And this is so important for young and early founders to hear, or even experienced founders to do it better this time, is like...

active listening and decent question asking, will Trump be smart any day of the week?

Yes, very open-ended questions. My favorite one was like, if you could, what are your biggest challenges? And they would say things like traffic, good quality leads, they'd say finding labor. And I'd say, tell me more about that. And they're like, well, I got enough work, just can't find enough people to do it. And I was like, well, what kind of people? Just like dig in and say, OK, what if you had somebody who's super reliable that was always on? I mean, what if you had a robot? And they'd be like, well.

You know and then you go through that stuff and there is a little bit of like that's where the mom test is really good It's you talk about a lot about leading the witness because if you tell your mom you like I'm building a vegan cupcake app She's gonna be like honey. That's the best idea I've ever heard but if you go to like a customer and you say it they're like, know, would you pay a dollar for a vegan cupcake app? They're like, No, but I would pay for somebody to solve this headache I have right right not finding enough people in my business to run it And so that's where you get that's where the mom test does a really good job

I like that.

Speaker 1 (13:42.542)
I think that something I just love that you did that you're exactly right. You went out to customers. You did the customer validation. But the validation really wasn't validation. It was just, let's figure out what your problem really, really is. And then we'll start to mold our solution around it. think that oftentimes, as founders who just have the idea, like Grant mentioned, it launched the product. And now they're calling their customers. That's when they come up against a lot of friction. Not that I'm sure you go through friction in any sales process. But you're trying to fit a round peg into a square hole.

and it just doesn't really work, but you have to kind of mold it and things. Finding that product market fit, I feel like, takes longer. It'd probably take a lot more capital and iterations, because you started in a place that maybe you should have otherwise not started. You can eventually get there. think oftentimes you get there. But it seems like just your natural intuition to get to product market fit through the conversation with the client ahead of building the product or even naming the company was super insightful and clearly why the studio brought you in.

Right.

Yeah. And then, know, another fun story, and especially for hard tech listeners would be when there is a product that has the complexity. Like, so they describe a product that is very hard to do. Like, there's no way I could go to an OEM and like build some magic retrofit kit that retrofits all their mowers, although that is what they wanted. So what I did to them, our very first thing that we offered was very interesting. We went to the landscapers and I said, Hey, pay me a thousand dollars a month.

and this is before all the jokes about pre-revenue, we should have stayed pre-revenue, but I did it pretty instantly. And I said, pay me $1,000 a month and I'll go mow a piece of property with my prototypes that I didn't quite have yet. And I said, I'll mow as much as you want. I'll go be a sub for you. I'll be an OSHA contractor. And so I think they call this wizard of Oz or man behind the scenes, right? And so what we did was we bought a mower.

Speaker 3 (15:15.438)
for you.

Speaker 2 (15:31.838)
and we started retrofitting it and putting our tech on there and we would go out to the field and the first day we're out in the field and tapping on our laptops, sitting on the deck of the mower and we got cables running to it and we're like, go. It doesn't work and we're like, okay, let's redo this or it takes off and...

doesn't know miles an hour in a crooked line. Yeah.

Exactly. And we're like, okay, take that back. And we're like, shoot, it's getting late. Let's just mow it manually. So, you know, I'd have me and my guy just hired, you know, for however much we were paying him. And I'd be like, all right, we're landscapers today. Like, you in the truck and I'll do I'll go mow manually because it was worked manually. we just know and then we Yeah, and we just get all the data. And then it wouldn't work. And then so the next day we'd be like, hey, we have another day to do it or next week. We'll try it again. Or, you know, is a big, big enough site where we had like half of it. So we do the other half.

And so that's what we did for the first summer season was just eat our own dog food. And by the end we had it working, hit enter and it would work. And then we would send them a report, which was a manually report that we compiled. But it basically showed them what it would be like if they had a robotic worker. Now that customer's actually still with us and actually employs their own and now they have a whole portal and they order them from the dealer and they just spin them up. so they don't even, all we know is that they're using it and they're using it a lot and expanding a lot.

But it is interesting to be like they came from the prototype, know, man behind the middle or man behind the curtain, you know, version of that to where we are now. And that was a very early on for hard tech. think you have to do some of that, like that disbelief and like shoring up the things you can't do manually. You know, even Airbnb talks about this a lot, like what can you do manually now to like, you know, get the people to believe that the product will exist in a certain way and then you just layer it.

Speaker 3 (17:16.781)
Yeah, it's the Y Combinator quote. just just said this in a meeting in half an hour. So Deandre is gonna tell me to quit saying this quote, but it's like at the beginning do things that don't scale. Right? Yes. Go, go, don't waste the time, effort, and energy automating this thing that you know you will one day. Just go do it all manually and test drive with clients. People in software have done this for years. Before this was popular, people would literally sketch out web pages with pencils and pens and paper and pitch.

Yeah, and slide them across the table.

And hey, you click that button, this is slide six. And just keep sliding the fake website to the other person. Today, you can use Figma in 10 minutes and build a fake website instantly and then you can tell Figma to turn that into code that generates a real website, which is amazing. But in hardware, it's still really hard. So what you do is you get cardboard and you cut it out, and like hey, the box is gonna be about this big, you put it on the table. And then you're like, you know, you're gonna turn it on and I'm gonna tell you what happens. You know, I'll pour the coffee for you, this is the coffee. the coffee's gonna come out here just like this, was that fast enough?

because you're saying they're timing yourself, the internal bruise going, and you do these fake live demos with potential customers or your client of your dev firm like me, and you're just doing this to elicit response. Did they smile? Did they giggle? Was this the right time? Was this too slow? Are they impatient? And one of my favorite fallacies is it's better not to be too close to reality if you're not there, because uncanny valley sucks, right? Interesting. Either make it pretty decently fake, or you've got to fake it all the way.

Because clients will get really upset in the middle. Ooh this feels not quality enough like no I'll just make it a cardboard that will never judge me because we're just learning

Speaker 2 (18:47.374)
I think that's interesting that you did. you send them our first reports that we sent them, they were like, you know, we don't really care about number of incidents or whatever. It's acreage. if you get it done, acreage per hour. And so like that's always been a like it's always front and center on there. Like we had all these ideas about like, don't you want to see where they parked? like, you know, like also they're like data and they're like, no, no, no, acres per hour. Yeah. And so we're like, Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

and how many maintenance requests per month.

other

O'Reilly-Fleck Another fantastic story, which, again, you're just an example of one of these best practices. DoorDash, if you think about the company, they're worth several billion dollars at this point. The first DoorDash orders was a website. That was doordash.com, or whatever it was, back in the day. And if you called this number, you called the founder of DoorDash.

And it's his cell phone in the car as he was delivering other orders.

Speaker 1 (19:35.394)
He was delivering other orders. Which is fantastic. You gotta start small. That's right. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm curious, on the hard tech side of things, what's like the science or the really cool stuff behind the actual tech that you guys have now today live in the field for Green Sea?

Nice.

In a heart attack, right?

Speaker 2 (19:54.764)
Yeah, so I like to tell people that we're systems integrators. know, like if you used to build a PC a long time ago or maybe still do, there's all these parts and they work great. There's robotics cameras that have been great. The self-driving car industry has been wonderful for our business. We do off-road autonomy. And so there's a ton of rugged, reliable sensors that work in industrial and warehouse and other things. We assemble them.

Right. And we certify them. They're part of our robotic ready program that manufacturers now join, which by the way, existed, but you know, is something that again, like in the early days we never had. Right. And we had only one partner doing it with us and we were retrofitting it. But now we have this robotic ready program. So the sensors all work with our software and our software is the secret sauce that makes it all work. We're very good at outdoor coverage. We're very good at the mowing. And I believe in another thing that I very much believe in is you got to hyper specialize.

And that's one thing that I've done in my previous companies. And I just feel like you got to know and be good at one thing. And that's how you get very big. And it's very counterintuitive because people think you have to be good at a lot of stuff to get big. But I believe in true hyper specialization, like saying no to a lot of things and just going. So we are very hyper focused right now on zero turn mowing, which is a big form of like almost all commercial mowers have zero turn mowers. Yep. They're all behind us.

You know, we don't do, we don't do push, we don't do robo, we don't do any of these others. We just do zero turns and we're very good at it. We know exactly how to turn. And it does open us up to when we are ready, like our customers are pulling us to say like, the next one you got to automate is X or this one. And I think that it also does give you an advantage when you do that hyper specialization. But I would say our specialist offices in software, our software is phenomenal. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. Outdoor coverage, outdoor planning, all that.

It does.

Speaker 3 (21:46.834)
Breaking that apart from your secret sauce of software, one of the things that I love to dig into in connected devices, which autonomous motors are connected device, you are taking physical input, processing, going to physical output, and the whole phrase of garbage in, garbage out matters, which is why you have your readiness program that you guys certify. What kinds of data do you have to have as a minima to get in? This is where I'm curious. Are you like, I have to have RTK, I have to have...

LIDAR or what is your minimum area to entry and then what is your Rolls Royce look like? Because the mowing companies will give you all the sensors that exist.

Yeah, so grant you can join our robotic ready program for you. It's only half a million bucks. I'm teasing. I love it.

Always be pity other videos

All right.

Speaker 2 (22:36.642)
There you go. we, at a minimum, we do have a couple of slides on this, because I do enterprise sales to all the OEMs and I try and get them to join our program. But at a minimum, we need left wheel, right wheel control. And that's actually pretty hard to do. you know, step number one is actually quite hard on a lot of these gas powered mowers, but we found some partners that have a drive by wire solution. Like most cars are drive by wire. Mowers are not. Normally, if we walk over here, and we could probably do it if we have time. But if you open up the linkage when you do your handlebars to go left and right, you know,

do the wheels. There's a linkage that always goes down to the hydro pumps that do the wheel motor. And we have partnered with a firm called Hydrogear that offers a drive by wire system. So now we have drive by wire, which is awesome. On electrics, it's a lot easier. This one's behind me is electric. A lot of these are electric. That's actually a lot easier because it's a brushless motor or a DC motor or some other form that we can get either CAN bus. So the A number one is we need left and right wheel. Now, if you notice a lot of these motors behind me have caster wheels.

So they just have some caster bias. So all you need is left and right wheel to go forward. You go both the same way to turn. It's a zero turn. So if you turn both wheels, you can spin. And so we need that at a minimum. And then we also need a wheel tick. So we need encoders on electric is usually included on gas. We add one or we work with the manufacturer. We've got a couple of those, or you can do it at the motor level if you can. If we have left and right wheel and then we need the implement, which is called, we call it PTO or

power transmission on, it's the blades, right? The mower blades need to be able to turn that on. And then everything else is kind of gravy that we need on the mower. We would love engine off, E-Kill for safety. We'd love breakup. All these other things are nice to haves, but we can do without them. And we've been able to sort of go up the ladder on sort of what we can provide. Recently, we've got an engine throttle, engine RPM, all these other blade deck height, all that stuff is all extra. At a minimum, we need that to control the mower.

And then after that, you start talking about sensors. We make recommendations. They always ask us. So we've been very happy with, we keep experimenting with LiDAR, although LiDAR is a great technology. I really think it's, it's suited to cars because of the, you know, the, nature of like, the data that comes back. I'm also, I'll go ahead and admit I'm in Elon's camp that like, you know, it's the driving world has been, you know, we do it with two eyes. So it is a vision problem. Like road signs are designed for us.

Speaker 2 (24:59.724)
you everything's designed for people with eyes, you know, there's no markings on the road that are LIDAR, you know, able, right? So, I mean, it is a solved problem. Like if we can do it, then you can obviously say that a robot could probably do it. Like, in fact, maybe even better because we don't blink, right? And we have 360, so we can do it even better. We can be like something's coming up behind me while something's coming in front of me. So I am a big vision guy. So we don't use LIDAR, we use vision, we use stereo depth, we use RGB.

And honestly, be honest with you, outdoor autonomy is a little bit easier than off-road or the on-road. Right. Because if we see something, our stuff, we stop. And you got it. We don't have to go around. We don't have to navigate construction people. If there people in the area, sometimes we just say, stop. You're not supposed to be mowing with people in the area anyway, right? So that gets rid of one of the big issues. People are like, does it hit things? And we're like, well, no. And you don't mow around people. People are like, what if kids are playing? You're like,

What commercial landscaper who mows manually ever is mowing around kids? You just don't do it.

Yeah, within some number of feet of kids, well, that's 24 or 36 feet or whatever it is.

Yeah, there's standards for thrown objects and also you just don't do it. Think about it. If the kids come out in the playground, you're like, should have been here at 5 a.m. earlier, which is when they mow anyway. You don't mow at 2 p.m. when the kids are out. So anyway, I digress. You talked about sensors. We have a very specific ones that we recommend. We love the RealSense line, which is now spun out of Intel. We're excited about that. We've been a big partner there. That D455 camera is awesome. D457s are great. They're outdoor rated.

Speaker 2 (26:36.43)
They work great and they're easy to repair because these guys break them like it's not a when these things but like, know, they'll they'll go use a manual mower and you know smack into a tree and crack the lenses and Yeah, or or submerge it in a lake, you know, which happens better than better the robot than a human right? So it's where a lot of the accidents and deaths actually happen in our industry. So we're happy to replace the mower, you know very easily

Something on them loading it the trailer.

Speaker 2 (27:05.835)
We just can't replace people and that's sort of our ethos, right? Safety first. Yeah, there's a lot of sensors that we do.

Yeah, and so are the manufacturers putting those cameras on at the factory and then eventually someone's hiring your or buying your software or is this like I'm gonna go order this this mower with green Z software from the factory like how is that so that done in your in your market?

Yeah, it's a great question. So the way these mowers are built, if you look behind me, the tire on this mower behind me is a Kawasaki or a Continental tire. So the mower manufacturers are already doing a bit of assembling, right? They assemble parts. So we are just a supplier. We happen to supply software. So we have a hard drive and we have a couple of other sensors that we recommend. And then what they also like is that we tell them, like, hey, you need this many sensors, this many cameras in this location, and then we need you to bend metal.

And I don't know you know, but every mower manufacturer loves bending metal. In fact, one of them is named Metal Craft of Mayville because they're very good at it. And so they love building those mounts and things. And they already have procurement and sourcing people who order parts. And so when you give them to them and say, hey, here's the distributor, actually, and they go, you know what, we already work with this distributor. Yeah. they say, great, we can already get better prices than you can because we already have an agreement with them. We're a hundred million dollar manufacturer. So there's no reason we should buy it from you.

Here's your shopping cart.

Speaker 1 (28:14.958)
Mm.

Speaker 2 (28:25.378)
And so the only part they buy from us is a software. And so we sell them hard drives with licenses and they put them on and we help them. We, as part of our program at the factory, know, mowers go down a line and then they go to, you know, an R line or whatever you want to call it. If each one has something different and then they're up fitted. So we don't do retrofitting. It's at the factory.

Right.

That's right. the software license is bought by the manufacturers and then the end users basically activate it. So it's kind of like when you buy a Ford Blue Cruise, which is their self-driving, it's basically if you go into the menu option, it's provided by Mobileye. So we're basically the similar thing. we're, you know, the self-driving functionality on these mowers, which by the way, they all are going to have, right? How many cars have cruise control? Right.

or adaptive cruise control. More autopilot features are coming to more cars, blue cruise.

So we're just doing that for these guys and we're the easy button for them. That's in fact our main pitch for joining the Robotic Ready programming and putting it on here is it's the easy button for you to offer it. And then the other thing is landscapers love it because their data and their maps all work across all these. So if you buy this one and you make all your maps and then you're forced to go electric, you can buy a different mower that has GreenZ technology on it or we call it GreenZ equipped mower.

Speaker 2 (29:44.972)
And then you can also use all those maps. It doesn't matter. You're not going to lose and be bought into sort of one OEMs deal and be locked in. everybody loves it. At least everybody. That's at least the way we designed it. Landscapers love it. OEMs like it. The ones who are doing it themselves probably don't like it because we kind of fix a lot of those issues. Don't get them locked into that one vendor. But otherwise, it seems to be working pretty well.

That was going be a question I have, and maybe you just kind of hinted at it. There's different autonomous mowing companies in this space. Some folks are going small. have other companies like Scythe, for example, that are large, these large autonomous mowers. You've taken a completely different approach. So I'm curious, how are you seeing the market? What do you feel like is, obviously I'm sure you're biased, but just curious, what do you feel like is the right play with autonomous mowing being really the future of what that is?

Yeah, so my competitors have it all right. And I'm pretty wrong. I'm just kidding. The I'll tell you this, it's something I think about a lot. But there is a statement I will say for a hot take. We can talk about my competitors. And I'm okay using a little bit of brain power to think about them. But I have a theory that anytime I spend thinking about competitors is a waste of time. And I should spend two X that calling a customer and just asking how I'm gonna serve them better.

So let's time it and then after this call, I'm going to go call a customer and just ask them how I can serve them better. So I will think about my competitors for half a second because it is worthwhile to do, but I think early on and even now.

I think that's my piece of advice that you didn't ask for is that I just think competitors, as long as you serve your customers and just listen to them, you're going to be fine. Scythe is a unique model and I know those guys well and we talk to them a lot and we have similar customers and we're doing something very similar. They have a different model where they said, let's build the mower from the ground up, which by the way, when I wake up in the morning some days, I'm like, damn, we should have built this mower from the ground up because we would have control over everything.

Speaker 3 (31:40.899)
All your headaches would would or would be different headaches, but they wouldn't be the same different head

Exactly exactly and so, know, it's a unique model right if you can go from the ground up you you now you you you have full control like right now early on we had problems where people we put the cameras in the front and Landscapers would like run into the machine and like shove it and bend them up and now they're like miscalibrated like shooting up high and we're like, okay That's not gonna work. So whereas with them they've got them in the machine like there's no Retro like not even a we call it an aftermarket up fit, right? It's not even a retrofit. It's like

So they do have that and yes, so they have that going for them But on the downside is they now are competing with 27 different OEMs, know, they have to have brand recognition like people when they demo this they don't ask how it cuts they already Exactly and they you know, and they also say like do you have dealers and we say yeah We have 450 like you this deal you already know and they're well, that's great. I can order it from them I can take it to them when it's broken. So we have different issues

I guess the only right.

Speaker 2 (32:44.502)
that they would also probably wake up and sort of say the same thing, right?

What I was like and it's like the Apple model your competitors are building the hardware in the software to work together and probably create some seamless experience that is good for some people But you're the windows app store your Microsoft excel you work on everyone's stuff forever and always Right like you're it might good good analogy you might have some more what I'll call friction because you have to make it available for everybody But it it just works more often you can hit more markets. Yeah, I mean still no matter how popular as Apple Apple has gotten Windows has a

way larger install base.

There's way more Android phones, know, bought.

And you know, you guys are that's a great analogy. I'm gonna steal that deal. And you know, you guys know that like also too, as the bigger you get like

Speaker 2 (33:30.574)
We're now going to these manufacturers and they're saying, what do you want to build next? And we're like, OK, that's a good question. Right. Like now we're hitting some of these things. Like if we designed it like this from the ground up, now we got the best of both worlds because we were out in the industry and learned and then we're able to do it. Yes. So they're out there. There's also like you mentioned smaller machines, Robo mowers. We actually count them as a different category. You know, I use them at home. I love them. I'm always buying the latest one. There's a new one on Kickstarter every month. It looks like

Hopefully you guys haven't designed any of those for customers, but there's always a new RoboMower that promises everything. That's an interesting market. We are very focused on landscapers, and we've done the job. We still do the job. We are out mowing today. It's still little hot from it. We do validation testing. We actually still are subs for our customers.

are specifically for them, we aren't for homeowners. So a lot of people ask me like, can I get one? And I'm like, what I'd prefer you to do is go to my customer. But yeah, so we're very focused on that. Whereas I think other robo mowers should be very focused on that. think robo mowers have a tough one because the it actually is better for the person who does it to own it. Like it's not there's no like way to like come out as a landscaper and drop it and then kind of sit and wait.

the term is music.

Speaker 2 (34:50.702)
you know, for it to kind of Robo-mow, right? It is really an install because of the slowness of it, whereas ours is just like a, it's an extra crew member. And that's how we pitch it. It's a robotic worker that is already on your mower. And so you bring out your mower and you let it do it, and then you pipeline other stuff while you do it. So there's a bunch of different ways of people tackling this. We are the, we call it supervised or semi-autonomous mowing. If you really like, we're on definitions, like we're not fully autonomous, like the mowers that Robo-mowers install are because, they decide when to mow and

I mean not like it's semantic but if you really had a fully autonomous system you would say, I want to go to work and the system would say, nah you seem stressed out I'm going take you to the beach. That's fully autonomous.

By the way, well, what's interesting is you got to what I'm gonna call probably crawl walk run your performance Yes, right. Yes start with just only being able to serve square patches that are relatively flat and Your clients would still buy it like your as greensy your clients are gonna mow that anyways And during the time it's mowing the middle of the field that's flat and straight I can go edge and weed whack and do the other things I do as long care Whereas a robot mower if I don't do the whole yard. I don't need to use a robot. I'm just gonna come out

Yeah. And you know, it's funny, I sent one of our developers early picture where we were having difficulty with a customer who kept trying to use it in like a tree filled area. And it actually wasn't even that bad. But we kept saying like, can you just mow this giant area like right over here? And finally, he was like, Yeah, sure. He's like, and then I'll go mow the other. And now I was like, this field was like would be easy for us to do, right? Like we can

totally do that because we have avoidance and you can map the whole thing and you can keep out zones or you just leave them in there and it'll just go around them. But we didn't have that in the beginning. And you know, it could get stuck and you know, like startup and like, but we just, we, know, run, what was it? Walk, crawl, walk, run. We've done. So now we're just going after like the, we've, we've been at 80, like we were the 80 20 rule at work. We just keep going after more bigger and bigger 80, you know, percent rules. We're like, okay, what if we did this? They, they want it to do this, but like, what if it's just 80 % of it?

Speaker 3 (36:38.998)
lot of that.

Speaker 2 (36:52.428)
and we just check the box and they're like, that's awesome, let's keep going. So now it's been really fun because now we are in some of these edge cases where the customers are like, what about this site? And we're like, that's a great site. That's very challenging, we can do it. And so now we bring it in and the other thing that's very different about our company is that we work with these mobile manufacturers and it's crazy because we update our software every two weeks and it blows their mind. Like, know, that it just gets better and better.

So we have a client Hammerhead they make bike computers like a GPS for your bike like a Garmin competitor And this is one of their strengths and they've been on Android since the beginning They send a software update every two weeks. This is a community. This gets better every day You don't even you know, this is how they they compete with someone like Garmin who's like the know 600 pound gorilla room that's been here since the dawn of my computer Yeah, and it's just so neat to see that you are stealing that same, know, you were so excited to share that ethos

And this is what hard tech really is getting neat about is we used to be a thing that shipped in a box as hard tech and the day you validated it and put it on the production line, that's as good as it ever was. And today with the internet connection of everything, you can actually, as long you build the hardware really good and really robust, the software can make it better and better and better.

And even firmware updates. And I would not even get hung up on the hardware because you could do service bulletins and all kinds of stuff. the hardware for sure, as long as it's good enough, the software can compensate for a lot. A lot. And that's really been fun.

So Charles, you've dropped so many nuggets throughout this entire conversation for founders, starting from the very beginning to now. If you had to just kind of pick out some specific advice for a hard tech founder just getting started, maybe they're in a studio, maybe they're self-funded, maybe they're VC-backed, what would be like your core pieces of advice as they're starting that journey?

Speaker 2 (38:40.526)
Yeah, I am I'm not good at giving advice, but I can speak from experience and I know you did ask me about this so I would say one of the things that I think we did and that I you know did I think that I did well was Start asking for money and payment quickly. I think you a lot of times people think that you have to have everything buttoned up

And I personally think that we offered a form of professional services we would mow lawns way before we had the product. And I just think that that's super valuable. I don't think enough people do that. I think they think that they have to go off and solve some hard problem and have it all working. And what we did, I think, extremely well was go ask for money and do it constantly. There's no shame in it. Hey, pay me to go do this. Would you pay me to do this?

And if not, how much would you pay me to do this? Right. And if they're good and they try and you like and you say you'll do it like they'll pay you. And I think there's a lot to be learned by doing it. I do think a lot of our tech founders to sit in a lab like that's one of the things we early on like didn't do a lot of like I think the best location like somebody would did a poll the other day and like where's the best place for a hard tech founder? And I jokingly but not jokingly, I was real. I was like at your customer.

They were like, talk about cities. They're like, where's the best place for a hard tech founder? Atlanta, is it Boston, is it New York or Chicago? And I was like, it literally is at your customer. If you could find a way to start your company in your customers, your best customer's office, do that. That's where you need to be. And we joke about moving to Florida, because there's a lot of mowing, but for us, and I'm glad we're in Atlanta, because there's a ton of mowing and we get anywhere. It's a great place for us to be. It's like where our customers are. That's where we need to be.

I mean glassboard literally started in our clients office. We had a client There's an e-bike client that hired three Individual consult like Drew and I as a company and two other companies in a trench coat to build this product for him And we're all doing different parts and he offered all of us free office space to get better access to his consultants We all worked out of this one office together and then we form, you know Banded together to form glassboard and we literally were forged in the office of our clients. Love it so the

Speaker 2 (40:58.582)
Yeah, culture and your ethos and it's real hard to, you know, I see a lot of stealth startups and I don't understand the concept. Like I just literally don't. I think when you do a stealth startup, like it becomes your culture. And so as soon as you come out of stealth, it's really hard to get rid of that. Like a lot of times, like I would deal with stealth startups and I would be like, so how things go? And they'd be like, can't tell you.

And I'd be like, well, you know, what's going on? Like, how did you fix this issue? Like, can't tell you. And I'm like, okay, well, it's real hard to undo stealth. Like they even do it to their customers. Their customers are like, hey, you know, what's going on? They're like, well, we'll fix it. You know, it's like, we've been the opposite. We're like, hey, this is a big issue. Like, you're right. Like, what can we do to fix it? And like they, you know, like, here's all the data. Like, here's what we found. Like, and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, this is it.

So, yeah, I don't know, I keep dropping crazy nuggets, it's probably because I've done it wrong so many times, right?

It's the best way to learn is to do it wrong yourself because you'll never forget the lesson. The next best way to learn is listen to other people tell you about all the bruises they've gotten.

Yeah, so then you can remember when you do it yourself, you can be like, I shouldn't have done that.

Speaker 1 (42:07.768)
Build in public, build with your customers. Everybody, this is the Hard Tech Podcast. I'm your host, DeAndre Hericus, with my co-host Grant Chapman. Charles, thank you so much for being on the show.