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Rob Telson is VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at BrainChip and brings over 20 years of sales expertise in licensing intellectual property and selling EDA technology. Rob has had success developing sales and support organizations at small, midsize, and large companies.
We discuss the incredible capabilities of AI at the edge, the real definition of edge computing, and how that context creates interesting challenges for organizations and people. The conversation also covers a ton of great insights into building effective sales and marketing teams, empowering people, plus where to find the best burgers in the world.
Check out BrainChip at their website here: https://brainchipinc.com/
Rob also hosts a great podcast here: https://anchor.fm/brainchipinc/episodes/Conversation-with-Vice-President-of-Worldwide-Sales-Rob-Telson-and-Alex-Divinsky-eua3lv
Big thanks to Rob for a very fun and informative discussion.
Rob, thank you very much. I was first of all, I get excited by being able to see a name that shows up, but as a human, essentially, that is very interesting to chat with. And I’ve been lucky as I’ve gone over some of your your own content and you’re your producer of content, your you’ve got a really solid voice and a great way of of really leading a discussion, which is cool.
And on top of that. I looked at BrainChip and it was pretty darned excited about the potential of what’s there. So before I jump in and I start discussion over the good stuff, I did want to for folks that are new to you, Rob, if you want to give a quick introduction and we’ll then we’ll talk about yourself. We’ll talk about brain ship, the Akeda platform, which is really cool, the technology and kind of what’s what’s being done with it.
And we’ll kind of run from there, if that’s all right.
Yeah. Well, Eric, thank you very much for for first of all, for having me on the podcast. And likewise, I’ve had the opportunity to listen to some of your podcasts and you’ve had some pretty talented people on. And so I’m actually excited and honored to be here. And I feel like I have some some big shoes to fill in the discussion. Right. But just real quickly, for the listeners out there, brain chips, the semiconductor manufacturer, and we’ve developed an artificial intelligence processor.
And it’s you know, it’s architected to function similar to a brain. And it’s it’s based off of continually learning as we go on the device that we’re implemented in. And it’s it’s processes without any dependency on the cloud. And that will become a lot of our discussion today. And and last of all, it’s it’s architected in a way that it consumes very little power or energy. And by doing that, it gives you a lot of flexibility and functionality to do a lot of things in the world of compute a lot, that’s becoming very common to all of us.
But it’s going to evolve over time. But before I talk more about. Brain chip and our processor, which is called Akeda, and for those listening, a ketamine’s spike and we’ll get to that in more detail I really want to talk about. The problem that we see happening and why al Qaeda is going to play a major role in solving a lot of potential challenges in technology moving forward. So, so so what what I want to bring up is three words that in my world mean the same thing, and there’s a lot of technologies out there that will give you but ifs, ands, buts and so on.
But the reality is we’re talking about the same thing. So let’s think of Iot based devices. And let’s think of edge based devices and let’s think of end point devices, they all mean basically the same thing, and that is we’re really, really far away from the cloud. We’re doing a lot of compute and in most cases, especially as we evolve. That computer goes to the cloud and then it goes from the cloud back to the device. OK, and I’m going to reference edge based devices and I’m going to reference instead of Khanum, I processers deep learning accelerator’s GPU impious.
I’m going to use the word engine, the engine that’s processing this information. So if we look at the evolution of edX and we look at the evolution of these devices over the next five years, we’re looking at hundreds of billions of devices and these hundreds of billions of devices are going to be demanding easy access of information to the cloud and back. And to put that into perspective, we’re looking at I don’t know, I think it’s forecasted there’s going to be 90 zettabytes of data going from edge based devices to the cloud and back.
So we all need to take a step to the side, put ourselves in the driver’s seat of our car and realize we’ve just hit a traffic jam. And what that means to anyone who has a smartphone right now or has a personal assistant voice, personal assistant at home, like an Alexa or let’s say using Siri, an Apple based device, I don’t know about you, but there are times when I’ve said Siri directions to this address and Siri says, I cannot help you right now or play.
Fleetwood Mac can’t help you right now. OK, so what’s going on there is that the device is trying to communicate to the cloud but doesn’t have access to it. And we’ve all just been accustomed to dealing with that for those that have experienced that and you just wait a couple of seconds or whatever and you move on. But let’s fast forward let’s fast forward to this evolution of EDG based devices and let’s think about vehicles. Let’s think about unmanned vehicles.
Let’s think about flying vehicles. Let’s think about drones. Let’s move into medical device applications. Let’s move into industrial applications. We’ve got an issue. Four doctors in a remote location trying to save someone’s life needed access to the Internet and they don’t have bandwidth to the cloud. The device needs to be able to do some processing on the device, and that’s where we see the key to making some massive impacts. The other thing that Qaeda can do, which gets really excited, is has the ability to learn on the device, we call that one shot training or one shot learning.
So you’re adding new images. You’re adding new functionality to the device as you go. This is the growth and evolution of artificial intelligence. And we’re we’re able to do that because we are architected. In an advanced way, using what’s called the neuromorphic computing architecture and neuromorphic computing is architected to function much like a brain. And what I mean by that is for our listeners and for you, Eric, right now your brain is moving and it’s consuming energy and it’s listening to everything I’m saying that is important to you.
But being a fan of yours, I would hope you have a cup of diabolical coffee sitting by your side. Right. And you can smell that fresh coffee, but your brain is not spending a lot of time on that. And it’s not spending a lot of time recognizing that your hands are resting and you’re touching something and your feet are touching something and or the scene. Exactly. So so what what going back to what I said earlier, Akeda is is, is the it’s it’s also references spike.
We focus on spiking or events and that’s what makes us extremely unique and extremely advantageous as we move into this next generation of A.I. is that, look, we can function and focus on all these different things that are going on, but we’re consuming all of our energy on the event that’s taking place right now. Their traditional engines, as I referenced before, it could mean a lot of different things. Those traditional engines have to process and compute all of this information.
They are burning. They’re consuming so much energy and power and they’re moving faster and faster and faster to solve the same problem that we’re going to solve. And using microwaves to milliwatts and using a lot less energy and and gives us a lot more flexibility. So I know I said a lot there, but that’s giving you a little bit about brain chip.
But and I’d say that’s actually the perfect that’s the perfect segway to something that’s very important about this. The challenge that we’re trying to solve, right. Is that it’s you know, it’s one thing for me to do yell into my phone like Siri, find the closest Tim Hortons or whatever. Sorry, I guess I should say Dunkin Donuts to finally close Dunkin Donuts. And and yeah, I’m sorry, I can’t help you right now. And like, darn it, Siri, like, that’s fine, I, I will I’ll open Google and I’ll say it’s got a slow connection and I can get through it.
It’s very different than system to system, which is where like you talk about, you know, rolling devices that are using Lydda and ultimately need to communicate and they need to do a lot of processing locally in because they have to have certain amounts of asynchronous communications and they cannot rely on every transaction being decision driving. So they have to be able to make decisions locally. So we do all this and it sounds fantastic. Irresistable, it’s easy. Why don’t you just move processing close to the edge, closer to the workload, whatever.
Great. Sounds great, right? It sounds as great as the numbers that we hear when we think about the scale that we’re we’re tackling. But then the first thing you think is how do I drive this like little of the power to do the stuff in the datacenter today or in the cloud, a fantastic amount of power required to run GPU and TP use and all these things when you move the edge. Now, this is the thing like you’re talking about milliwatt, representation of power usage, fundamental shift in the ability of technology to act in the way that what a kid is doing yet.
Not burn the planet down like Bitcoin miners doing this crazy bocking processing.
Yeah, it’s it’s it’s amazing. I’m going to bring up an example again of of a scenario. And I don’t want to get overdramatic, but I think we always have to visualize these types of scenarios. There are closer to us than we than we realize. But, you know, the proliferation of electric vehicles to proliferate, proliferation of vehicles and the amount of compute that’s taking place in the vehicles of today and tomorrow, the cars designed to do a lot of of great things.
And and I’m a geek, so I get really excited about functionality. Useless functionality usually gets me to buy something. So what happens, though, is that the if we don’t have the ability to have some of this compute in decision making on the device, and we’re going to find a scenario where you’re driving a car and that car sees a human and it knows what it needs to do is swerve hard. Right. And get out of the way.
Now, that hard right to get out of the way could actually end up causing another impact. You know, and. If it doesn’t if it’s dependent upon communicating with an external device, whether it be the cloud or something else, it’s going to make that hard, right? Whether it communicates or not, there is a human there and then you find out it’s a plastic bag. We didn’t need to make the hard right. So we need to advance and that’s what we’re looking at.
And the second thing that you what you brought up there in my head was spinning a mile a minute ago. OK, how do I want to respond here? But you start to take a look at devices that do consume a lot of energy. And one device that everybody has in their home is the refrigerator. It consumes a lot of energy and we we look at that as these consumable, these consumer white goods appliances in which al-Qaeda is going to help reduce the amount of energy that’s being consumed.
We look at it and we say, in the future, you’re going to want to have the ability to recognize by odor whether your food is is stale or it has a lifespan. How do we how do we do that and, you know, has that capability. One thing I didn’t mention that I’ll I’ll dovetail on is that we focus on five sensor modalities and two are very common in the world of processing today. And that’s image or object detection, very similar to the plastic bag and what’s out there and what’s going on.
And and the other one is, is voice or keywords. And again, something very common and a lot of the functionality that we have today. But there’s three other modalities that will become impactful in our everyday lives. And one is the ability to smell or olfactory. One is the ability to touch or vibration and which is some somatosensory. And then the other one is taste gustatory. And between all of those five sensory modalities, that’s where brain chip is kind of hung their hat and said, OK, well, if we can process vibration.
Then we can help in industrial applications and make things more efficient, we can save the infrastructure of the roads and bridges and we can actually help with prosthesis. And so people that that have prosthetics can now feel by having vibration detect somewhere else in their body. And we’ve now seen with the olfactory side of things and they always say it’s you hit these these points, inflection points by random. You design it all you want, but these random events happen.
You have what’s called Vox’s or volatile organic compounds, which are breath markers. And by these Vox’s you can detect different diseases. Illnesses, viruses and even different types of cancers. So with the right systems and the right engine, you can do a lot of good. You can start to make a lot of impact in areas that that we only dreamed of five years ago.
And I think that’s the important thing, too, when we think of any of any solution and what I love is enabling solutions in what you’re talking about, what what you and the team are tackling by bringing Akeda to the market is that. You know, the old was this show Halt and Catch Fire? My favorite interviews, watch that one is a famous sort of early episode. He says, you know, this is computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets you to the thing.
And so we look at what this does. It’s an incredible enabling function now is that, yeah, we can move to enabling prosthetics to be, you know, touch detecting. And it’s like it’s. This is the stuff like the reason why we went to the moon. And people say like, oh, well, there’s no one living on the moon, why did we go to the moon? And, you know, when we said, well, I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but most of the things in your house are were engineered and discovered as a result of research that we did in that we know why we call it a moon shot.
Yeah. And so now you have by giving this capability to the research community, to the industrial community. So as we go from Industry 4.0, which I didn’t realize we were already there to fight or whatever it is like, this is the huge, huge leaps that can be done by those communities and those creators and those researchers that are going to tackle, they said, big problems. This is this is like what quantum is a concept. You know, right, and it was it’s a very it’s so far out of the realm of most people’s mathematical understanding.
That it becomes like, oh, yeah, one day, but it’s. When you show this and you bring this and you show people what can be done now with this capability. This is a lot closer to the use cases that people understand. I think in then those sort of massive concepts like Elon get landing us on Mars and say, yeah, you know. It’s been. Tremendously satisfying on a daily basis, we’re constantly on calls with current customers and future customers and dreamers and visionaries and and.
I try to I’m going to take this conversation twofold, number one is I think it’s really, really important for people to understand in the world of artificial intelligence, it’s very complex. And a lot of people are addressing these challenges and problems and solving them a variety of different ways. So what I’m trying to do and is communicate that there’s an ecosystem out there and within that ecosystem you need. To have sensors that can detect what’s going on, you need to have a data set.
In order to understand what you’re trying to detect and you need to have an engine that can take all that information and actually accurately predict and accurately provide feedback. That you can depend on. So, again, we are the engine, but one of the things I brought up before when I talked about bosses and it’s something that we’ve had some success with, is is, for example, working with a couple of partners, but one in specific that it’s over in Israel, that I was able to develop some type of a breathalyzer that you can breathe into and it can capture information.
And the goal was to recognize different types of viruses or disease. And it just so happened that as they were building this product covered it up. So now let’s apply it to covid and we need an engine. If we get data sets, we get all this information, what engine is low power and operate quickly and provide us the accuracy. Right. And so we were hitting ninety three ninety four percent accuracy on these data sets to determine covid positive cova negative.
And that’s one example what we’re doing.
It’s amazing to think and like you talked about one shot and for anybody that wants to, you know, pause the show and go like understand what it means to be able to do zero shot, one shot and what like the impact in the way this does versus the like, mass data set, continuous learning it. So it’s a big, big change. And now to be able to bring one shot learning close to where it needs to be processed, because the other problem we’ve got is the data sets in order to do continuous training or potentially massive.
And while we’ve got five G in areas like oh five is going to here, that’s going to save the world. Well, no, you know what’s it’s going to happen with five G Instagram. That’s what’s going to happen. YouTube, Hulu. Like, that’s the the reason why 5G is going to be full by the time it gets here fully is because we are always pacing well ahead of the capabilities with the content. And now if we look at we’re effectively going right alongside your latest, you know, Hulu release their Game of Thrones or whatever craziness the people are streaming.
And you’re trying to do like legitimate real time neural processing. This is why being able to bring that processing and do it there, it’s it’s it’s a significant need. Yeah, it’s a huge boost in it, like I said, because right now the devices aren’t capable to do it without a significant amount of power or like these large processing units deemed to be local. So doing this at at a small scale with low power is game changing, to pardon the overused phrase.
Yeah, it’s exciting. And we’re we’re at a point where we have customers and, you know, our business models made up of the fact that we sell silicon and we’re in volume production right now and we also license our our IP. So they’re getting an encrypted IP that they can design into their system on a chip, and that functionality is on that device moving forward. And I think at a time like this, it’s this is this is huge. I mean, I have one of my colleagues says, Rob, you’re on this Jerry Maguire moment where I’m saying we have this semiconductor challenges, manufacturing and shortages.
And and there are a lot of great technologies in the sandbox, all trying to solve specific problems and broad problems. There are only a few of us that are licensing. The technology is IP. So for the others, they’re all scrambling to get wafer capacity and to get in line. And my Jerry Maguire moment is just made up of the fact that how great is it that some of these companies can incorporate our IP into their system on a chip, rely less on the supply chains and the challenges that will exist for a period of time and be able to to make a move as a as a market mover and have products with a lot of functionality on it.
So we we see that. And I’ll stop talking about my Jerry Maguire moment. But I do I do like to emphasize we have we have two two business models that we’re we’re leveraging and we’re seeing success in both of them. And the other thing is, is I look at it and we have two two paths. Right. One is, as you mentioned, there’s a lot of really exciting AI applications and some of them are more scientific than commercial focused.
And we have a unique crossroads where you want to address a lot of these scientific solutions because they’re really cool and, you know, you’re going to do something really good and beneficial. And we use that word beneficially. And I think that’s important. But also we have a business to run and and we are in the process of making sure that we have a commercialized product that all of our customers and future customers will have a lot of success with.
And I got to call something which is so thank you for using the best phrase on Earth, because, you know, the way you describe things here, you can tell that you’re very people focused even in understanding the technology. We talked to the like. Where we can go with how deep we can talk about attack, and first of all, you go far deeper than you would even give yourself credit to be able to. I’m sure we could go further, but.
You call it future customers, that may seem like a throwaway to some people, I worked with a lot of sales organizations and every time I hear the word prospect, I cringe a little. And it’s a difference in the way that you think about it, but by the way, you it’s not even a thing you fight to make sure you don’t say it’s natural. Like you just said, you know, we’re people with work today, future customers.
It’s a it’s I’ve got a huge respect. And so, you know, there’s. Thank you. Something something in you. You’re definitely your solution. And people focused. What what brought you to that? We’re going to dig into the rub portion of the show right now, because I want to unpack this because it’s actually very rare for a senior sales leader to not kind of. This slip up and say we were talking to a couple of prospects today and it seems like small thing and I have a massive respect, first of all, I should say this to I got to catch this with look, I’m not I’ve never, as they say, carried a bag for for an organization.
I’ve got a huge respect. Everyone’s in sales to some degree. I’ve been lucky that I don’t carry a quota for it. So I, I, I don’t live without my sales teams doing what they do. And I furnish them with the tools to do what they do. Right. But but you split this line where you have this and this. There’s something different. I figure out where that comes from.
All right, let’s dig into it. What do you want to know?
So what’s your what was your background? As I noticed that through your career, you’ve actually been pretty consistently in this account, executive sales track like you’ve you’ve always sort of come in there. So where did your what drew you to that? And then kind of what drew you to the way in which you approach it?
Well, you know. I’m going to go back far. You know, it sounds like it’s a short path, but when I just had my my birthday yesterday, it’s been a while. Well, thank you. So I went to school to become a lawyer and I came home. From my final interview to go to law school and I sat down with my parents and I explained to them. That, OK, I start in three months and dad, you’re going to owe X amount of dollars when all is said and done for me to go to law school and as a very matter of fact statement and my father looked at me and he said, oh, hold on a second.
And he said, I never said I’d pay for law school. You’re on your own. My recommendation is you go get a job. They’ll do something and then figure out whether you want to go. So the next day I went out, started interviewing for jobs and and I ended up getting a job. Selling, mailing and shipping systems and learning about warehouses, learning about packaging devices, and and just walking door to door in a suit and tie and talking to guys and warehouses and selling products, the only thing I realized was I was really good at it and I was living at home and I was making a lot of money.
And I’m like, wow, this is who needs law school, right? And and about that time, we were transitioning to two Windows based operating systems. And I had the one thing I really look back at when parents make investments in their children. My father was really into buying computers before. Computers were something that everyone could get their hands on. And he had chosen Apple. So we had Max, so I had learned how to work on a Mac OS, so by the time Windows was introduced, you know, it had a lot of the same feel.
So the company I was working for had introduced a Windows based operating shipping and mailing system and no one knew how to use it. No one knew how to operate, and I sat down and started tinkering with it, and before I knew it, I was part of a Fortune 500 company sitting with the CEO of the company, some in Puerto Rico, teaching him how to use the system. And and my my sales career kind of took off and immediately took me into the most random decision I’ve ever met in my life, which was to move from this company into Edde Electronic Design automation.
And I was I was I got a job with a very large Iida firm that brought two guys in that had no engineering background and said, one of you as a sales guy will learn how to navigate all the way to the upper echelons of senior executives. And one of you won’t. And within six months, most likely, one of you won’t be here. That wasn’t me, I was there and was able to have a lot of success, and then that led to start ups.
That’s when things in technology were starting to take off. The the Internet was becoming something of a thing. And this was back in the day when, you know, you went to startups and you tried to make some money. And I was very I was very fortunate. I use the the phrase I’d rather be lucky than good. I was really lucky to be at the right place at the right time, which led to intellectual property. And again, another startup then, which led to a corporate career of sales organizations evolving into large sales organizations, evolving into sales leadership and being a part of a phenomenal run with a great group of people at a company called ARM and doing that for a long time and running their sales for the Americas, as well as running their sales for manufacturing, which most of it was done over in Asia and then transitioned to the second phase.
I called the second phase of my life, which is I want to do another startup. I’ve done this before. I know what we’re doing and I know what I’m looking for. And it just so happened that an unmanned car was a customer customer of mine. And we’ve done business together. And that car is one of the co-founders of Branch It. And we were having a discussion and he said, Robin, be great. If you could join our company, we need to build a sales marketing organization.
And and I think you’d be phenomenal doing it, which led to. Yes, sure, why not? And here we are months later, and we’re starting to make an impact with things that we’re we’ve we’ve put in place all seem to be executing. So this this to me is a very, very exciting time for brain chip. And to be a part of this this cycle, this revolution is really cool. So that might be a little long, but I just went through.
But Hurford says, you know, it’s a beautiful story because it tells you. You know, when when we choose a place to be. One of the most fundamental parts of the why is because we go there to there’s people that we care enough about to give ourselves to their their life via the startup, like the amount of time we spend supporting each other and support in the organization and, you know, the sacrifice of families. It’s it’s it’s no insignificant, you know, step to move to the startup landscape.
And especially, you know, you went. What was effectively the Oggi startups, right? This is, you know, startups now, you know, I’ve got I’ve got four startups that are running right now. I mean, there are startups. I’ve got a coffee business. I’ve got an affiliate website. I’ve got a podcast. I work at a startup which is not really a startup because it’s a 12 year old company that was just acquired by IBM, you know.
OK, so but you there was no other option like this was there was Fairchild Semiconductor. And it was like the crazy hero story of of how Silicon Valley truly became Silicon Valley. Right. But the story is that we we don’t here are how many did try and get started. And they’re very dominantly in the manufacturing and physical stuff. There was no eight of us. There was no like you could just whip startup at a Starbucks. It’s like so the leap of faith was even more faithful.
In the first one that you did it. And then now so. Are you, as they call it, unemployable, right? You can’t go back to the big company again. It’s very it’s always a very interesting thing is once you hit a certain phase of growth of an organization quite often. You look back and you say, the biggest impact I feel like I’ve had was, as it turns out, growing this company from one million to 10 million or whatever.
And I find a lot of. Folks, they really are like kind of like a SWAT team for a growth phase. You know, it’s but you’ve spanned every phase through different ways in which you’ve you’ve been in the industry. So I’m curious if you’ve got a. Kind of a favorite assize or favorite thing about building the team and building the organization.
It’s funny, I’m reflecting on and I was writing an email earlier today to my current team. We have some really young guys, very talented individuals that that have a lot of development to do. But I have some pretty senior guys that have actually worked for me for a while in different environments. And I was reflecting on a comment by one of the young guys who was was just. Talking about the camaraderie of the team that we’ve built and and how we’re there for each other and and the fact that he was highlighting this this level of comfort and excitement every day, it’s almost like a family.
And I think what I’ve been able to do. I don’t know why there’s no there’s no magic recipe, but it’s it’s a team, it’s it’s an organization and it’s to get everybody in trusting each other and being there and then being able to pick up the slack when we need to pick up the slack, being able to to realize what we’ve just done is not good enough. We have to do better and have that mindset to win. And so that’s carried on with me from very young organizations, with a few people to very large organizations.
And I think that’s part of the fun. And so the other thing, what I at this point in my career, what I really, really enjoy is having the frank and candid conversations almost like a mentor. And there’s a fine line when you’re managing people and working with them and mentoring them about what could be some personal dynamics and so on. But when I look back at people that I’ve worked for me and worked with me and I’d rather say worked with me than for me, we still keep in touch.
We communicate a lot. And there’s a lot of frank dialog about what would you do in this situation or and it doesn’t have to be business related. It can be life as well. And to me, that’s very fulfilling, more like a friendship. And I think that’s when you look back at life, it’s it’s one of the things you have to look at. How are you measured? What did you do? And I I had the opportunity to to do an executive management program called the Program for Leadership Development through Harvard Business School.
And one of the most dynamic individuals of his time was Clayton Christensen. Oh, yeah.
Who lost? Yeah, no, actually, I guess, yeah.
And I had the opportunity to to spend a lot of time with him. For those who don’t know, Clayton Christensen is the author of Innovator’s Dilemma. But then he had a follow on book after he got the he had a stroke and it was called Your Life and How Will You Be Measured? And so as we were all evolving young and aggressive and wanting to capture the world, he was on the other side saying, does it really matter? I mean, what about your family?
What about how what Mark are you leaving? And so when you ask the question, all right, what do you prefer? You know, I know we walk into an environment and determine understand the environment, large or small, and that’s the team. Let’s go. Let’s go be effective. And one of the things that I’m really steadfast on right now is that I have my children that are I have teenagers and I have I know when they’re not teenagers in their 20s and but they’re working and they’re grinding and they’re learning.
And one of the things I think is important that they see some of that same work ethic from me to an extent. I also want to spend a lot of time with them. But I think that they they start to realize, like this podcast, my daughter and her friends will listen to this podcast. So I just referenced my daughter. So, you know, so so from that. And I think that’s that’s what I’m when I look at make my mark, I want to make my mark and and for my friends and my family and for them to to see that this is this is life.
This is what you do. You get up every day and you give it the best that you got.
It’s I often say the I will my greatest accomplishment in life will not be what I achieved, but what I helped someone else achieve.
Yeah, exactly.
And it’s it sounds whenever I say it or remember, you know, write down some of these things in the way that I do a mentoring program and I’ve helped, you know, I’ve been mentored as well and continue. It’s a continuous process. Right. And it’s funny, I started thinking, like, oh, if I start writing this stuff down, it’s really cool to be able to share. But then I’m going to end up being like, you know, what do they call it?
The fortune cookie Twitter voices who just go on there and like they write threads about, you know, I’ve learned five. I’ve talked to five hundred CEOs and this is what I’ve learned thread, you know.
Right. Right, right.
But the amazing thing is we do now have the ability to have a much greater and continuous and direct impact on people because of the way we can communicate differently than like you, you know, by the rarity of the opportunity in your choice to take it on. Got to meet one of the most fantastic sort of leaders and creators. You know, Clayton Christensen is is widely read and widely respected. And, you know, I have a friend of mine and we I was joking about something.
I said. I said I’m like I’m like the guy from a beautiful mind, but a technical marketing. And he’s just like I says, I went I went to school and John Nash was one of my professors. I’m like, oh, wow. You know, it’s. The opportunity to be there is different, but the other problem with abundance is also the ability to find focus. And right now, you know, it’s like when you look at your wall of books and you see, like, I’ve got two hundred, you know, books and effectively they’re all the same, the same middle chapters and just different intro and outro for a lot of business books or whatever.
But I still read them all and I still like. But most people, you know, it they look, they’ve got the Internet, they’ve got YouTube, they got Masterclass. They’ve got this. They’ve got school. We have so much available, but then we don’t leverage it. Like, we don’t listen, like, you know, I, I, I read everything that my dad ever wrote, right. And like, I sat with him as a kid building system, that’s how I got into this stuff, is because, like, we he was learning at night.
And so. Yeah, like, well, that’s going to learn. I’m going to sit beside him, you know, and as long as it doesn’t bother him, you know. And then what happened, I was I was 12 years old, learning DBAs, you know, and then I got a job at 15 years old. Right. Doing data entry because it was on a on a DBAs three system. And I was the only 15 year old kid in anywhere.
I lived in a small like farm town. And I was the only person other than my dad in that town, that new DBAs. And so it was just so funny that that’s how I got the job. And then I got into, like, system development and, you know, diverged, you know, later on for years. But, you know, and then came back to technology. But again, it’s like the reason I say this is.
Just hearing that, like your your kids will take the time to listen to what you said, not from your mouth, but like they’ll go back and like, hey, dad was on a podcast. Let’s check it out. Yeah, exactly. That’s an impact. That’s a profound impact.
It’s funny. One of the things I was excited about on this podcast was the fact that my youngest son, as we hit the pandemic, you know, naturally was trying to keep himself busy. And he really you’re going to laugh in a second. He really got into coffee. OK, I’m going with this. And so, you know, as a dad, I’m like, all right, let’s get into coffee. I wasn’t even drinking coffee at the time.
And we got we got a coffee machine and we got up. And then and then from the coffee machine, we decided to up the ante a little bit and we got a grinder and we were buying beans from little boutique shops. Right. And we were tasting a little bit. And then I got into coffee. Now I’m into coffee and I got a machine that grinds and it brews and I froth my milk. And and then we were buying beans from four or five different outlets all over the country and shipping it.
And again, this was how we were entertaining ourselves. And he became the barista of the family. And he wasn’t drinking it, but he was making it. And I would say, I’ll take a mocha. And my wife would say, I’ll take a vanilla latte. And then my other son said, I’ll take Americano. And all of a sudden the barista was just in action and we’d have family over and everyone say, make us coffee. And so fast forward, he’s not in a coffee anymore.
He’s done with coffee, doesn’t want anything to do with it. And I’m stuck in my coffee machine.
And you’ve lost your barista no more. I’ve got a double half caf Rob yelling across the kitchen, so I’m making my own coffee and, you know, but he’s still over my shoulder every once in a while, giving me a little bit of advice and and pulling up stuff on YouTube. So I will give your coffee a plug. I am going to order it and put it up against some of the other guys that I’ve I’ve I’ve started to build some relationships with.
And we’ll see how it goes. And that leads back to Akito, a smart coffee makers and and what we’ll see in the home. And and I do want to make sure that everyone listening, if you have a free moment, go to the go to our YouTube channel at you, go to YouTube and just type in Brain Chip Inc, and we’ll have the links as well. Yeah, but remember to put them in the show notes as well for folks.
We have these these videos that we’ve put together that really show you where this is all going on. Smart Home and some of the devices and applications we will all find customary in our homes over the future. And I’m going to reel it back now that I said that. And I’ll tell you a funny story. If you ever bump into anyone that knows me. That really knows me, and you say that Rob tells them they will ask you, have you had a burger with Rob?
Nice. So I just want you to realize that there’s a potential that could happen.
Burger afficionado. So I’m going to take you up on that.
Rob, you drop my California dude on you is I’m a burger guy, too, and I’ve had a lot of burgers. So in back in the day, it was a very intense negotiation in a in the northwest Pacific Northwest. And we had a client or customer, that future customer at the time, but then became a customer that wasn’t being very receptive to the negotiation. And as we were sitting there having this discussion and I had a team of about six people who had a team of about six people, we’re four hours into this discussion and we’re getting nowhere.
And we feel all these people up for this meeting. I mean, this is supposed to be the deal. And I at the time kind of made up, hey, look, I’m really into burgers and I we’re in a town. We’ve never been here. I’ve got my team. Why don’t we take a two hour break? When I take my team and give me a burger recommendation, we’ll go get some burgers and we’ll meet back. And the guy on the other side said, You like burgers?
I love burgers. Matter of fact, I’m writing a book on burgers. And he said, well, if that’s the case, I want to take you to my favorite burger place. And we left everyone there in the room and we went off and and we had burgers and we had some French fries and a couple of sodas. And now and a half later, we had closed the deal. Right. And so that stuck with me everywhere I went.
And everyone that that has bumped into me and my professional career has kind of stuck to this. Oh, Rob, I got to take you to this burger place. Oh, Rob. And that has led to burgers in Taiwan, burgers in China, burgers in Korea, burgers in Europe. And I learned over time to to very graciously say, when I’m in a foreign country, I will eat the food of choice, not burgers, burgers or are here.
So I ended up writing a book for a close friend of mine on burgers because this person had experienced a lot of burgers with me as well as my wife. My wife has experienced almost every burger with me, but the first book I wrote I dedicated to my my buddy and my wife was like, Are you kidding me? You didn’t dedicate this book. I missed on that one. And it was for his fiftieth birthday. But yeah, I can I can I can hang when it comes to burgers and talk about burgers and anyone out there interested in giving me some advice on burgers, I’ll take it and potentially experience it.
When we think of like I said, this is why when when I listen to your podcasts and the content that you create and inevitably the discussions that you have with folks. You know, this is why I latched on to, you know, what’s going on with brain chip and the potential there, and that’s it’s it’s incredible to see you’re you know, you’ve got the you’ve got a choice to, like, go to a team and a team that it’s a it’s a beautiful thing because teams, especially in startups, you know, at different phases of organizations, they’re very dynamic.
And what you end up having to make sure that you do is you find this kind of like Top End’s, like that’s that vision, you know, what’s the reason why we’re here? And that’s the thing you say. I mean, Donald Miller sort of fancy is what you call story brand. And that’s it’s so it’s so easy when you when you get used to it and you start to hear it come out. But you realize that that’s it’s much more than that thing because I’ve gone into many companies and I see the you know, the thing behind the administrators desk at the front and I see the stuff printed on the walls.
And and you realize that the only person that took that in was the person that painted it. You know, it it’s not reflective of the culture. The culture is how you will deal with it. If the walls were white, you know, the culture is how they’d be if you’re not looking in. So, you know, knowing why you’re doing what you do, what’s your vision, your guiding principle, and then taking this and then being able to have sort of fantastic technology that’s in an exciting area of opportunity.
But it’s also probably a fun challenge because it’s not massively a lot like the type of solutions that you’re able to enable are still being developed. They’re still in a lot of research areas. So it’s it’s it’d be neat. In 10 years, you’re going to be look back and say like we did that. Yeah. It’s it’s cool to to see that. But it’s also this it’s a very interesting. Dynamic of being in organizations where you’re selling something where, you know, like they’re going to get this one day and then back and to be like, oh yeah, when he explained it to me now totally makes sense.
It’s pretty impactful. And the amazing thing about Akeda, it is wide and deep in regards to applications and and problems we’re going to solve. And it’s it’s you know, this is a unique we can only say so much, but it’s it’s an exciting time. And as you said, in these types of technologies, when you look out in the future, when you look out of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there and the impact that you’re going to make, my gut tells me that brain chips can be impactful and we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.
But but it’s it’s a lot of fun. And we’ve got it’s going to be a good ride. Looking forward to it.
And especially to to go to a first principles approach in developing a solution is is amazing because we look at any competitive landscape. And it’s quite often the first thing that most people will do is just turn around. Yeah. And sort of head for head for the door and look for another object, because it’s it’s a big challenge. But, you know, that’s what it is. You choose you choose first principles to attack a problem in a specific way, do so provably, and then find people that can take that and give it an application, give it a place in which it can be leveraged and then ultimately see the as that comes to fruition.
So, yeah, it’s exciting. What’s the what was the most exciting surprise you had after, you know, you were like, OK, I’m at brain chip. I like the idea. And when did it suddenly go? You’re like, oh, hang on a second. What was that? That thing that that really kicked in for you?
Yeah. One of the things we haven’t really talked about is the learning on the device. And for those that are new to artificial intelligence and I brought it up a little earlier on on this podcast, is the fact that the. Training a device, teaching it what to look for and then process that information is not trivial and is extremely complex. It requires data scientists, research scientists, and it requires a lot of time, six months, a year and so on.
So having the ability to have a device where we can add a feature to it added my my face, your face, and then use that for facial detection or or for image detection or in a vehicle or something. To that extent on the fly is huge. And so I think it was day to day three, one of the engineers said, do you want me to do a demo of Akeda for you? I said, Sure. I sat down and started putting some stuff in front of and it was recognizing everything really quickly.
Very low power in Yemen. And then I, I said, well, what if I want to take a baseball and put it in front of al-Qaeda? And it was using a data set that had no idea what baseball was. And he said, sure, no problem. Put it up there. You know, you trained it on the device and all of a sudden baseball is now part of the whole data set. And I’m taking the baseball.
I’m throwing it through the the image. It’s it’s picking it up as it moves through. I’m like, wow, that’s really responsive. And fast forward again. And we just did a presentation about a week ago where we were teaching a kid beer bottles on the floor, had different beers, different brands, and then pulling them in and out of the screen and showing the viewers that, hey, look, it’s recognizing it really quickly. But we decided to show Akeda two beers from the same brand that the label and image was so similar to each other that we confuse other devices.
And we were able to recognize it. We were able to to to to process it quickly. And the whole on training thing is mind blowing and it will become impactful. For all these from from industrial applications through automotive through consumer applications in the future. So that’s the one thing that I get really excited about.
Yeah, that’s it, like on learning is yes, is it? This is where amazing things now are possible because, you know, I’m I literally just I’m overly excited by it because it’s just this the potential is incredible. And this is where I am. I’ve been lucky recently. We’ve had a lot more folks. We’ve sort of divx been diving in a bit more on machine learning and some of the capabilities. And then you realize like it itself is a fairly small community relative to, you know, it’s very, very much in the research phase, so much so compared to the broad computing frameworks, you know, so when you start to show them these capabilities and you hear about how they’re trying to solve the problem, they’re solving it in papers.
You know, it’s still stuff that’s being submitted as research phase. And yet. They can take that blackboard or whiteboard theory now and they can literally put it into place now because like you said, al Qaeda has this capability, like, OK, cool, this is no longer just what is the theory of of driving cars, going to self-driving cars going to be like. All right, let’s show you the other thing is that that and this has happened the other day and my guys were really excited.
They called me into a room like Rob, you got to take a look at this. I highlighted earlier not being dependent upon the cloud to do your processing. And there’s a company out there that that has a phone that most of us have or a lot of people have that has a software update coming out. And they talked about the fact that if you put your phone on airplane mode, you now can run their assistant on device without being dependent on the cloud, providing you more privacy and security.
And and my guys are jumping up and down when we do that, where we do it in hardware. I mean, we’re on to something here. And like we are, we are. And that’s the other thing that you’ll see. There’s a lot of applications and software. And for those that are listening, there’s a lot of great functionality in software, but it’s in software. And what that means is it consumes a lot of energy. It consumes a lot of power because our IP battery, because, you know, the if you’re solving it in software early, I’ve got bad news for what the power consumption levels are.
Exactly. So when we talk about edge devices and we talk about all the stuff that that’s that’s dependent on being independent and functioning without consuming a lot of power, software is a problem. So at the end of the day, so we look at this and we look at what these leading this leading technology company is doing. And we say to ourselves, we’re doing the right things. We are doing the right things. We just we’re just going to continue to march down our path and execute.
And and it’s like I said before, it’s the tip of the iceberg.
And it is and it’s it’s amazing what we can do and the potential is fantastic and yeah, first of all, thank you, Rob. This has been really fun for folks that wanted to reach you to chat further and learn more about brain. Like I said, we’ll have links to the site. We’ll put the link to the YouTube and thank you. And what’s the best way your folks want to get in contact?
Yeah. So if you go to w w w dot brain chip dotcom, there is a link for information. You can fill that out and it will go directly to our sales team, most likely. I’ll get a look at it as well. You can reference that you were part of Disco Posse and I will personally respond to you and start dialog. You can also go through the sales link at Freindship Dotcom. You can contact us through LinkedIn, you can contact us through Twitter at Brain Chip, underscore each.
But for those who are curious, I really, really want to emphasize we’re using YouTube as our platform for education and understanding of the company who we are. So subscribe to our YouTube channel, our Friendship Inc. And that way you’ll be updated every single time we have a new video, a new presentation. And and when this is is uploaded, I’m sure this will be on our our YouTube channel as well. But that’s those are the best ways to reach us.
And we’d love to talk to you and educate you more about brain chip and what we’re doing. But, Eric, thank you very much for having me. And this conversation was great. Thank you.
