Embedded - 156: Black Knight 2000

Episode Date: June 16, 2016

Jeri Ellsworth (@jeriellsworth) spoke with us about the latest developments at CastAR, hiring engineers, and her favorite engine. Embedded.fm T-Shirts are available until the end of June on Teespring (more info). CastAR is making an augmented reality system. They are in Palo Alto, CA, USA and they arehiring.  They work with Playground. Jeri was last on Embedded.fm episode 23: Go For Everything I Want.

Welcome to Embedded. I'm Alicia White, alongside Christopher White. This week, our guest, I'm so excited, is Jerry Ellsworth of CastAR. Hello. How are you? Before we start asking you a bunch of questions, I have a quick note that i have to to do here um t-shirts are coming embedded fm t-shirts are coming with sarah peckis's awesome new embedded fm logo i will have an order link in the show notes it will be a limited time order window and we don't know when and if we'll do

it again so act quickly and push the button yes, despite any premature releases of... I'm sorry. And yes, despite any links that might have gone up, I am going to get men's shirts as well as women's, and they will not all be black. Okay, I'm done. Hi, Terry. Welcome to the show again. Thanks for having me.

It has been a while since we talked to you. Could you introduce yourself as though you were on a panel? Oh, my goodness. Where to begin? I'm kind of an interesting character. I'm a high school dropout. I got into auto racing in the 90s. Had a chain of retail computer stores after that, back when the Internet was getting hot and Windows 95 was the thing to have.

And then when the computer stores fell apart, I took my hobby, which was electronics, and turned it into a career. So I started coming down here to Silicon Valley and meeting folk and showing folks projects and eventually kind of busted into doing electrical engineering as a career without going to school. So some people know me for various things, whether it's the race cars, the computer stores, or some of my designs that I did. So, you know, my electronics career, I did everything from, you know, super high volume toy design to pretty high end video compression. TiVo type boxes and then eventually ended up at Valve Software as their first hire in their R&D department, which out of that came my current project, which is CastAR. And what is CastAR? CastAR is a mixed reality headset. So it allows you to see holograms on your table and you can directly interact with them so our primary focus is entertainment and games and so the the technology allows you and your friends to sit around the table and see video game characters and you can directly interact with them so imagine games like god mode games where you can look down on, on top of little game characters.

So, yeah, that's what we're doing. Okay. We'll ask you a lot more questions about that. But before we do that, we have this segment where we ask you questions and want short answers. And if we are behaving properly,

then we won't ask you why or how, or all of the other questions. We'll see. All right. Grace? I'm excited. Oh, I'm going to go first? Okay.

You always go first. I always go first? Yeah. I don't detect patterns in anything. Favorite pizza topping? Pepperoni. Favorite processor of all time? Oh, I have to go back to the days of when memory was as fast as the internal logic

and it's the 6502 zero page you know a brilliant thing tightly coupled to the memory allowed to have really dense code cool uh least favorite electrical component the thyristor it's just weird i forgot what those are by py i think no thyristor yeah yeah so it's it's used to switch um alternating current it's much like a bipolar um transistor but um only works on alternating current or pulsating signals. Most favorite electrical component? The MOSFET because I try to build them in my garage and I'm just in love with trying to do that. Well, I think after that, this one's going to be an easy one.

Would you rather explain the static keyword in C in its many forms, or the difference between NPN and PNP resistors? Transistors. Oh, that's easy. I'm frustrated with programming. It takes too long. I'd rather just solder a wire, so definitely transistor. Holes, electrons, depletion layers. Totally geek geek out on that favorite engine of all time like automotive engine yes small block chevy for sure um they made it for about 40 or 50 years they're still probably making it um lots of add-on parts for it and when you're into racing it's one of the lightest V8 engines out there it doesn't have much iron in it compared to like the Chrysler Y blocks and those other ones that just

weigh hundreds of extra pounds I feel like we could have a whole show about that probably I have lots of opinions not all good ones uh favorite fictional computer and i tried this last week and it didn't work so if you don't have an answer that's fine uh how um there we go yeah i mean i've been playing with amazon echo and i love asking it to open the pod bay doors and the funny responses so that's kind of on the front of my mind right now.

Favorite pinball machine? I mean, that's like asking if you have a favorite kid or something. Don't let the other pinball machines hear. Okay. Black Knight 2000. They may have heard. I think they're looking at me kind of angrily. They're across the room. I have one more. Chris, do you have any more?

Nope. Preferred type of flux. Oh, this one's easy. So, Kester, high solids. My circuit boards look like a tree busted open and sat poured all over them when I'm done. And it it's great it has a long work time it's sticky so your surface parts stick down and and i'm definitely not into the no clean stuff because it just evaporates too quick and you get cold solder joints too easy yeah i'm learning a lot about fluxes through that question okay i'll take i'll take on anyone that says anything but high solids flux it'll it'll be like two nerds enter one leave and it'll be me

uh so in more detail what is a work day like for you um for me I usually get up around 9 30 or 10 and then cruise down the hill i'm in in san jose and i work in palo alto so i try to avoid all the traffic so i try to hit the road by 10 and then get to the office by 11 and then since i'm an executive in the the company you know, most of my days, you know, spent in BS, you know, business meetings. See, I'm trying not to drop the F-bombs like I warned you about. So, yeah, most of my day, like the regular business day is just like meetings and go-to-market plans and next funding rounds and stuff like that. And then, you know, all the suits and stuff go home around 6 o'clock, and then that's when the engineering starts. So really our core crew, we really get most of our work done between 6 and 8.

And then I head home, and I usually work until like 1 or 2 in the morning because I really love the engineering aspect. I don't like the business side I was gonna ask you does being president of the company interfere with your ability to get engineering done it sounds like that's a resounding yes oh yeah yeah I mean that was one of the biggest surprises um starting the company like I've run businesses before but not at this scale so you end up you know just so much time like trying to inject your vision into all these business meetings and if you if you're not there then all of a sudden you come back a few days later and it's like the whole company is pivoted to do something crazy oh that word pivoted. That's really different than when you made the Commodore 64 system-on-a-chip joystick that you're pretty well known for, the mini games in a single controller.

And that was like 2004, 2005-ish? Yeah. I mean, it was a much simpler project in some ways, but what was different is it was manageable enough that I could difference with the company now is like the landscape is just continually changing. Like we did our Kickstarter for this, gosh, was it almost three years ago? I think it was, I think I was in the middle of the Kickstarter campaign when I came on your podcast last time. Yes. middle of the Kickstarter campaign when I came on your podcast last time. Yes, yes. In fact, you were doing the whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley talking about the Kickstarter. Oh my God, that was crazy. I almost ended up with pneumonia in the middle of that because

it was so stressful and so much like, you know, sleepless nights and working and jet setting around. I admit that when you came over to record, I didn't so much want to record as feed you. You looked tired and just like you'd been doing this a lot. Yeah, it was funny. The Kickstarter, it started off with a month before we did the video, which was pretty stressful.

So, we had to like try to make tons of business decisions, then get the video made. So, that was stressful. And then prior to that, we were doing a bit of a tour just to get the hype going to see if we actually had a viable product. And so, that was stressful. But going into the Kickstarter, it was crazy because I think the first week at least, there was about two interviews a day and it slowed down a little in the middle and then picked up in the end when we started reaching like a million bucks,

then a lot of other folks wanted to talk to us. You did have a very successful Kickstarter funding round. And you reached well over your goal. Yeah, it was pretty exciting. It was a nice proof that we were on to something. But then things went a little wrong with Kickstarter. Yeah, it did. It's not the only thing that went wrong for sure. You know, it's interesting, you know, Rick and I had this,

you know, big lofty plan, you know, okay, we're going to do our Kickstarter, we're going to make, you know, a big bold plan. And then we're going to go raise, you know, more money, because almost anything like this, you have to raise more money. The Kickstarter, the VCs these days just look at Kickstarter as like a validation that you're onto something. But I think our missteps were we underestimated the amount of time it would take to raise that next round of funding and the business side of it. For Rick and I, we quickly got sucked into, you know, 14-hour days of trying to like hire people to work with, you know, engineers. And then we were out hitting the road talking to VCs. But then another misstep is we were in Woodinville, Washington, which was in the middle of nowhere. And when fundraising was kind of going slow because we were in Washington and not Silicon Valley, and we couldn't hire people because we were in Woodinville and not Silicon Valley, it just derailed the entire project. Eventually, you know, we wised up, you know, and partway through that,

we hired a professional CEO, which was great because, you know, the first thing that he did was like, okay, you guys got to get out of Washington, you got to get to Silicon Valley. And as soon as we did that, you know, things started getting back on track. But then you refunded out all of our dollars i know that was uh i'm actually very proud of that you know so we you know to give some you know backstory on that so we promised to start delivering stuff within the first year and we didn't do that we started delivering stuff like a year and a half into it which was um some of the earliest um kickstarter glasses and then we raised a bunch of money through playground global which is andy rubin's um venture fund and so by all this after all this time had elapsed like the market had shifted. VR had sucked the wind out of a lot of the stuff that we were doing.

And so we were like, do we still want to make a PC peripheral with all of these weird skews associated with it now that we're behind? And all we're doing is pissing off the Kickstarter people because we're just behind. And there's, you know, what we really need to do. Here's your favorite word pivot into doing doing what um uh the end consumer really wants which is a self-contained unit not a pc peripheral and so you know internally we went back and forth like oh my god if we wait if we just make everyone wait, and then we ship them out the self-contained, you know, the, let me back up, instead of a PC peripheral, the new units are going to have all their processing on boards. They can play the games out of the box. So, it's an important

distinction, right, in a quite a bit different development cycle for us. And so, you know, getting back onto why we decided to do the refund is we sat in these endless meetings discussing like how to deal with a Kickstarter backer since they were the first there to, you know, love us and support us. You know, it was funny as some of the, you know, purely money focused people, you know, when we start talking about refund, they're like, just give them a refund. They should be happy with that. And Rick and I are like, no, that sounds like something that's going to backfire really badly. Yes. Sci-fi. It's backfired. fired go ahead so you know we we actually we went to andy rubin and our um our friends at playground here's the scenarios we could go through we could give back the money

and potentially piss off everyone because we just borrowed their money and and they get nothing out of it or we can make them wait and piss them off and then they'll get a product that's different than what they ordered or we can give them back the money and give them free glasses. And it was really a no-brainer. When we looked at the figures, it was like, I don't know what the number exactly was, but it was like $1.5 million to do this whole campaign to give back the money and give them glasses and it's like geez that's going to be some of the cheapest marketing dollars we'll ever spend you know when we actually go mass market we're talking about much bigger spends on marketing

it's it's better to have all the kickstarter people happy and and really thank them for getting us through those rough patches you know and getting us down here to silicon valley so we can raise real you know money so we can do it right i'm curious how you feel about kickstarter in hindsight now because it does sound like it was it was invaluable in getting you to this point um but on the other hand it didn't quite work the way you wanted it to would you go back and do you know in 10 years another kickstarter project i would never do kickstarter on this kind of scale again okay so i would only do kickstarter if everything was fully developed and like it was

pretty much at the stage where you know it's like dumping gasoline on a fire. It's like the design is in the can and all I have to do is pull the trigger and the units will start coming off of the factory production line. Anything else is too risky because you're going to get sucked into all these things I talked about. It's like, you know what? I mean, we had some disasters just trying to get the first set of glasses out where one of our vendors just got acquired and they no longer wanted to sell his parts so you know now we're retooling and you know trying to like make something else work and adds like four months to the project and you know or you can't you can't hire um folks fast enough and so you're you're trying to do it yourself but you should be out there doing fundraising. It's just a bad situation. Well, and hiring is a giant time suck too.

You're not doing engineering. You're talking to people all day. Yeah. Yeah. I've got stories around hiring. I'm actually very surprised at the state of engineers these days. It, it's interesting. It's like there's a lot of folks out there that don't know their fundamentals anymore because it's become such a plug-and-play world where you can take a bunch of reference designs and kind of squish them together

and make pretty complicated systems. But, you know, when something goes wrong, when you're plugging all this stuff together, you know, they kind of fall flat and they don't know how to debug it because the underlying fundamentals aren't there. Or even make it low power, miniaturize it. I mean, you can make it work, but it's going to be 10 pounds. Exactly, exactly. You know, and back to the Kickstarter thing, it's like, you know, I think Kickstarter is awesome. And I think, you know, at the time, you know, I think VCs are getting smarter about it.

I'm spending all this time working at Playground and talking to those guys. You know, Kickstarter back then was new. And so, the VCs were really leaning towards people to do Kickstarters on these difficult engineering companies. And now I think they're wising up that it's not a great indicator. It's not a great indicator, and you have to build what you said, even if you find out halfway through that that wasn't the right thing, which is largely what happened to you. You said you were you said

you were going to build a pc peripheral sort of i mean sort of like the the vive and the oculus that are out where you you have a big computer and you are tethered to the computer and maybe you get to walk around maybe but uh you're still tethered to the computer and so you're going to build something self-contained that not tethered to the computer. And so you're going to build something self-contained, not tethered to the computer. Exactly. And that's how you hit tens of millions of homes. It's got to be, pull it out of the box,

hit the power button, and go. It has to be that easy to be mass market. So that's where the Vive and all these other ones are going to struggle. It's hard to imagine most homes in the world that's where the vibe and all these other ones you know are going to struggle it's like it's hard to imagine like most homes in the world you know clearing out their living room and buying you know $1,500 computer sorry that that was exactly what happened wait do you have a vibe yeah Chris got a vibe about a month ago and he let me play with it for a minute and I said clear out the living room and build a 15-head dog it wasn't exactly that Yeah, Chris got a Vive about a month ago, and he let me play with it for a minute. And I said,

Clear out the living room and build a 15-header. Yes, it was exactly that. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, that's my old team that, you know, we were doing that at Valve. And I absolutely think it's amazing. They've done an amazing job, but you're never going to be mass market that way and you know rick and i knew that going into kickstarter we're like what we we really want to be self-contained but since we're doing kickstarter we've got to do this kind of minimalistic thing which is a pc peripheral which don't get me started like the whole like trying to make something work on a pc what a nightmare holy smokes i'll never do that again it's terrible yeah you have no control right i mean it's like oh we don't know what gpu they're using we don't know what cpu they're using so you have to give recommended numbers and nobody likes the recommended numbers and then microsoft comes along and releases some new directx and something oh god i can't imagine oh i know i know it's crazy

it's like windows 10 does like this uh transparent windowing thing and it adds an extra frame of latency, which just totally destroys our system. You can't have that. So then you have to bend over backwards and target specific video cards. And you got to have backing of Facebook or Valve to actually write drivers to target that hardware. But, you know, if it's self-contained, well, you have a target that's not moving, so it becomes a lot easier to make a good user experience. It's like, you know, Rick and I sit around and we talk about what Christmas Day is going to look like in 2017 when kids get our product. And it's, you know, we don't want kids, I mean, we talked about maybe we hook it to phones or maybe we still support hooking it to PCs. And every time we go through that thought exercise, it's just a recipe for disappointment for folks. It's like you get it home and you try to hook it to your 486 DX60.

It doesn't work. You're just disappointed. So, no, it's been a good thing. The Kickstarter and the response from the Kickstarter refund has been amazing. I was really, really proud of how we handled it. And the backers, in general, were really, really happy and thought it was a classy move. And so, I mean, the anxiety the day that we hit the button to say the refund was coming, it's like I couldn't sleep

because it's just like, am I going to get crucified or is it going to turn out neutral or is it going to be good? Well, and it's so easy now with so many horror stories on Kickstarter for that to become a big press debacle and somebody decide, oh, we're going to make an example of this company. So navigating that carefully was probably very, very difficult and anxiety producing, yeah. We tried to be really sensitive to our partners too.

Like Kickstarter was awesome to us when we kicked off our campaign. And so we made sure that we let them know ahead of time just in case they wanted to like have any kind of damage control if it did go south because i mean even kickstarters under a lot of you know scrutiny yeah just because it's out of their control so we wanted to try to be you know nice and let them have some control for a change. So, self-contained. I'm still stuck on this.

Because if I think about wearing the computer necessary to drive the Vive system on my head, it immediately gives me a headache. I mean, the Vive system alone is pretty heavy. You add a nice GPU into that, which I imagine you'll need, and you add a processor and then the ginormous power system and cooling system. I suspect they're doing something different. What can you tell us about what you are doing different that you won't need a large, powerful, expensive computer sitting on your head? So what we're doing to prevent you from having to wear a whole PC on your head that would look kind of weird and probably too heavy is we have a little game console box that clips to your belt and has a wire that runs up to the headset. That way we can remove anything that will generate heat or be heavy away from your head.

And we're doing a lot of other tricks too. So we're using some of my ASIC FPGA mumbo jumbo magic to do feature detection in the world so the actual SOC itself doesn't have to process gigabytes of data just to do the image processing. That's where the other guys are not being very, well, maybe they're being smart because they have a PC there and they can actually just brute force this stuff. But we're reducing gigabytes per second of data down to just megabytes of data. So the SoC, the tablet class processor, doesn't have to actually do all that work. So you're doing the motion tracking with cameras?

Yep, it's camera-based, similar to our original system. Gyros and cameras and stuff. We're adding new features, but we're not going to be announcing those quite yet. But the majority of the little game console box, it's all battery because we're shooting for a long gameplay session. And so these tablet processors, when you run them full tilt to do graphics at that rate, they're five or six watts. So it's quite a challenge.

That would get hot, too. Yeah, so you need a little surface area to dissipate that heat. But those processors are actually pretty capable now. If you think of high-end tablets, they're driving really high-density displays and, you know, playing pretty appreciably good games on them. So it doesn't seem like a huge impossible task. Yeah, there's tablets out there that have far more resolution than what we require. So, you know, we're in good shape. So we actually have a lot of that stuff up and running on the bench. And it'll be exciting when we actually get to start showing that, which will probably be later in the year or beginning of next year once we start trying to get the next hype cycle going to sell the actual units.

It's kind of interesting that as we're going through all these different phases of the know, the amount of money on engineering starts looking small compared to things like marketing. It kind of makes my skin crawl. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Many of your past projects have been, I don't want to say word of mouth because I'm sure there was marketing, but it wasn't like that. You probably didn't drop a million dollars of advertising before you got started. Yeah, this is different. Like, we're trying to get into like a big market penetration into, you know, homes across, you know, well, maybe I shouldn't go into all that, but across some regions.

Oh, you know, that brings up a topic. I really, you know, some of our folks would probably, their skin would be crawling themselves, like hearing all the stuff I'm talking about. Because whenever I have to go do public speaking, it's like my hands are constantly tied now. And that's one of the things that was really disappointing about the Kickstarter campaign for me. Like Rick and I thought we could go into this probably naively that we could be, you know, you know, totally open and talking about what was going on and it would be okay. We quickly realized that was a really, really bad idea. Like there was a situation where we had a delay to one of our our early kickstarter backer glasses and we were convinced it was this chip that was causing us the problem and you know if we would have went on twitter and said like you know this company made this chip and it doesn't work as expected and it turned out it wasn't that chip it was a

software bug you know we had just you know potentially like pissed off one of our partners it's just different when you're uh when you're trying to make a mass market device you got to be a lot more careful about what you say and more people are watching you now. So, when you say something, you're saying it to a larger audience. So, eating crow is worse. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that would have been a really, really bad situation, you know, because we were totally convinced. I sometimes don't have a filter and go to Twitter and trash on things. I was about ready to do it. Don't worry, nobody listens to podcasts. Okay. That's not what I told her when I asked her on the show. Oh, oops, sorry.

You have a good viewership. We do. And our listeners are pretty engaged, which has been really great. But one of the reasons I did ask you on the show is because you are hiring. I mean, you're hiring a lot. Yeah, our team has grown a lot since we moved down here. We're now well-funded, and we're trying to build out the team, which has been a challenge.

Just like I was talking about earlier, there's really good talent out there, but you've got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princes and princesses and um so that's pretty tedious you know even here in silicon valley what are you hiring for oh well we're looking for mostly production um type folks folks that have been through the production cycle once or twice, really in desperate need of a firmware person right now, because we have, you know, firmware hanging out all over our device, whether it's our wand controller and our headset and our, you know, the personnel we have now are stretched pretty thin. That would be great. We're looking for another program manager so someone familiar with manufacturing can run some of these programs and then on the software side you know we're looking

for folks anywhere from we have a small game studio now so we're looking for games folks so there's a wide variety of folks that work in that group, like artists and level designers and various games people that I probably don't even know. And then we have our system aspects. There's a lot of system software, and those guys are kind of stretched a little thin. So, you know, Android experience, you know, low-level clear down to the metal type experience, drivers. And I think I saw hardware and mechanical engineering on your list too. Yeah, if we could find another really hardcore electrical engineer that's been through the production cycle before, that'd be awesome. I mean, I tend to let everyone down because they're looking to me to do some of this EE work.

And then, you know, I get sucked into some BS, go to market meeting. Sorry if any of our marketing people are listening. But I don't get all the work done that I should. So I keep finding myself being the critical path. We'll pretend that BS stands for business supreme. Ah, yeah, yeah. We love you. Okay, so I have been wanting to talk to someone about hiring process and what is it like for you? We have a fairly large segment of our audiences are college students who are just trying to figure

out engineering as a whole. And so they probably wouldn't be who you're trying to hire, but could you talk to them about what do you do? I mean, you submit a resume, do you include a cover letter? What kind of interview questions do you ask? I think it's different for everywhere that you go. But for us, things that are important is that you have some relevant work, you know, some prior history. You know, even if you're like a student or maybe getting started that, you know, on your resume, you're not a good engineer until you get a couple bloody noses and you kind of mess up a few times. I must be a really good engineer. No, the more bloody noses you get out there, the better you are as an engineer, usually. Sorry. The other thing that we look for is someone that can collaborate. So, you know, when you come interview for us, you know, you go through, you meet, you know, most of the hardware team.

Like if you're interviewing for hardware and you do whiteboarding sessions on every single session. And what I look for and a lot of our folks look for is like we're going to throw some curveballs at you but what we really want to hear is like you know don't try to bolt us um like if you don't know something say like gosh i've never experienced that before can you you know help you know walk me through that. And what we're looking at is see if we can do a collaboration because I can't, I shouldn't give away our interview questions, but it may be, they're not trick questions. They're not like puzzles.

They're real design problems, but they're tricky because it forces you to think about what the customer wants. And you have to think about your bill of materials, you know, how much each part that you're selecting that's going into the design and manufacturability. And so those are all the things that we're kind of throwing at you to do a work problem on the whiteboard. Some of the candidates that I've ran into that I have the biggest allergic reactions to, we kind of call the filibuster folks. If they get up there and they try to waste time in the interview talking about stuff they did in the past

and are resistant to get to the whiteboard, it's almost an immediate no higher when I start seeing that kind of you know stalling to get to the whiteboard yeah I remember that kind of behavior now that you mentioned that yeah you know it's amazing in the valley here there are people that go from company to company that don't have any of the fundamentals, but they're really good at talking the talk and throwing out the buzzwords. And if they can get past all the whiteboard work sessions, they can get hired and then they can kind of fly under the radar for a year or two before they get found out and then they move to the next position. You know, for us, we look,

you know, when we pre-screen folks, we often look at their work history. If we see six months here, one month there, a year here, really short durations, we start to really poke to see if they're one of these filibustering people. Well, and it's tough. I used to have people who really did not want to program, didn't want to write code in an interview. And as a senior engineer, I sort of understand, you know, writing code is sort of just a tiny part of what I do. That's not the most useful question. But on the other hand, wow, there are a lot of people who really can't write code and I need to know before I start paying them. Yeah, exactly.

I think, you know, when I've sat through hundreds of interviews at Valve Software, putting that team together and many here and maybe not hundreds, but it's very rare for a candidate to come through and get the problem right on the whiteboard it has tons of like problems in it you know i think as a young engineer coming into the field they should just be ready to accept and be humble when they go in and understand it's going to have tons of problems and most of us on the other side aren't looking for perfection we're looking for someone that we think that we could actually work with and when when there's a problem we can collaborate it's another allergic reaction i have is when a candidate like instead of just accepting

their problem that they may have in their design, they start getting defensive. It's like, that'll be like an immediate no hire for me if they get defensive. Because that just shows that I won't be able to work with them when there is that problem, when we're sitting around the table after they get hired. I once, after I was offered a job, but I wasn't really sure I should take it. I made an appointment to have a talk with my future manager. And then I disagreed with everything he said. Like I was annoying just to find out what would happen when he disagreed with me. Oh, so if he like lashes out at you or something? Yes. Was this a, well, I'm not going to hire you.

You're too much of a jerk. Or was it a, well, let's find out what's wrong. What's behind the problem here? And it was, I think, educational for both of us and useful to have done. And I did come clean and say, these are the things that I really don't care about that we argued about. And these are the things I actually do care about. And so, we should clear this conversation from our cash. That's actually kind of a good point. Like, you know, if I were interviewing, you know, I think I would be looking at the people in the room. If they're condescending

to me or mean in any way, I probably would, you know, second guess going working there. Like, you know, I interviewed at a big fruit company. I was just going to say. I just, go ahead. Yeah. And they were condescending to me. I was kind of f***ing up in the interview, but they were asking me questions out of my domain. And it's just like, so as soon as they realized that they'd put me into the wrong interview, they brought in some other folks, you know, to interview me in digital design instead

of hardcore analog design. And they were going to offer me a job and I was like, forget it. I don't want to work here. But interviewing is scary. So, it's hard not to get defensive. It's hard not to feel like they're attacking you when what they're doing is setting up a difficult problem. They want to see how you work. Exactly. It's a tough situation, especially when you only have an hour to get to know somebody and to find out if you're going to work with them for the next five years. Well, sometimes people are trying to find out how you work. And I like what you're saying about practical problems and talking about the implications of part choice and all that. That's things I've never been asked in interviews,

so I would love that. But I've been in interviews where it's like, okay, here's this goat in a river, or here's this completely inscrutable bit-twiddling problem. What does this code do? It's like, why? Exactly. You can't learn anything about how i think from this because i can't explain what's going yeah so i'm heartened to hear that practical questions exist yeah i mean i think the advice if you're like a manager and you're um looking to hire people onto your team make sure that every single

one of the interviews is technical um don't don't allow any of the interviews just to be chit chatty because those are super you know when i say chit chatty like we've had folks that were tempted to just sit there and ask them about their prior history and of course they're going to be able to you know make it sound like they're amazing but if they're not getting up to the whiteboard you're never going to know and don't ask those stupid like puzzle questions i mean it's they just scare the the candidate and they really don't reveal a lot well and experienced people often are very annoyed by those because we know what you're doing and it's annoying and it's not going to get you what you want and all that do you ask the same mostly the same questions from interview to interview

i always found that to be really useful yeah yeah so um every candidate gets the same question from me um unless they're in a different domain and so so we have a digital design, we have a firmware, we have an analog design question, but they're all kind of the same. And I encourage each of our teams to have their questions and we review them ahead of time and make sure that everyone going in knows what they're looking for.

And we're getting better as a company hiring because you start to calibrate. You start to see trends of how people are failing or succeeding, and you can refine that question. I guess once we get bigger and we start hiring hundreds of people and Glassdoor starts putting our questions up there, we'll have to make different variants of it, but. A nice problem to have. Yeah. That's a future problem. Yeah. It's fun. I love our team. We put together a really awesome team. We work really hard. It's the startup life and dream. We also, we're looking for that when we're talking to folks. It's like, are you ready for this? Because you're going to come into an environment where here's your favorite word.

Again, we may have to pivot a couple of times as we, as we figure out where we're going and, you know, there's going to be some really times and there's going to be some really great times. And, you know,

in the end it's about, you know, making this amazing product. Okay. So if you have sold your hiring uh or your your open positions to someone listening they should go to cast ar slash jobs yeah i think on the main page there's a join us or something it should be easy enough to find okay and the jobs are in palo Alto, Silicon Valley, California.

Yeah, we're not big enough to support remote workers necessarily unless they're just like absolutely amazing. It's tough. it's part of your corporate culture. It takes a different discipline on both sides. I spent most of my career working remotely. So, like I was talking about coming down here to Silicon Valley and finding my first jobs. I was living in Portland, and I would cruise on down here and meet people and land these jobs. I was living in Portland and I would cruise on down here and meet people and land these jobs. And the first couple that I did were okay, but I learned a lot about how to, when to over-communicate and when to, you know, keep it brief. It kind of depends on the

personality of your manager on the other side whether you know they give you complete faith that you'll just get done or if you need to over communicate so that's some of the first things i always try to figure out early on um starting like the job well that's even true if not remote i mean sometimes yeah people uh who are on site get lost in the shuffle. Yeah, and sometimes it's just not workable. You know, sometimes I didn't have the skills to meet the expectations of my boss at the other end. And so it was just unworkable. And sometimes it worked out great. So, you know, if you try it and it doesn't work out, you know, maybe don't get discouraged.

It might have been the other side as well. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, this is going down a depressing path. Let's try something else. For CastAR, what is your killer app? Oh, it's definitely entertainment. We're really focused on social gaming. You know, what's magical about our system is when you start getting two or three of your friends around the table and you start playing these kind of God mode games. And, you know, let me set up a scenario for you. Just imagine we're all an rts and i go off and i attack your village and i you know form an alliance i look across the table to alicia and then we go off and like attack you know someone else's village for a while and then um the alliances can shift and it's it's that closeness it's like sitting around a campfire and sharing this entertainment experience it's super magical and the more people you can add around the experience the more um addicting it

gets and we're also trying to bridge that over larger distances so our system has wi-fi and all the normal connectivity stuff to it but we're adding some features to it to allow you to have a more intimate connection like that. So, you know, if we're playing across the world and, you know, I have a hologram standing on the table, you would see that same hologram on your side and we'll be able to directly communicate with each other over voice chat. And so, we're trying to mimic the social experiences with, you know, network play. This kind of experience is kind of around the campfire type experience is not really present on any of the other video game systems. And so we think that's really

special about our system. I don't know if that made sense. I kind of rambled a little bit, but. No, no, but going, going like way back to the beginning, RTS is a real-time strategy, which when you say that, I think of things like risk, but you probably have things that are more fun than risk. Or like Warcraft. Yeah, things like that. Our system works really well for top-down kind of god mode stuff. Like a Mario Kart would be amazing, where we're all sitting around the table and you have little um race cars cruising around the the table or world of warcraft or um any kind of third person top down type game well it's such a direct interaction so you can just reach right into the experience and directly point to where you want your character to go that's also another thing that's just really never seen on any other

type of gaming system. I mean, VR is doing some of it, but it's inherently anti-social. So, you don't get this kind of communal type experience. It's partially because it's augmented reality, because you can see the room as well as these, as well as what the glasses are overlaying the the augmented part of the reality and you're in the room with your friends and you're in the room with your friends or you're in the room maybe not with your friends but with somebody else who is a friend but far away exactly so like if we're far away from each other when i take my wand controller and i put it into the virtual space you see it

show up on your side you know which is that's cool you know it's very it's very direct one of one of the things from using the vive for a few weeks is the impression i got is nobody's quite figured out what to do with it yet are you kidding audio shield is the best thing ever there's lots of fun little games and there's some fun bigger games. But the games, they're all trying different things, and nobody seems to have... They've all got different interfaces. They've all got different interfaces.

I mean, there is a killer app out there, but I don't think anybody's settled on it yet. And I think what's going to emerge from it is maybe not what everybody's expecting. And I expect you guys are open to that, too. It's like, okay, here's what we think's going's gonna happen but if something else pops up that's compelling we're gonna we're gonna go with that too we're gonna pivot yeah right i didn't want to say that hey i'm gonna abuse the hell out of it it's so close to home um anyway um yeah it's true you know i'm looking at the

whole like evolution so when we were at valve and we started researching mixed reality ar and virtual reality um everyone thought first person shooters were going to be the killer thing on these VR headsets. It turns out it makes everyone throw up and get really sick. And so after we left Valve and we started doing the mixed reality stuff, we started to see this trend of all the VR stuff moving away from first-person shooters where you're running through an environment to more of a localized like room scale type experience that's the the magic of the vibe system is it's it's kind of like um these most of the compelling experiences are like the connect dance dance central or whatever it's called where a bunch of you get together, you have fun, like thrashing your hands around and you're running around in the living room, you know, doing tilt brush. But

the problem is, is they're just like the Kinect games and Guitar Hero and some of these niche-y things, is they don't really have the sticking power. So, like, you know, our Vive, you know, I use it like once every three weeks and I try and experience. I'm like, haha, it's fun. And I play it for 15 minutes and then I put it on the shelf and it sits there for two or three weeks until the next experience comes along. Like what we're trying to put together is a system that gets people coming back every day. It's approachable.

You don't have to clear out your furniture. It has familiar game content that has long play aspects to it, like RTSs have long session times. And something where people don't necessarily have to learn how to interact with something in a new way. It's virtual, but it's interacting in the same way's really cool technology out there like um these auto stereo displays that within 10 years for sure you're going to be able to walk into your home it's going to track your face position and you're it's going to know who you are you're going to be able to say hey cast ar show me the weather in silicon valley and you'll see a holographic version of um the valley and the

weather you know system floating through it or you could sit around the table and and play games and have multiple viewers into into these holographic displays and they'll be eyewear free but they're they're going to be that easy to approach easier than you know even tablets are today because they're just going to be there and present in your environment all the time. That sounds amazing. I mean, we have a long ways to go. I mean, at CastAR, we're just looking at what's the most viable mixed reality platform we can ship out today. And really, it's the projected type mixed reality. I mean, we want to have a

price point that's just an impulse buy so everyone can get these headsets and they can use them. But where are we in 10 years? We're probably, a lot of our experiences are going to be eyewear free. If we get on the bus, we might put our near eye type display and we do our computing in our eyewear when we're out and about but not when we're in the home so we want to make sure that we're ready for that when when the time comes and so a lot of our focus is around our platform not necessarily the um making the ultimate infidelity for the glasses or i think that's another thing where the VR guys kind of painted themselves into a corner. They just kept pushing so hard for more pixels

and more fidelity. And so now the expectations for the games are it's got to be AAA game title type experiences and they lost track of the social fun aspect of it. Yeah, most of the most fun things on there so far are not triple a they're very simple and you know cartoony graphics and things and exactly and we're going through a phase right now i'm seeing it i already see all the chatter out there this is something i was trying to warn um valve about early on is that um if you go down this path there's going to be an expectation of the quality of the games that you're not going to be able to achieve.

So, you know, if you keep pushing down the path of like we're making a headset for AAA games and then folks get the headset and they pay $40 for the office simulator and it's just an office simulator that you want to play for 15 minutes, they're going to feel disappointed and then there's going to be this bad cycle of this disappointment. But you are focusing on board games and community shared things. Boy, I didn't really get that right, did I? I got the board games part okay. And you have been saying mixed reality. And I was saying augmented reality. What's the difference between augmented reality and mixed reality? It's just another acronym that...

We moved to using mixed reality because we want to start bringing physical objects into the experience. So playing cards and little toy figures and stuff like that. So we want to mix real world objects with augmented things. Like I put my toy dragon down, plastic toy dragon. It shoots fire at your village. You know, we want to create those moments of delight and direct gameplay and mix them right in the middle of games. Augmented reality has been around for a long time and it's very confusing.

So anyway, that's the reason we're pivoting towards mixed reality. Are you going to be Cast MR soon? Mr. Cast? I know, because maybe it doesn't go well with our name. No, it's fine yeah AR has mixed reality has more ability to integrate into the real world that's what you're saying

and I was playing with the VR and there are some things you can instructional things that have so much more possibility than what they're doing. And I'm really excited about the idea of walking around my electronics and things like that. But CastAR would let me have more of a real world heads up view that if I wanted to walk around the electronics of a board, I could, but i could also be holding the board exactly that's the

that's the kind of experiences we're going for and we think those would be more compelling in the long run um and definitely more approachable oftentimes i use my father as a metric of you know are we getting the product right because he's a smart guy but he's not you know technical as far as computers and it's like in the past when I was a kid I tried to get my father to play video games and he was completely confused by the decoupling of a joystick and the computer screen or the the game screen across the room he just couldn't get past it. But I think about like, could my father work a game of Risk with the grandkids, for instance?

And yeah, I think, you know, if we had physical ponds that you could move in there, like the grandkids could say, dad, take the toy dragon and put it where you want it and it'll burn the village down. That's something that he could understand because it's very direct. You just interact directly with the experience. You know, VR is heading in that direction, but it's incomplete. And I don't think that it's going to be something like my father and many other people out there would ever do.

It'd just be too alien to him. But mixed reality, as we get comfortable, as the world gets comfortable with mixed reality, like CastAR, we think we have the perfect entry point for that. One of our sayings is, if you can open a game board, you can play with our system. We want it to be that easy. Open the game board, hit the power button, reach into the experience and directly interact with it. As people mature and they understand it a bit more, then all these other types of displays like the HoloLens with near eye display will become more interesting for the mass market where, you know where you can bring it off the table and you can start doing bigger experiences.

And as you project into the future, just like I said, these other holographic displays that don't have eyewear, those will be very interesting and very key part of our everyday life. But the mixed reality glasses will get so good that they can do everything VR does plus all of the mixed reality stuff that societies become accustomed to. It's just like the early days of computers.

It just took a lot of baby steps to get it to where everyone now knows how to use an iPad. And the HoloLens is the very expensive Microsoft mixed product, right? Yeah, yeah. It's pretty amazing. So it uses this near-eye display to put the image right into your eye, and then it tracks the entire room. So you can have stuff like hanging off the ceiling or popping up out of the floor. But, you know, it's pretty crude right now.

It's going to take quite a few years for that kind of technology to be ready for a mass market. I think it retails for $3,000 right now, and it only has this really tiny, narrow field of view. But every time I've tried it, it's definitely heading in the right direction. It's too bad we're going to get there first. I know that when we saw your demo many months ago, maybe a year ago at this point, there were lots of games, which I expected, but there were at least one science-y thing to look at. Are you still pursuing other forms of visualizing engineering and science? Absolutely. Yes.

So we're just building the tool for other people to make interesting content. So our main focus, what we're driving towards our platform is games and entertainment. But just like you saw with Oculus now, it's been shipping for a while, there's lots of other vertical markets that are using the device. And from a business perspective,

this is all the stuff that Andy Rubin and all the folks at Playground have been helping us understand. It's like you've got to focus and then the other verticals will come for free. And so that's our strategy. It's like where will we get the most adoption? And if we went after enterprise or something very niche-y like that, we could probably sell the headset for $2,000 and we could sell tens of thousands of them.

But it'd be very hard or difficult for us to go into mass market if we have that mindset. Because once you head down that path, it's hard to erode your business unit that's selling $10,000 headsets for a $299 headset or something like that. And yet it's got to be so tempting. I mean, you could get to one of those headsets faster. I mean, you could do something to augment surgery or teach people how to fix, I don't know, cars or electronics

or anything that requires you to have detailed manuals alongside physical objects. But that still can happen. It will, but... Well, you actually, like, you look through the marketplace now. You've got Epson that's doing enterprise. They have some headset that's kind of like HoloLens, but they're trying to sell them to Boeing and places to look at stress in the wings of the airplane and stuff like that. You've got Meta, who's squarely focused on enterprise. It changes your decisions as you're creating the product you know if you're selling a ten thousand dollar or a thousand dollar headset or

whatever um you can throw a uh fifty dollar chip in there without blinking at it if you're going for something that's going to be impulse by like what we're doing you have to sit there and do a lot more engineering like we're just doing tons of engineering so we can drive the price way down. It would just be easier for us to, it would be dangerous for us, right? We would throw really expensive components in there and get it done, and then we wouldn't have a path to get to market, mass market. I think people, a lot of people lose sight of the fact that that a great deal of engineering is driving cost and power out of things those those are the hard you know the two big hard problems besides inventing an idea uh and i think people forget that absolutely yeah and your engineers have to be like mindful of that from day one and that's the stuff that we work with our engineers to you know challenge them

like we do you know frequent bill of material reviews like here's a dollar sitting there on this particular component have you really looked for something that's 10 cents or are you just trying to uh you know get the prototype out just let us know like so we can keep an eye on it if we need to throw more work at it. And that's the balancing act that we do on a daily basis. Some things are prototype and we understand that we're throwing a lot of money at it and other things are going to stick around until production. So let's try to do the cost reduction stuff early. If I wanted to program a game for CastAR, what language should I be learning? Is Unity a good platform?

Unity is great. So Unity and Unreal, so we support both of those. Both of them are almost push the button and go type experiences. You just drop our plugin into the experience and you set some scaling values like how big the game's going to be on the table. And you can get up and going within seconds. In Unity, I believe it's C Sharp

and a couple other kind of higher level languages. If you're a hardcore programmer, then Unreal is the one for you. But you know, even this goes to show how easy it is. If I can get a game going on our system with Unity, it's pretty amazing. It's drag and drop these days to make games like you just drag assets in, you buy them from their asset store, attach sounds to them, and just hit the play button

and it shows up on the glasses. Wow. When can I try that for myself? I think you can download, at least you can download Unity for free. I think Unreal has a free-ish version. No, no, I have Unity. We started taking a class.

That was the disguised question of when are you planning to ship? You mentioned 2017 Christmas, but are you doing developer glasses? Are you doing early adopters? Yeah, so folks are using our Kickstarter glasses now, but they're not a great proxy for what the new glasses are. We've added a bunch of features. kickstarter glasses now but they're not a great proxy for you know what the new glasses are we've added a bunch of features um so towards the end of the summer we're going to be sampling some of the new glasses but um let's be to very select developers like key developers because it has

lots of warts and then we have a couple more builds of glasses as we sand off the rough edges and warts. And then they'll become more and more available. I mean, for us, it's important that we have a pipeline completely full before the day we launch of content. Not only the content that's going to be on the actual unit itself, but content that you can go download and put onto the unit. Because again, we're trying to craft everything to get people coming back to our system on a daily basis so it doesn't become like the Vive where you just throw it on the shelf and only come back every couple weeks. Maybe if you see a news story or something, you know, getting people engaged every single day, having new content in the pipelines, there's always something new and exciting.

So that's going to be one of our big challenges is coordinating all of that. And we're actually putting a lot of staff and personnel around developer relations. So actually, if you asked who we're looking for, we're desperately looking for more developer relations folks to get up to speed for when these units go out. Because we want our developers to feel like rock stars. And so we want to treat them really well. And it's going to take a lot of people on our side to do that. What is a developer relation person? What would their skill set be?

Would they be game developers or would they be community managers? Yeah, it's going to be a little bit of all of that. So there's going to be technical developer relations positions that we'll need to fill out more of. It's like an FAE sort of help with your technical information. So technical. Okay. Someone that knows about games, knows about programming, you know, we can parachute them in, you know,

hopefully all these people like to travel, you know, because they may have to like travel and parachute in, help developers when they get stuck. And then we need some evangelists too. So the people that are your best buds, they're not necessarily technical, but they'll stop by the studio and bring you a muffin basket or something to keep you loving CastAR. And then finding out if there's anything blocking and then they'll help, you know, dispatch the more technical people. And then we're a little low on folks to do like web outreach type stuff. So we're kind of looking around for some folks in that area. It's going to be a big, it's going to be a big program and a big operation around that.

Yeah. Most device companies and manufacturers or, and engineers don't have to think about two different kinds of customers where the people we sell to, and then the people who make things for the people we sell to that, that is a huge multiplier and complexity. It's the curse of being a platform. Yeah. Yeah. And having an SDK and maintaining it. I mean, that's a huge multiplier in complexity it's the curse of being a platform yeah yeah yeah and having an sdk and maintaining it i mean that's a whole other company brought up a great point that

um i think it's pretty interesting you you you hit on one of the key things that we're focusing on really heavily right now is the inconsistency between um the user experience from one game to another. And so part of this developer relations team is taking our TCRs, technical code requirement documents and guidelines and helping the developer follow those because it's really important on a platform that the user has a consistent experience. So when you enter or exit

a game that it's the same every single time like it's kind of surprising that the vive like has this problem right now because um at valve that was one of the things that they were beating into my head is like consistency like if you're going to do a micro transaction it should the store access should always be the same. Or when you leave a game, it should always exit approximately the same. You kind of see it across the board. It's kind of strange. Like even the Xbox One is like half the time I get lost trying to exit a game.

And it doesn't have to be that way if you help your developers follow some of these guidelines. Yeah, but it's a lot of guidelines and it's that's a lot of enforcement a lot of enforcements and sometimes it's you end up in two games and they handled the same problem differently but it probably there probably was no standard way to hand handle it it was just whichever game I played first, the other one was wrong. Sort of problem. I think the VR guys have a bigger challenge with that because, again,

the interaction models haven't been defined yet. For us, one of the important things is we're a game board type experience, so we have a target. The game developer targets unless they want to make their own game board but basically you target this game board and it's much easier task than trying to

you know figure out how to make a user experience where you can walk anywhere in the room and i think back to my um assertions that you know that the mass market needs some baby steps to acclimate to these type of experiences. I think with CastAR, if we knock it out of the park, we're going to define a lot of those experiences. And they're going to be centered around the table and centered around social interactions. And then when other technology comes along, like the near eyeglasses, where you can just start putting experiences everywhere, I think those are going to translate and be a nice springboard for,

a familiar springboard for the end consumer. Cool. Well, I think I have just one more. Well, I say it's one question, but it's probably like six. You have mentioned Andy Rubin and uh Playground which is a sort of a VC sort of an incubator sort of a consulting firm um could you tell us about that and how you uh got involved with them?

Oh, absolutely. So when we were raising money, we were doing the Sand Hill Road circuit, which is where all the VCs are in Silicon Valley. We had some corporate money, a syndicate of some corporate money that wanted to put money into us. And we had some money out of like New York. So it was like these three different groups

that had different like strings attached to them. So, you know, Sand Hill Road money, you know, is the most traditional and most straightforward and most well-known in the Bay Area. Some of this hedge fund money that we were looking at from New York was really cool, but it was super hands-off. And then some of the corporate money that had all kinds of strings attached, like you need to use our chip if you're going to take our money, which we didn't want anything to do with. And so we were getting close to making our decision on which of the Sandhill or the hedge fund money we were going to go with. And then out of the blue, Andy Rubin kind of parachuted in and he's like, here's this deal. This is what we're

doing. It's different. We've identified why most hardware startups fail, and we want to fix that. And most hardware startups, and I've actually experienced this working at various venture-funded companies as an engineer, but I got to see it. You take your first big chunk of money, and much like the Kickstarter, you have to like make big bold plans to use that money. And sometimes it doesn't work out. And so what happens is you get this lump of money and you start to quickly feel this pressure that you got to get going. You got to start hiring. And then inevitably something's going to go kind of wrong. So now the temptation of the executive team is to kind of shield that from the VCs. And so then there's this like bidirectional pressure coming, you know, the executives are like pressing on the engineers to get their together and, you know and fix this problem. And then they're trying to push back with the VCs to keep them away

and hide the fact that things aren't going well. And it's kind of dysfunctional. And so what Andy recognized is like, what if we make a more intimate kind of relationship and also add resources to the money that comes along for free with it and so basically what you get is you get for us the deal was we got the same amount of money the same dilution we gave up the same amount of the company and we got engineering resources so his studio has mechanical engineers, software engineers, industrial designers,

business guidance, manufacturing experts. And you get to use as much of that as you want. So what that did was it allowed us to focus on hiring more smartly and not rushing out and making bad decisions on hiring or spending money on stupid things to try to accelerate the process. And also this more intimate working relationships. We get free rent. We get some free food. We have a free prototyping service. We're intimately working with all the partners

at v at uh playground and so when things go sideways they're just there they're going to see it so there's no no reason to try to hide it or try to put pressure on the engineers to you know pull a miracle to fix the problem it. You're more tempted to go over and say, hey, Andy, you know, we kind of messed up. This chip vendor's not working with us and they're not going to give us this chip. And then it gives them some opportunity to try to help fix things.

I mean, that's an actual scenario that happened. It's like we had a chip vendor that didn't want to work with us and he said something like, God damn it, I sold 200 million of those chips when I was at Android, you know, let me get on the phone, and we got immediate, you know, reaction out of him. So, it's been a really amazing relationship, quite different than other VCs. That sounds very different than most VCs. Well, and Andy has just an amazing wealth of

experience. He did Danger, which did the Sidekick phone, which I loved. Oh, I love that phone too. And then he did Android. And I mean, it's not like he was part of the android team no he he really he was very much in charge of android it's it's so funny so the entire group of playgrounds made up the partners all are entrepreneurs so they know exactly what we've been through and they've been through different entrepreneurial challenges so there's always like that when there's a problem, there's always someone there that's been through something similar. And the interactions are kind of interesting between the different partners. Like Andy Rubin, you know, he's kind of like the guy that comes in and drops the grenade in the middle of the room and challenges us to think a little bit differently and it blows up and we're

like oh that was pretty smart um yeah gosh he really has some insight about like whatever go to market or this or that and he just drops the grenade and turns around and walks out some of the other partners are more intimately involved so So, you know, they're actively trying to help us find the right executive team or the right marketing people. And, you know, I can go on and on. I don't want to bore everyone with it, but it's quite different. It's pretty awesome. And it's different than an incubator. You know, some people might say like, well, why is it different than Y Combinator? So Andy Rubin's thesis is he wants to invest in companies that are going to change the world, like big platform plays. And so they're making pretty big investments. So unlike a smaller group like Y Combinator that sprinkles like a few hundred thousand dollars here and there and they hope for one out of 50 to make it big like Andy looks at like more mature startups that actually

are you know and to to touch you know hundreds of millions of people's lives and so that's that's what their focus is and so um, the resources that he provided, provider, I would say a little bit higher quality than a small incubator. That sounds really, really cool. All right. We have kept you for long enough for your weekend, and I know that you do work a lot. Chris, do you have any last questions? No, we should let her go. I'm sorry if I was so rambly today I felt like I was all over the board

I know this is great I wanted to hear about all the different things actually I want to hear about cars but that is separate we should get back to our weekend I'd love to come on and talk about cars sometime

well in the meantime do you have any last thoughts you'd love to come on and talk about cars sometime. Well, in the meantime, do you have any last thoughts you'd like to leave us with? No, not really. Actually, I feel pretty good. I had a great time. Um, I hope, hope there's some little nuggets in there that, um, folks that are out interviewing or folks that are putting together interview panels can use. Yeah, I think so. But it's been a joy. Well, thank you. It has been a joy. We are quite thrilled to have you. All right. Thank you very much.

My guest has been Jerry Ellsworth, president of CastAR and an amazing electrical engineer. I'd also like to thank Christopher White for producing and co-hosting. And of course, thank you for listening. T-shirts are coming really soon. So check that embedded.fm website for a link. You can hit contact there if you'd like to say hello, or I may have some availability starting in August. So if you've got something that you want help with, we should talk. And you can send me email off of show at embedded.fm, info at Logical Elegance, or hit the contact link at either one of those. Now, a final thought from Philip K. Dick.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. Embedded FM is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive any revenue from them. At this time, our sole sponsor remains Logical Elegance.