This Week in Startups - Reimagining reading with VR featuring Sol Reader CEO Ben Chelf | E1772

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

This Week in Startups is presented by: .Tech Domains has a new program called startups.tech, where you can get your startup featured on This Week in Startups. Go to https://startups.tech/jason to find out how! Crowdbotics. Great ideas can change the world, and Crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com/twist Issuu is the all-in-one platform for creating and distributing beautiful digital content. Get started with Issuu today for free or sign up for an annual premium account and get 50% off when you go to Issuu.com/podcast and use promo code twist. * Today’s show: Sol Reader CEO Ben Chelf joins Jason to discuss Sol Reader’s design (1:24), how wearable e-readers will create more focused readers (28:06) the ways in which devices reshape the human brain (24:37), and much more! Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/bchelf Check Out Sol Reader: https://solreader.com/ * Time stamps: (00:00) Sol Reader CEO Ben Chelf joins Jason (4:00) Ben presents the prototype and demos Sol Reader (8:28) LLM and future integrations for Sol Reader (12:40) .Tech Domains - Apply to get your startup featured on This Week in Startups at https://startups.tech/jason (14:04) Overcoming the challenges of a hardware startup (17:59) Sol Reader’s business model (21:09) Audio integration and transcript features (23:22) Optimizing Sol Reader's first product launch (26:38) Crowdbotics - Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at ⁠https://crowdbotics.com/twist⁠ (28:06) The origin of the wearable e-reader concept and efforts to diminish screen time (38:45) Issuu - Sign up for free or get 50% off an annual premium account by using promo code twist at https://issuu.com/podcast (40:05) Initial product testers' feedback (44:59) Apple’s Vision Pro headset * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Even from the first time I put the first prototype, which was essentially toilet paper rolls and like, you know, just baseball cap full of like electronics. And I realized this, that's when I realized these two worlds came together. One, like the comfort aspect of lying and bed reading. And then two, you know, this this nicotine gum idea of like, well, where are we going to go with personal computing devices? And I really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iPhone for personal computing. and that's what that's what grew me back in. This weekend startups is brought to you by. DotTech domains has a new program called Startups.Tech,

where you can get your startup featured on this week in startups. Go to startups.com slash Jason to find out how. CrowdBotics. Great ideas can change the world. And crowdbotics is the fastest way to turn those ideas into code. Get a free scoping session for your next big app idea at crowdbotics.com slash quiz. And issue is the all-in-one platform for creating and distributing beautiful digital content.

Get started with Issue today for free or sign up for an annual premium account and get 50% off when you go to issue.com slash podcast and use promo code twist. That's ISSu-U-U dot com slash podcast and use promo code twist. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the program. I was on the Twitter. And I saw a really creative idea go by and I said, get me this person for the podcast. And that idea was a pair of glasses that are essentially a Kindle in sunglasses format. And the company's name is Sol, S-O-L.

And the founder's name is Ben Chelf. That's right. I got it right. Okay, great. You got it right. C-H-E-L-F. And I see my friend Gary Tan, shout out to posterus, led the $5 million. our seed round. I assume when he was that initialized

back in the day. Correct. Yep, before he went to a one combinator. And he tweeted it and said that it was a really cool idea. So tell me, welcome to the program. Thank you, Jason for having me. Tell our audience what you're building and why we need an

e-reader in the form of glasses. Yeah. Well, as you said, we are building the world's first wearable e-reader. It provides you a completely immersive reading experience. and the two pillars for that reading experience to be immersive, it has to be really comfortable and it has to be distraction-free.

So, I'd say the entry-level, obvious pitch use case is you don't have to hold the book. You lie in bed completely comfortable, you're on the couch, you're on the beach, whatever. You don't have to hold the book. You have a little remote in your hand to turn the page, much like you would turn the page with a big button on a presentation clicker. And it's a really comfortable way to read. The other aspect of this, the distraction-free aspect. aspect of this has to do with the bigger narrative that we think is happening in tech and specifically

in personal devices. And namely, the fact that we're distracted a lot. You know, you pull out your iPhone all the time, your smartphone all the time, you've got a bunch of notifications, maybe some of its work, maybe some of its social. It's just a cacophony of noise in our heads. And reading is essentially, the act of reading requires a different kind of focus. So when we try to engage in a deeper activity like reading, it's really hard to do that on our phones. And we argue, it's even hard to do that on traditional e-readers. Because the phone is still right there in your pocket. You're tempted to pull it out if there's a break in the action in the book.

I'm sure you've experienced that. I'm sure your listeners have experienced this. You experience it when you go to the movies. And the movie theater, the, you know, the director's like, you know, what I would love to do is give you an incredibly beautiful shot that, you know, cost a million dollars to make. And you're like, oh, you're not talking and nothing's blowing up. Let me check my Twitter fee. And, of course, or my eye message or signal or whatever you're on.

So I guess, you know, a demo is worth a billion words. Sure. I'd love for you to demo this for us. And I don't know if you have a prototype there where you could show people the profile of it. Yeah, of course. Well, I can hold up a, I can hold up the one I read on every night, which is my unit here. So prototype is working. Yeah.

It's a natural product. It's a product. It's coming this fall. Hold it up for a second there and just show us a little bit. It looks for people who are watching. Looking at it, it looks like a chunky pair of sunglasses, the stats. the stems, or what do you call the things that go over your ear? Temples.

Temples, okay, so those are a little bit thicker. I assume it has batteries in there or something? Correct, yep. Okay. In each side. Great. And then the, instead of just having glass there, they look a little bit more like goggles or binoculars even.

So what is that component, I guess? And then also there looks like there's buttons on the side. Is that left and right or something, turn the page? No buttons on the device, but I'll describe a little bit of the features. And so you asked about the lenses. The lenses are a what's called a pancake lens. It provides a lot of magnification in a very short, you know, Z-axis throw, which is why we can get them to be thinner than, you know,

say a full headset or big thing that you would have to put a strap behind your head for. The nose bridge is adjustable so that you can, you know, kind of mold it like Gumby style to your nose. And then what you see here on the top is adjustment for what's called the interpupillary distance or the distance between the pupils of your eyes to, you know, ensure maximum comfort. Now, you also mentioned binoculars. They do have the functionality to turn each lens similar to a binoculars. Oh, wow. For diopter adjustment so that, you know, if you have a prescription that you need to adjust for,

you don't have to wear your glasses or contacts. Most people don't have to wear glasses or contacts while they're wearing a soul or something. $350. Oh, okay. Wow. That's a pretty low. So you don't make any money on the hardware or barely?

Well, at scale, we will make money on the hardware, actually. And some of that has to do with the technical decisions we made to get really long battery life, you know, really light form factor. It's much more, we call it, it's closer to an IOT type device than it is a full computer on your face like others are building. Got it. So because you're using an e-reader technology, it's not going to be playing a movie ever. You don't need to have some crazy OLED device. Right.

And that would burn your battery out. You don't need to have a sick. processor. What kind of processor do you run this off of? Get this. Dual core 240 megahertz processor. Straight out of the late 90s. Wow. I was about to say, like, can you still buy those? Yeah, well, in fact, yes, because of the, you know, IOT, they're just tiny, tiny, tiny little

packages that are, you know, seven millimeters by seven millimeters. And so, yeah, the whole, the whole thing's built around long battery life and really lightweight form of. And what would you get in terms of battery life here in terms of reading? 25 hours continuous reading. in low-light conditions. So much more like a traditional e-reader. Wow.

So if you were trying to read a really long Stephen King book, you might even be able to do it with this. That's right. Reader. All right. So you were going to demo a little bit. When I saw, I looked at your webpage before I invited John as a guest, it looked like the text was a little bit pixelated.

And I wasn't sure if that was a, like, stylistic choice or something. But what does it look like when you're looking at it? Am I looking at a giant page? I'm I looking at a sentence? is it wrapping with four words or 10? Yeah. I'm curious about how that would visually look.

Yeah, would you like me to share that previous? Oh, sure. Let's do that. Let's do that. Let's share screen, yeah. Great. So we talked about the glasses already. So I'll go straight to this navigation video.

And what, you know, for those who are just listening, this is a video that's zooming in on the text. It shows a bit of the navigation between the various books that might be on your device and then goes in and shows you a page of text at a time. And yeah, to your question, this is. is a render. It is very accurate in terms of, you know, dimensionally and number of pixels. But what you don't get here is you don't get

what E-ink actually looks and feels like, which because it's, you know, it is not precise pixels. Each capsule is what they call it. Each capsule essentially kind of has a little bleed to it. So where you see sharper, pixelated edges here, those are a lot softer when you're looking at, you know,

the text of the device. I had a feeling it was the emulator or whatever you're using. Yeah, exactly. It's still like a little old school. Right, right. But what's really interesting there, you have a, am I correct, though, when you went to the articles that you're pulling up, you plan to pull up RSS feeds or something? Yeah, so we're working on integrations right now with those types of stuff. Right now we can, part of my goal is to get people out of their inbox for a lot of these things that should be consumed in a different type of format. And so, you know, set up filters, auto forward your, you know, daily news drips, whether it come from substack,

or specific publications. Yeah, thinking about how do you connect with other news feeds and, so you could forward to an email address like you can do

with your Kindle, like they'll give you a secret email address to send a PDF. So you get forward your favorite substack or Axios or inside newsletter or whatever. Basically what I do every day now.

Yep. Oh, wow. And then you have to, of course, figure out the formatting because you just need plain text and things are always coming in HTML now.

So that's a little bit technical challenge? You'd think, but guess what's happened in the last, oh, nine months that makes that extremely easy for us? Apple's new product? Nope. It's all LLM processed.

It's like this. The LLM just takes everything and does the right work. In fact, we get a couple of other great features from the LLM. For example, if you got, say, 30 minutes a day of your normal news drips, but you don't have 30 minutes. We also give you the five-minute summary that just summarizes all of it. So you say, hey, send me Casey Newton's, you know, thousand words, but give me a hundred-word version of it.

Exactly. Or, like, say you're a few days away from the most recent reading session in your novel, and you've kind of forgot where you were. It just gives you the summary of her last reading session. It's like the LLMs are so great for a reading tech company like us, because, yeah, it's all text and processing. That's a killer feature. Catch Me Up feature.

Yeah, I forgot where I was at. Give me a little summary of what I've already read. But let me ask you a question about that. Sure. And about just generally ebooks. So you can get ebooks that are not protected. I guess there's like a, what is it, ePub or something? thing is the file format.

Is a typical, yeah. But a lot of these are owned by the Kindle and Amazon. So if I got a whole library on my Kindle, and they DRM it up, I believe. So it's got all this digital rights management. I'm screwed. So you're going to have another bookstore and you have to do all these deals with all the publishers all over again to get these to my device? Yeah, we're working on the content partnerships now.

Now, of course, we're, what is it, 16, 17 years into the e-reader world. So it is not as complicated as it was 20 years ago to kind of aggregate and build your own marketplace. And a lot of Amazon has their own DRM. But then there's an Adobe DRM that is kind of more generally used by a lot of different providers. So once you plug into that Adobe DRM system. So yeah, we're working through all those details. But we anticipate a marketplace very similar to. Can you just partner with some existing bookstore in the world and just get it all done?

Yeah. Okay. So that's not announced yet. I take it. You're working on that. Correct. Got it. Okay.

I mean, that'd be amazing if Amazon would just let you send my Kindle stuff over. Of course, that would be up to them. Well, and they also could be sharp elbowed about it because they could see this as competition. And I think, you know, this is why the Justice Department, not to make this a political thing or whatever, the Justice Department is looking at big tech and saying like interoperability. And this is one of the reasons I was critical of Lena Kahn, our new head over there, because she wants to stop, you. you know, Facebook from buying, you know, some, you know, a VR app, when really interoperability and forcing Facebook or forcing Apple to allow a third-party app store or forcing Amazon to allow other devices to get Kindle books, that's a much better use of her time.

And I think it's like very ineffective what she's doing in terms of blocking acquisitions. I think it's like a, it's futile and it's like skating to where the puck has already been so those tough's not there anymore but well I'm sure you could appreciate it as a startup we're not quite to the scale of having our lobbyists angle for us in the right directions no exactly but we'll have these conversations

and you know we'll hope that partnerships can emerge as it is a new category that you know others haven't anticipated yet dot tech domains is introducing a new program it's called startups dot tech let me break it down for you imagine you're a startup building on a nice dot tech domain name And you got some traction, but now you need a little kick to boost your growth.

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go to startups.tech slash jason to learn more. That's startups, plural, dot tech slash jason. What a great domain. Don't wait and go now to startups. dot tech slash jason today. Running a hardware startup is brutally hard. Explain to people exactly how hard it is to run one of these companies and why and how you've mitigated against just the brutality of hardware startups.

Sure, sure. Yeah, so hardware is definitely start up on hard mode and then some. And a lot of it has to do with, one, there's obviously a business model. You have to build a physical thing. That has a certain cost to it. You don't necessarily get the same kind of margins as you would by doing enterprise SaaS, et cetera. So there is just some business model stuff that you have to think about and really be conscious of what is going to be my overall bomb from day one, right? And so we're thinking about materials.

Yes, thank you. Thank you. The build of materials, a total cost of. every little piece in part, whether it be electronic or plastic or optics or whatnot, that goes into the final product. And so that's one business model challenge. Then there's just the practical challenge of coordinating and examining the tradeoffs between every software decision you make, every mechanical decision you make.

In our case, every optical decision you make in terms of lens technology, every electrical decision you make around the different chips that you pick and the different, you know, and everyone has a tradeoff in terms of speed, performance, other. Otherwise, size, battery consumption, power consumption, you know, weight, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's, you know, it is a challenge. It is hard. Part of the reason I enjoy it, and this is my first hardware startup, but part of the reason I enjoy it is it's like the best min-max optimization problem ever, right? Because you have all these different challenges coming at you and you can just sort through that.

Now, in terms of how you navigate it, you know, in my CT and I, we talk a lot about this. this is starting at this type of startup is not something you probably want a bunch of people who are right out of college to do. You know, this is my third startup. I was an investor for a while in between there. My CTO has been at a number of startups. Our head of hardware, you know, he's been in his career for 30 years. Our head of manufacturing has been in her career for 30 years.

So you assemble a team that has just stood up, you know, physical things many, many times. So in terms of having the relationships with the contract manufacturers who are making various aspects of the parts, figuring out, you know, how do you, how do you go from prototype to manufacturing? I think, you know, Elon Musk and the recent investor meeting talked about how hard, or how easy it is to build a prototype, how hard it is to, you know, actually build a scale and then how impossible it is to build a scale profitably, right? And so, you know, we're, we rely on that expertise of our team to be able to go from the prototype phase into this, you know, scaling phase as we're doing now. Yeah. And there's something about like, whatever

component is the least reliable or the least available, the furthest behind in delivery, that defines when you ship. That's exactly right. It's so brutal. Yep. Which is why Elon, I've had many conversations with them about it, so much of the Model Y, Model 3, he makes himself now. And so if you look at Mercedes, they were talking about their software issues, and, you know,

GMs talked about this before, every single component in their car has its own software, whether it's the seats, the heating and the HVAC, the entertainment, the navigation system, and then they have to figure out how to get all those things to talk to each other. Whereas, you know, Tesla, it's one set,

and then they even make their HVAC now. If you bought the original model S, it was the steering column from Mercedes, I believe, and the shifter. So if you were in a Mercedes, and then you got a Tesla, you're like, wait a second, And this shifter looks exactly the same.

And it was, right? And Mercedes was an original investor. And so I think he, and now the screen from the model three is the same screen in the model S and the model X. They move that screen over. So they have one screen for all cars, right? Instead of two or three. Is there a subscription to this thing? Because that's the other problem is it's a one-time purchase.

And the better job you do in making it reliable and making it, sturdy and maybe having good specs, the longer people can use it, which is great for them, but it's bad for you. Yeah, right, right. So we decided, we debated this in the early days of,

you know, what is the, what is the right model for getting it in the market? We thought about maybe even just a lease model for the hardware itself. We decided for V1,

we're just going to go with kind of what's, what people are used to, which is I buy the thing, I own the thing. And so that's, that's what we're doing for V1. And we were able,

because we were able to get that cost of goods down to what we felt was a reasonable, place to charge people $350 for it. You know, that's, we felt comfortable doing that. You know, it's still an open question as to what we end up doing on the, you know, overall content side of things in year one, year two, year three. Is that a purchase by purchase?

Is there some subscription for, you know, connection to various news outlets or some aggregation or additional features like some of these LLM features that I'm talking about? You know, maybe there are ways to kind of add on from there. But honestly, as a startup, you know, our focus. Our first focus is how do we get this reading experience to be really, really great? And that has to do with the hardware and the form factor, but then also the software and then making it work. And we do that right.

And people love reading on the thing. And then we'll have a lot of options from there. It'd be amazing for the New York Times, which is doing just gangbusters with their subscription business. They decided, hey, we're going to get rid of advertising. Not get rid of it, but at the peak of their advertising powers, they said, you know, what we should do is build a foundation here of subscriptions. And now there are a subscription juggernaut.

consumers are pretty good with it. Imagine if you bought a three-year subscription to New York Times in advance, you got one of these. So, you know, what does the New York Times cost? Like, 200 a year or something? If they said to you, you know, hey, give us 500 bucks. We'll throw in one of these. And then you just cut some deal with them.

And then you had the whole New York Times on there. What a great deal. So I think there's some option here for this to be very powerful. Or one of the book publishers, you know, your Harper business, they have a great label of business books. and they said, hey, we'll give you 10 books a year for three years. You get 30 books and this for 500 bucks.

I'd buy that, you know? Yep, yep. One thing that the Kindle has added, which will be your number one competitor, or they'll see you as a competitor, I guess, because if you use this, you're not going to use your Kindle. If you succeed, you're only going to bring one with you

when you go to Italy this summer. If you succeed, they have something called whisper sync, I think. No, not whisper sync. There's something that connects the audiobook to the words. Oh, right. Yeah. To the words.

And so I have dyslexia. I found out later in life. And so reading pretty hard for me, listening to audiobooks really easy. But if I buy the book twice, which I've done like a dozen times now, where I buy the audiobook and I buy the other books, I pay 30 bucks, 15 each time, whatever. And I don't know if that whisper sync is how you deliver. it, but it will highlight the word and speak it to you. Have you considered adding audio here because it is over your ear? And I have a pair of the Bose headsets, which I love. And the Bose headsets,

highly recommend them, will let you listen to music or an audio book, but your ears not covered. So I would love to have it, you know, do that sinking for me. Yeah. So not a V1 feature, but like top of the request list from most people that have tried it, have used it. Yeah, we hear that one, it's almost the first thing that comes to people's mind is I'd love to be able to read and listen simultaneously. And, you know, the good news for us is, yeah, speakers are small, they're low power consumption, audio's low power consumption. So in terms of kind of meeting our, what we think are the core constraints that we want to hold throughout the life of this product line, it is, it is something that will absolutely be prototyping for V2. And one of the things that we're

even putting in V1 is an autopilot mode where you don't even have to manually turn the page. It can essentially walk your eyes through the text line at the time. And so we anticipate that, you know, that combined with audio in a future version would be just a ticket, right? It is called whisper sync. It's called whisper sync for voice. It's got its own, yeah, and they call that immersive reading. What I found is when you do that, you really increase your, really increase your retention. Yeah.

Another possibility is, hey, you put this on and you listen to This Week in startups or all in, whatever your favorite pod is, and then it transcribes it, and you see the text of whatever is saying in front of you. That could be quite powerful, too. Have you considered that? No, we haven't really thought about, like, the pod, you know, going into the transcription realm, but I like that idea. That's definitely something that we should put on a list. And again, LLMs would probably be pretty helpful. Yeah, I would maybe in terms of... Well, you have a table of contents. You could summarize the episode or... Yep. Yep. And then it doesn't have a microphone in it yet, no. Right. Correct. Okay. So yeah, I mean, at 1.0, just reading, but you can imagine in the 2.0 if it had a

microphone in that, you could have voice commands. Pretty amazing. And now you're taking pre-orders for $350 right now. Yep. Yep. There's a lot of demand. So right now we're taking wait lists. Oh, really? When you do something like this, how big of a first batch do you do? And how does that work as a hardware startup? How do you optimize that? Do you try to order 100,000 or just 1,000 because there could be mistakes and you don't want to

put a bad product out there? How do you think about that? That's right. You know, we're being very measured in our approach. We understand there's going to be a lot of demand for this, but we want to keep a really high quality bar. So, yeah, so the initial runs are in the thousands, tens of thousands while we, you know, ensure that everything from a manufacturing standpoint is spot on. As our head of manufacturing constantly reminds me, like, you don't want to make a mistake at scale a million. You want to make it at a scale 100 or 1,000 first. And so that's what this year has been all about. You know, we're shipping out our kind of final beta units to our, you know, beta folks. in the next few weeks. Thank you for putting me on the list. I appreciate that. We'll do what we can, Jason. You always want to have an influencer with 700,000. I got more followers in Gary Tan.

He's an investor. Okay, okay. All right. All right. He doesn't have the two top podcasts in tech. Just saying, Gary's great, but. So yeah, that's coming out pretty soon. And again, assuming, you know, we, you know,

that's been a great learning experience to dial in a lot of that manufacturing process. And then we roll right in from that into, you know, production later this fall and start to fulfill that wait list and pre-orders. You said you were a VC before this for a little bit? Yeah. How long did you spend in venture capital? And then why'd you quit VC to go back to startups?

Yeah. It was about six years. Did one, basically one fund cycle, right? Which I loved. I'd done a couple of startups before that. I loved the variety. I loved the, you know, just you get to interact with so many brilliant people with brilliant ideas and a lot of passion for it.

And truly, I didn't know if I would do another startup. But one of the things, that I had been thinking about pretty much that entire time is, is what our relationship with devices is and read a lot of books like, you know, Sherry Turcles alone together in terms of what our devices are doing to us and, and, you know, the kind of traditional stuff, Cal Newport, Deep Work, like, really thinking about how our brains have been rewired by these devices. How have they been rewired? Well, yeah, I think our attentions are shorter.

You know, I think it's harder for us to concentrate on long form. And, you know, I'm an optimist. I think there is a path through, obviously. but I think one of the things that happens when I pick up a device is my brain is wired to kind of be in this multitasking mode of like, you know, what's the next

input, what's the next dopamine hit? And so it was, so I was just wondering what is the path through that with respect to our relationship with personal computing if this isn't the best thing for our minds? And a lot of the, if you will, state of the art thinking on that is essentially just, well, be more disciplined.

Take a digital detox. put your phone somewhere else. Yeah. And I don't... Stop taking heroin. Here's how you can not be a junkie. Stop taking heroin. And you're like, hmm, but I love heroin.

Yeah. I love Twitter. I love my group chats. That's right. I love TikTok and YouTube videos. You know, one of the things we talk about is we think that there is like, there is broccoli on the internet. Like, there are really good things in Twitter.

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So since I had been thinking about this problem for quite some time, this idea of building a wearable e-reader, kind of the origin story there, wasn't my idea, it was one of my co-founder's ideas in conversation with Palmer Lucky's, you know, the Oculus founder. Yeah, good friend of mine. Yeah. Right. Good one. Good one. I'll be here for three more nights. Try the appeal.

There you go. There you. So kind of just discussing the state of ARVR and realizing that if you wanted a really satisfying form factor, it would have to be more specific purpose, more single purpose, less general, less trying to render 3D worlds or put an iPhone on your face. And that's where we got this idea of, wow, it would be really great to read with a headset if we could make it light enough and whatnot. And from the, you know, before I dove all.

the way in to start the business. I did some prototyping. I did the tinkering in the garage, if you will, with some friends. And even from the first time I put the first prototype, which was essentially toilet paper rolls and like, you know, just baseball cap full of like electronics. And I, and I realize this, that's when I realized these two worlds came together. One, like the comfort aspect of lying in bed reading. And then two, you know, this, this nicotine gum idea of like, well, where are we going to go with personal computing devices? And I really do think that this is better for humanity if we figure out how to provide other options besides just my iPhone for personal computing. And that's what, that's what drew me back in. I mean, if you think, and

Sherry Turkle talks about this in her book, but just the need for downtime, the need for solitude or reflection, it's kind of gone. And we're so addicted to these devices that you don't have boredom kick in. And if you think about children, you know, sometimes what happens when you get immersed in a book is you kind of get into that world, you get transported, and you get to live in that environment for a little while. When I would read Michael Crichton's novels, I had that experience of just being lost in them, right? Or if you were to read Charles Dickens, you can just be transformed into, you know, to tell it to cities or something like that. They don't get to have that experience. And it's a lost experience. And then you also don't have to, you don't get to have, oh, it's August. There's nothing to do. And then your mind's like, here's something we could do. Hopefully it's not, you know, I grew up in Brooklyn. We did some bad things. But hopefully you come up with something really creative.

But maybe you could talk a little bit about, since we're going there, what you hope to achieve in terms of maybe, you know, those aspects that we're losing. And maybe even talk, I don't you have kids. Yeah, I do. And it was a big part of me thinking about starting something like this was watching them. When you see your kids and they're just like, give me my heroin. I'm sorry, iPad, and like, you know, you take the iPad away from them and they just literally act like a junkie who has been locked up in for 48 hours. Like, it's amazing.

These kids like will, I mean, a temper tantrum like you've never seen if they lose advice for two days. Yep. Yeah. So a couple things come to mind here. One, you know, when my six year old was six and four are my kids, right? When my six year old says, hey, dad, I'm bored. I'm like, good. Just sit there.

Be bored. And you know what he does? It's, you know, within a few minutes. He's making up worlds or building something new. It's like, you know, you just let them be bored. I mean, maybe this is maybe a little bit beyond the scope of what we're talking about today. But I'm with you. Let the kids be bored sometimes.

And one of the touchstones we talk about at the company is trying to get people who, you know, didn't grow up with the iPads and whatnot, get back to that kid under a blanket with a flashlight kind of reading, you know, where you get lost in that. That is one of our touchstones is like helping people get lost in a book again, a really good book. And so it didn't to your point about the device and whatnot, I like to talk about, you know, Steve Jobs in the early 80s. He took out this spread in Scientific American talking about the personal computer as the bicycle for the mind. Right. And that was his vision for what, you know, this type of technology should do. And it was reported after he died, it was reported that before he died, he said, we don't allow the iPad in the house because we're afraid of what it's going to do to the kids.

Yes. So in these 30 years, we went from this beautiful vision of what personal computing devices can do for us to, I don't want my kids to touch it. And so I do think that for me, there's, you know, and we'll see where we go beyond just reading in the years assuming we're successful with this, you know, first product. But tapping back into that beautiful vision of the bicycle for the mind, or we sometimes say the Peloton for the mind in the modern era so that people can do what's right for themselves mentally.

And again, to the discipline point, you're not going to get people to give up the heroin unless you give them something else and something better. And so that's why it's a replacement strategy. It's like make a new habit with the sole reader. And that will get you to read more and that'll be better for your mental health. What's the thing they give people, the little like little thing they can sip and drink? I had to get them off heroin. I forgot what it's called.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It'll come to us in a second. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Methadone. So yeah. Methadone. It's methadone.

Yeah. You do them a little method down. That's right. And I put it, so I put it on my nightstand instead of my iPhone. And, yeah, for example, when I first... Oh, I like that. It's on your nightstand instead of your iPhone because if you put this on, correct me if I'm wrong, the E-I-I-ing technology that you're using, I think it's E-ink they call it.

Yes, that's right, E-ink or e-paper. E-paper. It's not as stimulating, correct? Right. Now, we have to, because we're putting it in the glasses, we do light it, but the lighting itself is much more like what your phone is on when you, put it in night mode and it's in that very reduced blue light mode. So that's, you know, we, we all get drowsy while we're reading with the device on. You do.

Okay. Yeah, it is a, it's a very warm kind of light that is pleasing to the eyes, kind of, you know, the right, right for night. And an interesting thing happened when I did that switch. You know, I, you know, sometimes I check my screen time when I'm, you know, feeling a little masochistic. God, it's so embarrassing, right? It's like, shame shameful. But this is like if we we should force adults and the entire family should be forced to publish your screen time in the kitchen and like just as a group we have a collective number of minutes

we can do as a group with something. Right, right. Yeah, no, I think this would be good. But here's the interesting thing that happened to me is I was I was in the like five to six hour a day territory before I started reading with Soul Reader. Yeah, you know, not amazing but not so bad. Embarrassing but not tragic. That's right.

But I'm willing to mention it on a podcast. Yeah. That means he's really at seven or eight. But yeah, could be, could be. I'm at like four or five now. I'm like just, you know, I'm doing a little bit better than you. There you go. There you go.

Here's what happened, though. Here's what happened. I got the iPhone off the nightstand, a little bit less, you know, doom scrolling on Twitter, a little bit less binge watching. And I read, I would average probably reading about 30 to 60 minutes a day

and kind of depending on how interesting the novel was I was reading or the news of the day or whatnot. So you'd think, oh, okay, well, screen time, must have gone down one hour because you were reading an hour a day, right? Yeah. Swap it out. No. Screen time went down two and a half hours a day. Oh, wow. Why is that?

Why is that, Jason? I went to bed sooner. I didn't kind of get stuck in that thing. So I kind of magically found either I got to sleep a little bit longer or better, or I just kind of found an extra hour, hour and a half a day that I wasn't like this, you know, staring at my phone in my hand. Here's the thing with like getting rid of screen time I find with my kids. So when we're at the ski house and we're, you know, ski days, I say, listen, screens happen after dinner.

And if you, if you're out on the mountain, you get in a little bit early, we'll make an exception. And you go to the movie there and watch a movie or you can use your devices a little bit. But basically, what I find is like, if no device, then activities. But then an interesting thing happens as well. My theory on why these kids are getting so weird and adults, let's face it, we've all got friends who are getting weird. they can't make eye contact anymore. They get socially awkward. They don't know how to communicate.

Then you have in cells and just weird kids. Credit to Sherry Turkle on this. But there's just like thought that like, hey, because we're connecting with so many people all day long, whether it's on social networks and email and Slack that were like hyperconnected. But you're not getting face to face time with people. You're not hearing their voice. And so the social connections are not real. But we feel like we're being socially connected.

The fact, we feel like we're overly socially connected. Yep. What happens in boredom, my theory is that you become more introspective. You're in your own mind. You start thinking about yourself. And you also become more interested in inquisitive, like that Ted Lasso speech when he plays darts. You ever see that speech? When you know what I'm talking about or not?

Have you heard this? He gives a speech. It's a really great speech where the guy challenges him to darts. And he basically just, the guy was never interested enough in him to ask him. if he'd ever played darts before. And then if he had been a little bit more inquisitive or interesting, he would have known that his dad would take him to the bar every Sunday afternoon to play darts since he was like 12 years old.

And then he hits like three bullseys in a row. And it's just like epic. But you weren't interested enough. You weren't inquisitive enough. And you will become more interested in other people when you're in person. You will become more interested when your device is putting things. That's why I love a game I play with my friends when we go to dinner, which is stack the phones.

Stack the phones. And then whoever picks it up first. Have you played this game? Has to do dinner? You stack your phones at dinner. I try this at your next dinner. And you can reach for it any time, I assume. You're allowed to go for it.

Whoever goes for it first pays for dinner. It's fucking brilliant. And then the other good thing is I got some famous friends and go to parties where they collect the phones on the way in. No phone parties where they put your phone in a bag. also amazing. So if you ever have a party, ask everybody to put their phones at the front, hey, listen, if you're a parent and you need to check on your kid, just go out to the driveway. Yep.

And you do this. So a lot of the parties I've been going to where there might be celebrities at or other high profile people, they might just be like, hey, click the phones. And I think, I think this is like really great that you're taking your time to do this. Whether it succeeds or fails, we'll see in the market. I think it's guaranteed to have a level of success with bookworms. but I think you want to go a little further than that. Okay, listen, if you're running a sales team, you got a design agency, you got a media business,

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for your free starter account or 50% off an annual premium plan. How's the beta testing going? What's the feedback been to people who've read a book or two on it, right? So how many people have read two or three books on it? A few dozen at this point. What are they? I mean, you must have done some.

Do you do listening webs with them? Or how do you get information from them? Yeah, yeah. A lot of calls and, and whatnot. The two anecdotes come to mind that are, well, maybe I'll do three.

The first one is people are surprised at how well it works and how quickly it works with respect to this mindset shift. And they're like, oh, I didn't like, it's hard. to imagine what it's like to put on a wearable e-reader because it's a new category. So, yeah, there's a bit of that surprise and then kind of, oh, right, okay, it actually works. And that's the

first helpful piece of feedback is like we're on the right track with the new category. Another one is one person put it on and they reported back. They said, I, I woke up early, the first morning I had it. I put it on. I didn't think about the clock and I read for two and a half hours. And I can't remember the last time I read for two and a half hours straight. Wow. And so to me, like this point about being immersed in something is, you know, those. So the duration matters, yeah.

Yeah, you know, they just, they kind of got lost in what they were reading. Love it. And even just because this person was reading in bed and their reflection was, oh, if I had picked up a book, I might have, I might have shifted around a little bit as you do when you're reading in bed. Yeah. Exactly. Armstrong, neck strain, whatever.

Arm strain and. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's all that stuff. No back problems, no neck problems when reading this way. And then the other. The other big piece of feedback that we got from a person a couple days after they started is he was, he literally said, I think this is a 10x improvement on reading for me. And for him, and he's like, I felt, I felt the loss of optionality, meaning I, you know, it got rid of my options.

I felt the loss of optionality almost instantly within a few minutes. And so, yeah, those are kind of what we're keying into on whatnot. And, you know, then there's all the kind of normal user feedback in terms of, oh, okay, we got the mobile app. We think of the sole reader as your nightstand. You're going to have a few books on there. You're going to have the day's articles. Your mobile device, your computer. That's your full library.

That's how you're going to curate content and decide what you're going to read next and all that. So a lot of the usual user feedback on how those interactions should work and how easy it is to sync the content, all that stuff. But those are some of the highlights of the feedback. I think, you know, my friend Doug Rushkoff, who is a media author. I don't know if you've ever read any of his books, but he had this theory with MTV and the internet. video games that there was a ADHD exists in his mind. People debate that because when, I think you're Gen X too.

Like a lot of people didn't have it and then now everybody's got it. I think they're situational ADHD, which is you have to defend yourself against the onslaught of incoming, you know, notifications as we call it now, but it could have been MTV when we were kids, which was it just moved quicker, right? You watch a three minute video and the video had so many cutscenes in it.

Now you look at TikTok. It's, you, ADHD is like a defense mechanism, right? You throw it up. But then it has all these like downstream effects. So there's something that could be very healthy about this in terms of just giving your mind to break. And I think it's really amazing what you've set out to do. So I'm glad you're doing it. I'm going to buy it.

Great. Are you hiring right now? Are you just in sales mode? You got a full complement team? Or if you're hiring, I love to give a shout out if you've got any open positions for people who might want to apply to work on such a noble mission. Yeah, well, appreciate that. You know, like a startup, we're always hiring the best people we can find.

Okay. But also, we're still a small young team, so we're very much looking for startup generalists, technically competent people who can cross over a lot of different, a lot of different stuff. So, so yeah, I appreciate a shout out that you're willing to give. And then the website is soulreader.com. Sol reader. Sol reader. And it'll ask you put your phone number in.

Interestingly, not email. So phone number. I like that choice for growth. Early tip we got, you know, it does communicate a little bit more seriousness, which we like. But also,

then we don't have to worry about the spam bots as much. It's really tough to get, you know, email into somebody. You lose a lot of waitlist traffic. That's something we learned from some of our advisors and mentors pretty early on on the consumer hardware thing.

So, name and phone number. Get yourself on the wait list. Get on the wait list. And thank you for including me in the beta test. That's incredibly generous. I only had 30, 40 spots to include me, I'm not even investor.

What a great gift. No, I'm excited. I signed up and I'll be one of the first to buy it and go check. Just go take a look at it. If you listen to the audio, comes with a couple different colors. I like the goal myself. And I can't wait to see these in the wild. They're good looking.

Whoa, just as I let you go. What did you think of the Apple product? Ah, yeah. First impressions. You haven't used it yet, I know. No, I haven't had the chance. First Impressions is we love kind of what they have validated because it's been part of our message for years now, which is general face tech. They call it spatial computing.

I'll just say general face tech, ARVR, whatever. General face tech, it's really hard. It's hard computationally. It's hard from a weight perspective. It's hard from a battery life perspective. Yes. And, you know, the most resource tech company in the world in terms of who could go after this just showed us exactly what. what it takes. It's still, it's big goggles. It's tethered. There's an external battery pack.

Yeah. By the way, it costs $3,500. Right? And as zero to the soul reader. At a, you know, 10x, 10x, right? And yet we're still, we're still left with the question, do I want an iPhone on my face? Yes. I don't know if you do. I don't, you know. I do. I'll tell you what I want. I want to be in a hotel or in a plane or in a cafe and have my full desktop while not feeling like somebody's going to murder me and I don't see him coming. Sure, sure, sure. I just, I want to be safe and I want to see that virtual desktop. But I think we're, what do you think?

Three generations, you think there be three revisions, like maybe three cycles of 18 months before it gets down to under a thousand or a thousand where you can, you know, and the battery is smaller? Or you think it's longer? It's a really hard problem because, you know. What's the hardest problem? Well, it depends on what you want. If you want the existing form factor with the tether and the battery, yeah, probably a few generations and they get that to a thousand bucks.

If you want it to look like this and I'm holding my glasses for you listeners, if you want it to look like this, we're still really far away from that. So, so yeah, I think you put it at 20, 10, 10, something between those two? 10 plus, 10 plus, yeah. Yeah, and so we think that like this kind of, if we constrain on the weight and the battery life first

and, you know, kind of add a lot of value there and you mentioned it, we're going to get avid readers to like this, but we're also going after aspirational readers, everybody who at the end of the year says, you know, next year, I I want to read more books. Yeah. You know, this is the perfect thing for them.

And that will help us, you know, carve our own way to this more, you know, maybe general purpose, but focus purpose tech. This is why Amazon needs to do a deal with you

because I think you could sell this with 10 books. I think people will buy this for $700 with 10 books included or New York Times description, the bundling, because I buy the platinum

audible, which I think is 20 credits or 25 credits, and I spend $200 a year. Yeah. And I've had it for 10 years. So I've spent 2,000 on audiobooks. And I like, because I think one audio book, if I get one idea out of one

audiobook on a business basis, it's going to be worth hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars. Sure. 10 years, 200 audio books is $2,000? Like, are you kidding me? It's the greatest deal in the world. And that's, I think, when you pitch these, like pitching, what if you get that knowledge, that one nugget of knowledge that then, as an entrepreneur, but I love your approach. So that means, like gym memberships, December, January is going to be your big New Year's resolution.

I love it. Are you a previous marketer? You seem to have a good marketer head. No, but I've been thinking about it a lot. And my first startup, I was in tech and then moved quickly over to sales and marketing because I just found a love for the storytelling aspect of building businesses. So it is great. I can tell that you have the storyteller thing because when you go to the website, it feels like an Apple product. And the way you speak about it is just like you really understand.

on your customer, just the tagline on your website, just to rate my landing page, experience the next evolution in reading. The fact that it's an experience and that it's an evolution and it's only reading. Whoever wrote this copy, somebody suffered over that sentence,

I can tell, and it's probably you. And some of our great team, yes. But the fact that reading could evolve is a very evocative statement that makes you say, how is it evolving? And I want the answer to that. And immediately under that, you get to click, learn more.

That's right. You know, it's like a very well done. So shout out to the Soul Reader marketing team. Really well done. All right. Listen, loved meeting you. I hope you sell a million of these things. Well done.

Thank you, Jason. Really appreciate it. We hope so too. Hey, listen, all you got to do is sell 10,000 of these and you're still in business, right? I think the mark is if you sell 10,000 of these years at $3.50. If you make a buck 50 off of them, you'll be fine as a company. You'll survive. And that's, you know, in the hardware business, surviving those first couple of years as you figure it out is the most important.

So I wish you continued success. And we'll see you all next time on this week's startup. Bye-bye.