Transcript

Hello. Hi, can you hear me?

Yeah, how's it going? Good, how are you? Nice to meet you.

Good to see you. Yeah.

How do I pronounce your name, John?

My name is Jung Geun, but you can call me JK.

JK, alright. Much easier.

And you are Flavius?

Flavius, yeah. Perfect.

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, thanks for, you know, connecting. No, no, wait, wait. Yeah. Happy to chat with you. And we just met Jonny a couple of weeks ago. Oh, okay. trying to collaborate with each other. And he showed me your hardware. And it was pretty impressive. He suggested us to collaborate with you because I feel like there's some, you know, like shareable value to each of us. Yeah, that's why I wanted to chat with you quickly.

For heads up, I'm going to go out 50-50, 55.

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. Yeah, so I also met Johnny at the at another customer's site like we have a customer and johnny's friends with them so that's how i met johnny and he wanted us to set a demo with him as well so because he might use our device i don't know if you saw our website uh what's about did you take a look yeah at the time i went through quickly but if you can you know yeah we didn't post it would be perfect yeah for us like the doing like I saw you guys do VR right with a with a with a With the meta-ray balance.

It's pretty cool what you guys are doing. So you try to help workers do their job, basically, with all the AI, virtual reality, augmented reality. That's pretty cool. So that's why I think it's interesting because it's different what we are doing. We don't do any of that. So... All we are interested is more like logging all the routine maintenance tasks that the that the operators of those machines have to do.

Like they have daily tasks, weekly tasks, monthly tasks. So we want to give them an easy way to do that instead of taking paper notes. So we have this little hardware device that we attach to each machine, like just magnetically it goes there and it goes to our cloud and it transcribes and then sorts all the notes. And maybe the only, maybe a little bit of common part that we have with you is that also we try to accumulate tribal knowledge, but it's a different type of knowledge.

It's not knowledge about the execution of the job and things like that. It's more like about the machine when it breaks down.

down like more like that i saw that you are more about the parts and the parts inspection and things like that so i think it's interesting because it could be complementary you know yeah yeah exactly that's why i saw complementary one because um right now our user uh workflow would be like this um seniors wear the glasses and then they record what they do and junior machinists wear these glasses and then when they are in front of the machine they can ask hey from this machine I do like this and then what hurdle is, we don't have the machine data and we don't have the job data.

So we are trying to integrate the ERP like job boards or pro shop. The thing is, here in the ERP system, you don't have a bunch of the machine data. That being said, if our AI knows better the status of the machine, that would be perfect because AI says, oh, based on our vibration checking or spindle checking or temperature, it's not a good time to fix the machine. Or based on this status, we recommend ABC.

So that's why I think Our AI glasses capture more data point that will be much powerful, not just, you know, watch the video or watch the guidelines. That's my high-level thinking. But yeah, I'm just curious about your thinking as well when you observe your customers.

Yeah, that's a good point. We also record, like you said, we record the vibration so we can tell when the machine is being used and we know if the factory floor is at capacity. For example, if you have 10 machines, we can tell, okay, this is being used more than this other one. you Eventually we will capture, we can capture temperature for sure, humidity, pressure, things like that. And yeah, we could probably share this type of data and integrate also with ERP And probably you can pull that data back into your system, right?

Yeah, I'm open to different... type of, you know, usage of data, I'm trying to follow the lead of the customers, you know? For example, one thing I did with one customer was to process their invoices. Like, for example, We are capturing the maintenance that's being done from operators, but sometimes it's technicians from outside that come in. Oh yeah, and they repair, okay. But they... they put the notes in the invoice.

So then I made a little system on the dashboard where the customer uploads the invoice and with AI we extract that thing that has been repaired. And we put it back on the same log with the audio notes. So that's the customer.

Customer wants that.

I had no idea about that. So yeah, depending on what customer wants, we can figure out how we can both work to get them Oh, exactly.

We can do go to market together. Let's say I fully agree with you for field technicians. So our second target is field technician as well. What I observed is the machine shop that we are working for is one day the machine broke down and then Bill technician came in and he didn't know how to fix this machine because it was 20 or 30 years of ages of the machine. And then he had to call the headquarter and expert there and he had to read manually the descriptions of the manual.

He spent a bunch of time on it. And then we saw that, oh, this is so, you know, like... frustrated let's say he has the glasses and then based on the glasses he can communicate in the real time with the headquarter at the same time he just put the machine the your device and he can understand oh what is the exact the state situation of the machine then he can talk to like at quarter as well. Oh, I figured out this.

So that's the... high-level idea in terms of...

Oh, that's interesting because actually one of the field technicians came in to our customer and he didn't know much about our box. It was there. And the owner told him, oh, you can talk to the device and say what you've done. So they press the button, they talk to the device, they say, oh, I changed this thing in the machine. I did a few tests. Now it's operating all set. Done. And now the customer has that log.

Nobody had to take notes. So yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. So maybe, yeah, So I'm not sure. So let's say when you put your hardware into a machine, can they track all the historical data as well? Or once they put that machine, they can track from that one?

Yeah, we don't connect to the machine itself, like with a USB or something. So we don't get data from the machine, we just get new data. So as you install, it's like the timeline starts. Maybe in the future we could, but that is a bit more difficult to scale because now maybe each machine is a bit different. But if we install all bugs, then... It doesn't matter what machine is, we can put it anywhere.

That's why I try to keep it more generic.

So what stage are you guys at? So we are developing our MVP and then we acquired some of the pilot customers or paid customers. So we see that after a couple of months, we're going to see the more real value from there and at the same time, We are raising the money right now, maybe closing in May. What's the status? How about you?

So I raised an angel round like a year ago. That's all I raised so far. So we've been building MVPs, trying to get customers. We had a different product before in a different space. So we pivoted in basically end of last year to We were doing a medical recording device, like a medical scribe. It was hard to get it. You know how many people have medical scribes in the phone or on the computer? So we're trying to do a hardware device that we can put in the medical doctors.

It was hard to go into that space, very crowded and very hard to talk to doctors. What did you guys do before?

We are trying to automate the compliance document processes. As you mentioned, aerospace, medical device, defense, they have a bunch of compliance documentation. So we wanted to automate the processes, but we ended up, this is a problem, but labor shortage and travel knowledge is way much bigger. That's why Peabody, and then we realized that we didn't like the AI I think it was too early before like AR glasses was not a thing 10 years ago and now they're working much better right so it's it's good time yeah yeah exactly yeah good yeah I guess it's good to see that other people see that it's a good opportunity in this market and it's big, it's huge.

So you guys have raised already something before or had some plans?

We're bootstrapping and plan to raise Angel Run. But I wonder your perspective in terms of Angel Run, 'cause I'm trying to raise back in Korea 'cause I have some, my bosses from McKinsey and then they have contact point to the manufacturers. I'm trying to get there from there. But somebody told me you need to better raise from ICP in US. That makes sense. I'm just curious what's your approach and how did you do that?

Yeah. So in my case, I had just some mentors and friends here in the Bay Area. They were founders themselves or ex-founders or or vp at some company like some higher up in company so that's how i raised it's like people that just believed and supported me from the beginning and was very it was hard like uh because now i try i want to raise again it was not a lot of money that i raised you know like i cannot give and give myself a salary yet so so that's why i also want to raise maybe a little bit more maybe like 500k now or even a million i don't know how much do you want to raise I want to raise 500k but I realized that we need to raise more than that because these AI glasses require a bunch of hardware purchase and the computing power so yeah maybe ideally 1 million but yeah you know payroll is the biggest expense anyway so like do you have co-founder?

Yeah, my co-founder has been working in the AWS as an engineer.

Are you both full-time now or no?

So he's full time and then I'm graduating two months later. Oh, okay.

You're still in school.

Yeah, but I'm... I know 100% full-time right now.

Yeah, yeah. So you're at Berkeley. I saw the email, right? Yeah, yeah. Berkeley. Yeah. I'm actually I have a professor appointment at Northeastern, the new campus in Oakland, near Berkeley. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a research appointment. So I do a little bit of research there. Maybe you should come by on the campus when I'm up there. You should come visit.

Yeah, sure, for sure. Where are you located? Your office looks really cool.

It's quite old. I'm a plug-and-play in Sunnyvale.

Ah, okay. You know, I travel to South Bay pretty much, like Santa Clara and San Jose.

Maybe we can meet in person. Yeah, yeah. You should come here for lunch anytime. Yeah, they have good cafeteria, good price, coffee. And also, actually here, a few months last year, end of last year, I went to Korean event to KOTRA.

Do you know the association?

I met a couple of interesting people working more like on energy mobility, but maybe there is some application there, some potential there.

We should go together there, you know? Oh yeah, sure. Yeah.

I assume you're Korean because you mentioned Korea, right?

Yeah. So probably you'll connect even better with them than me.

You know, I try not to meet Korean people here that much because, you know, if I meet, you know, as you know, you know.

Yeah, I'm trying not to meet Italian people here, but it's inevitable.

So I'm going to travel to Korea for two weeks so we can meet in person in April. I wonder maybe if we meet in person and then exchange our real product demo, then it's gonna be opening our eyes. How can we collaborate as well? So yeah, let's think about that.

Yeah, absolutely. It's always good to keep chatting with the founder. It's a hard road ahead, so we should help each other.

Are you the founder or do you have a team?

Yeah, I was supposed to have a founder, he was a postdoc at Stanford, but he decided to move back to Italy. He was also from Italy. He decided to move back to Italy with his wife and I decided I didn't want to have a remote founder. So it's very hard already. So unfortunately for now I'm alone. I have a salesperson that started two, four weeks ago, like a month ago. So it's part-time. And then I have another friend helping part-time with software, software development, like AI research a little bit.

So, so, That's another reason.

Go ahead.

100% respect you because last year I was a solo founder for a couple of months and it was super hard. I know that half is hard so I fully respect you and if you really need any kind of support from me, I'm 100% open.

Thank you, man. Thank you so much. I appreciate it a lot. We should help each other as we can.

It was very great to meet you as a FromGhost customer connection. That's perfect. That's the best.

Yes. Yeah.

So not from investors or, you know, random guy. Yeah, I know. Yeah. So, all right. Cool.

Okay, let's keep in touch. And when you're back from Korea, hit me up and we should meet here in person. I'm also going to Boston for a meeting April 1, 2, 3, but the week after, so April 1st. April 6th, I'm here already.

Okay, okay. That's going to be perfect. Awesome.

All right. Good luck, man. Good luck in Korea. Safe travels.

Awesome. I just connected you on LinkedIn. Oh, yeah, for sure. See you around.